A personal reflection by Neil Oliver
This past year has been like watching the protracted death of a loved one. I have witnessed the dying, by a thousand careless cuts of the society in which I have lived my whole life. The Britain I grew up in has been wounded, and dreadfully.
After a forest fire, new life emerges amid the devastation and that will be the case here; no doubt, there will be green shoots among the ashes. Life finds a way. This is not the same as recovery. There will be a beginning for something new, but what is gone is gone forever. That all of it happened on account of people in authority lacking the wit to stop and change direction long after it was obvious to anyone with at least one eye open that their strategies were causing catastrophic harm to people in all manner of ways only makes the losses harder to bear.
Creative block
When prompted to categorise myself, I usually say I am a writer. Since most of my income in recent years has been from books, journalism and the public speaking opportunities drawn from both, I think that’s accurate.
Writing was surely one of the means of earning a living that ought to have lent itself most readily to the locked-down world restricted in the main to home working, computer screens and keyboards, and yet I found those months the most difficult, creatively speaking, of my entire working life.
When lockdown began last year, I had just embarked upon the writing of a new work of non-fiction. I am married with three children – an 18-year-old daughter and two sons aged 15 and 12. My wife took on the home schooling and I was to get on with the writing, much as usual. I have written a dozen books and, given the time and space, this one could and should have been a breeze.
For reasons I still find hard to understand, far less to describe, the stopping of the world and the descent into those slow-motion weeks of forced hibernation and isolation from the world at large served instead to wrap my brain in cotton wool, and not in a good way. While on the face of it the quiet and the opportunity to spend uninterrupted hours in front of the screen might have given me the perfect chance to romp through the pages, I found myself hobbled for the longest time. I forced myself to my desk most days and yet the words came only drip by drop.
On a good day in the old world, I managed 5,000 words or more. In locked-down world, it was 300 at the very best. It was soul destroying and confidence wrecking. Instead of archaeology and history, my mind was clouded by anxiety about the lockdown and everything associated with it – specifically the long-term consequences for my wife and me and our kids. Everything was viewed through a fog of doubt and uncertainty to the point where I took to doing anything – anything at all around the house or in the garden – so long as it provided an excuse to get away from the unforgiving blank screen. As any writer knows, a deadline is the most powerful force in the universe and, in due course, I got the job done. It had taken every ounce of determination I could muster.
Knockout punch
I have been self-employed for most of my adult life and for all the past two decades at least. My wife and I long ago internalised the stresses that come with never knowing where the next paying job is coming from. We are adaptable, as self-employed people have to be, and so we had the experience necessary to find new ways to keep the wheels on the financial wagon. As the lockdown stretched ever onwards – broken here and there by half-hearted offerings of freedom that turned back to lockdown soon enough – we looked around us, and ahead towards the horizon of the unknown with increasing dread. It was not necessarily dread concerning our own circumstances and rather more to do with wondering what kind of world was being shaped for our children.
As weeks turned to months, and then a year, it was always obvious to us that the damage being inflicted on the economy (and on society) was damned near apocalyptic. We are part of the self-employed private sector and so attuned to the plight of those in similar circumstances. From the beginning, we understood that the damage being done to that private sector, to the self-employed especially, would have terrifying consequences for the economy as a whole. The public sector depends entirely upon the well-being of the private. As the one dieth, so dieth the other.
‘We’re all in it together.’ But there was no we. There was them and there was us.
We watched with rising dismay as billions were borrowed from centuries into the future and sprayed up the wall, as millions of people were made dependent upon the Monopoly money of furlough. At the same time, many of the self-employed were left with nothing – no support of any kind. It was an education in human nature to watch how those on furlough so easily and readily turned blind eyes and deaf ears to the plight of neighbours. ‘We’re all in it together’, said the government-sponsored slogans, early on at least. Only we weren’t. There was no ‘we’. There was ‘them’ and there was ‘us’.
Furlough is, anyway, a short-term gain, and a long-term loss. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. On 6 August 1966, Muhammad Ali fought English boxer Brian London, in the Earl’s Court Arena, in London. In the third round, Ali had London on the ropes. Into the face and body of his hapless opponent he unleashed a torrent of blows. Within less than two seconds, he had hit London 17 times. He stopped and stepped back and London fell, sprawling on the canvas. London had been KO’d from the first punch and held up thereafter only by the continued blows. He felt no pain because he was senseless. Viewed in slow motion he stays upright, eyes closed, while the punches connect. He looks like a man standing, but he is a man unconscious and only waiting to fall.
So it is with those furloughed, and with our economy. The furlough scheme has been sold as a good thing – and it has kept food on the table and roofs over heads. But when it stops, the people and the economy will fall over like poor old Brian London did.
People not politicians
I am in the privileged position of having platforms from which to broadcast my opinions. I write a weekly column for a Sunday newspaper. I have appeared for a half-hour slot on talkRADIO with host and friend Mike Graham every Wednesday morning for most of a year. I have my own podcasts and I am regularly invited onto those of others to discuss the state of the nation. I have successfully completed another book, lockdown or no lockdown. These opportunities to let off steam have been godsends of a sort not available to many. I am grateful for having had the chance to speak my mind on a regular basis throughout this emergency – even if it certainly has attracted a fair amount of bile as well. Without those release valves, I might have cracked long ago.
When it comes to making amends and starting over, I shake my head at the enormity of what must lie ahead for our people. I am as apolitical as it is possible to be. I am cynical about politics and politicians. I would cut off my hand before joining a political party. Like Billy Connolly, I believe the spoken desire to be a politician should be enough to bar a person, for life, from ever being allowed to be one.
Already people are asking what the government might do to ‘help the recovery’. Dear god, haven’t governments done enough? If your house has been burgled, everything of value taken and a stinking mess left by the perpetrators among the sheets on the bed in the master bedroom, would you invite those same miscreants to tidy up and do the make over? If you’ve been bullied all year, frightened out of your wits in the playground, do you invite the bullies to take your hand and see you safely home?
If this country is to have any hope at all of getting beyond this mess, it is not more government that is required, but less. Vaccine passports, twice-a-week testing for all – these are just the latest ideas I read about at the time of writing. If I am honest, I just want to roar: ‘Get these people away from me! Get them away from all of us and let us get on with doing what we can to mend our lives and our communities!’
If Britain is to have any chance of meaningful recovery, it will involve putting some sort of distance between those who can fix it – which is the hard working, entrepreneurial people of the country – and those elected representatives and their pet scientific advisers that have dragged the best of people kicking and screaming into disaster.
We have all learned to preface our every relevant comment with lines like, ‘I’m no expert…’ or, ‘I’m no scientist, but…’ Well, I am no expert either – neither a scientist, nor an economist or any of the other specialisations that apparently grant some the right to an opinion while intimidating too many others into silence. What I certainly am is a human being and I look on at my fellows and wonder what on earth must happen to us next.
Broken people
Most recently, I have been reading and re-reading coverage of the closure of the footpaths on the Humber Bridge. The move came in the wake of six deaths, of teenagers and twenty-somethings, in the month of March, along with other incidents described as emergencies. Inquests are yet to be held, and so there is no way of knowing yet what sequence of events in each case led to a young person’s body being recovered from the river. I have been on the footpath of the Humber Bridge, for part of the filming of a TV documentary. It is a long way down to that brown water, long enough for thinking in the space between life and death. What would prompt a person to decide that that drop into oblivion was the only option? I dread to think. Inquests will be heard right enough, but the testimony of grieving friends and relatives already given has its own story to tell:
‘He was the kindest person I ever met.’
‘She lit up every room she walked into.’
Those incidents, those deaths, are just the most recent ones I stumbled across during random surfing of news online. I have heard and read of many others during these long months, and I am sure most of us have. People have been broken, are being broken, and will continue to be broken by the government’s solution to the problem.
Lives have been ended by all of this – by Covid-19, of course, but also by much else. Untreated physical ill health, untreated mental ill health. Other lives have been damaged, destroyed, compromised and blighted by the destruction of livelihoods.
I have never contemplated the future with such uncertainty. I look at my children, with their lives in front of them, and wonder who will emerge to lead us back to the light. Whoever it is, they and we have a long way to go.
Neil Oliver
Historian, archaeologist and presenter
Neil Oliver is a broadcaster and qualified archaeologist whose fieldwork experience covers everything from the early Stone Age in Scotland to the examination of the World War II coastal fortifications of Kent and Northern France.
He was lead presenter of the highly acclaimed BBC2 series Coast, which looked at both the natural and social history of the British coastline, as well as its spin-offs Coast Australia and Coast New Zealand. His history documentary series for the BBC include A History of Ancient Britain, A History of Celtic Britain, Vikings and Rise of the Clans.
Neil’s books include Two Men in a Trench: Battlefield Archaeology (2002), Amazing Tales For Making Men Out Of Boys (2009), A History of Scotland (2009), A History of Ancient Britain (2011), Master of Shadows (2015), and The Story of the British Isles In 100 Places (2018).
On the back of his latest book, Neil toured all over the UK, speaking to over 69 venues explaining what British History means to him and why we need to cherish and celebrate our wonderful countries. During lockdown he has had a regular slot on the Mike Graham’s talkRADIO show and in April 2021 joined the team of GB News where he will be hosting a weekly current affairs and interview programme.
Neil lives in Scotland with his wife and three children.
Follow Neil on Twitter: @thecoastguy