Diary Entries

Slowly slipping away… The bright yellow adhesive markers on the footpath outside the patisserie in Bowral indicate where to stand. Like a game of hopscotch, customers advance a hop, skip and a jump until they are inside, devouring the irresistible aromas of meat pies and sweet pastries. The lunchtime queues remain, but the yellow markers are starting to fade and peel away. Across the road, an A-frame billboard outside Australia Post warned that “aggressive behaviour would not be tolerated”. Only eight people were permitted in the shop at a time. The number “Eight” was soon crossed out and replaced with a “Five”. A post office employee stood like a sentry, just inside the automatic- opening glass doors, with her fingers poised high in the air counting heads, “One, two, three”, before ushering the next customer inside. This grey-uniformed female employee is now behind a Perspex screen selling stamps and gifts, while the A-frame sign is stowed somewhere out of sight. The swings in a nearby park, previously tucked precariously high above a parallel metal bar, have been allowed to dangle freely again. The faces of children light up when they spot the black rubber seats, swinging to and fro in the breeze. A pre-school aged boy in denim-blue dungarees runs across the verdant green grass towards the playground and calls brightly over his shoulder to his mother. I can imagine him saying, “Look mummy, the swing is not dirty anymore! Someone wiped all the bad Covid away.”

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This French proverb translates as – the more things change, the more they stay the same. Pandemics have happened before; they will happen again. The 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people; however, in June of the same year daily newspapers in the UK told readers to “maintain a cheery outlook on life” because it was no worse than a common cold. This tendency to deny or dismiss biological threats until they become impossible to ignore is a common characteristic of past pandemics. Another is the labelling of an illness as originating in one country or from one ethic group, which can lead to stigmatisation, as it did in Spain one hundred years ago. While our reactions to the threat of a pandemic show many similarities; fortunately, the way we react to them afterwards does not. The author, Arundhati Roy is quoted as saying that historically pandemics are “an opportunity to imagine our world anew”. She says that COVID-19 “should act a portal between one world and the next”. I share Roy’s optimism that society can learn and change in response to the current crisis. There has already been evidence of people becoming more caring of our planet and each other – especially the aged, disabled and vulnerable. After life returns to normality, I plan to continue my habit of phoning older loved ones to ensure they are OK and dropping care packages at their door. Lockdown is an opportunity to enjoy spending time in our homes, shopping locally and baking bread, but what will happen as restrictions lift? Will the lure of the hypermarket and the freeway be too great to ignore? There is so much potential for change … if only people choose to embrace it.