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Christmas. It’s not just a day. It’s a feeling. Just ask Mariah and Bing. How then to describe the anger, the anguish, the grief of December 2020?
We’ve dreamed of this Christmas like no other. Yearned for it in a year of lost lives and shattered livelihoods. Just days ago the Prime Minister reassured us it would go ahead, declared it would be “inhumane” to cancel it. Now he has done just that, with less than a week to go.
We want to save lives, to do the right thing and follow the advice of scientific experts, of course we do. But all the same, this latest bombshell, delivered so close to December 25, feels like a blow to our collective solar plexus.
After the most horrendous year, Christmas was all we had to look forward to. Not just the turkey and trimmings, the mulled wine and mince pies but the prospect of coming together after a year spent so painfully apart.
An ultra-draconian lockdown imposed without warning, and at the eleventh hour, feels genuinely shocking. Too late to downsize the turkey for a guinea fowl. Too late to get a last minute supermarket delivery to fill an empty fridge. Too late to send presents, to join the Royal Mail backlog. Too late to cancel travel tickets. Too late to make alternative arrangements for the infirm and the lonely counting on our company after a bleak year of isolation.
Britain’s battle weariness extends far beyond the wistful disappointment of cancelled pantos, the outlawing of parties and the absence of fairylit markets. It is no longer a surprise when our pubs shut or local restaurants stop serving. It’s almost amusing that the nearest our children will get to a holiday outing is queuing in a car park for a Coronavirus test.
Our bleak desolation comes from missing our families, our friends – lives put on hold, lives put at risk. Our increasingly bitter frustration comes not knowing when or how we will achieve victory in the war against coronavirus.
Having gone in and out of lockdown for nine months, we appear to have made little of the promised progress. No sooner did we rejoice at news the Pfizer vaccine was being rolled out than the spectre of a highly infectious Covid-19 mutation reared its head in London and the South East.
Now, for at least a third of England, Christmas is effectively cancelled. In the rest of the country, mixing has been reduced to a single day. Although Matt Hancock doesn’t think they should because it’s not really safe, is it? How the hell should we know? One minute we are being infantalised, the next we are being asked to make life and death decisions.
What a difference a year makes. This time 12 months ago, a beaming Boris had just smithereened the red wall and painted the north of England true blue on a ticket of sunlit uplands, jam today, full sovereignty tomorrow and a levelling-up of opportunity and wealth.
But that was before. Before the world had even heard of the Chinese megacity of Wuhan or the deadly virus named Covid-19. Before Britain found itself at war against an unseen enemy. And before more than 65,500 souls had perished, too many of them alone.
We have done all that was asked of us. Our goodwill is in tatters and we were already strung out and insomniac before we discovered we had to set about dismantling the complex military planning that went into making the best of an atrocious year. It’s like standing down an army while it’s high on E numbers and still in transit.
And thanks to the ongoing chaos there will be scant consolation to be had in tradition. The prescient John Lewis advert exhorts us to Give A Little Love, which may well be the only option, with half the family presents stranded elsewhere.
Was it only July when the Prime Minister unveiled his, on reflection, insanely unrealistic plan for a “more significant return to normality” by Christmas? The key, he declared, lay in “hoping for the best while planning for the worst.”
Five months on, the best remains in abeyance. Hope is in short supply, too. For Britain this will be a Christmas – a Christmess – without magic, without loved ones, without an end in sight.
