the lockdown times
five years later, let's not forget how weird sh*t got
Hey, remember the pandemic? The whole world was doing it for a while there. Until… well, we weren’t. When it actually ended is hard to say - it’s not like the coronavirus went away. But at some point,‘pandemic’ became more of a mindset than a fact of life. And everyone seemed to leave it behind at their own pace.
It’s easy, on the other hand, to put a date on the start. The lockdowns here in Berlin began exactly five years ago: March 22, 2020. Yes, things had started going weird before that. There had been strange, worrying headlines about people getting sick elsewhere in the world since January. And finding toilet paper in the shops had become a real problem locally by the end of February. But it wasn’t until March 16th, when Germany started closing its borders, that I realized we were really going to leave normality behind. I mean, the whole point of the EU was to have open borders between the states - I didn’t think they could close their borders to each other. If that thing that I’d thought couldn’t happen was indeed happening, what else might be next?
In the months leading up to that point, I had really been looking forward to the spring of 2020. Since the summer of 2018, I had been in baby mode - gestating, giving birth to, and then breastfeeding and caring for my son. My diet, work, sleep, attire, travel habits, and entire being had changed to accomodate these very important, very consuming physical and emotional responsibilities. And I had spent quite a lot of that time at or close to home. I had done all of it by choice, but by the end of 2019, I was getting a bit antsy. I had my eye on the spring, when my son would turn one. He could be weaned. He could start daycare. I could start doing more things on my own again, further from our flat. The world was going to start opening back up.
Ahaha. Haha. Ha.
Instead, the world got smaller. And smaller. Smaller than I think anyone imagined it could. It became illegal to go almost anywhere, or meet with almost anyone. Schools, daycares, shops, cafes, museums, offices, theatres - closed. The sky over Berlin was quiet, as air travel became virtually impossible. I mean, how could there be tourism, when just going over to a friend’s apartment was completely against the rules? Even going to the playground was, at first, verboten - the ones around our neighbourhood were wrapped with yellow hazard tape, like crime scenes.
The one thing you could do was get groceries. That was the big expedition of the week. And it was not fun. Because you had to mask up, and keep a careful distance from all other shoppers and staff, who were all stressed out, because no one knew quite how much risk they were being exposed to just picking up a cereal box.
It’s easy to laugh about people bleaching their groceries now (which they did), or to be angry about things like school closures going on for too long in many places (which they did). But I think now that COVID is something the world has adjusted to, there’s been some forgetting of how genuinely scary it was at the start. People were dying, at an alarming rate. Not just the old and the unwell - which was terrible enough - but people of all ages, who had been in seemingly good health. I saw people on social media commemorating friends who passed from COVID - one was in his mid-forties, with no known underlying health issues. Remember that doctor in China, who first tried to warn the world about what was going on in Wuhan? He died within a few weeks of contracting the virus. He was 34. As was I.
And there were pregnant women so sick with COVID, their babies had to be emergency-cesarianed out of them prematurely, in order to save the lives of both mother and child. Many of these women were in comas at the time. No one I mention this to now seems to have any idea what I’m talking about. But if you google ‘covid coma cesarian’, there are dozens of news articles about women in their twenties and thirties, from the Midlands to the Midwest to Malaysia, who were in comas when their babies were sliced out of them. Some only woke up weeks after their babies were born. And not all of them did wake up.
Then we started hearing about this mysterious phenomenon called ‘long’ COVID. The list of symptoms lumped under that puzzling umbrella kept growing. None of them were something you’d want to get stuck with. And no one knew why some people got it, and others didn’t.
And then on the other hand, lots of people seemed to catch COVID and not even know it. Their symptoms were very mild, or they had none at all.
And there was no way to know ahead of time if you were going to be one of the ones needing hospitalization, or one of the ones that felt fine. When I eventually caught it, I got it for my 37th birthday. I had vomiting, diarrhoea, vertigo, complete loss of taste and smell, shakes, aches, fever, unbelievable fatigue, and I was coughing so much and so hard that I started finding blood in the strings of phlegm being purged from the bottom of my lungs. My husband’s symptoms, while slightly fewer, were just as debilitating, and went on longer. It took many weeks before either of us was really ourself again. And we’d both had the full three recommended rounds of vaccine by then. Yet when my grandmother in Alaska eventually got COVID, she said it felt like just a cold. She was in her mid-80s. If there’s a logic to this discrepancy, it still eludes me.
Meanwhile, I had a little guy to look after all day and night. Who, at the start of lockdowns, was not quite yet walking or talking, and was oblivious to what was going on in the world beyond our home. Which really was a blessing, and heavily cushioned the blow so many other children suffered during that time. But also, it was so tiring. He would wake me up to nurse in the night, and then wake up fully for the day at around 5:30am. Raring and ready to go… nowhere. Because there was nowhere to go. Except the park, for a little while, after the sun was up. Then back home for his nap.
And though to the untrained eye, I would have appeared to be unemployed, I was trying to work. To write. And I did. In hard-won, short-lived bursts. Escaping into my imagination sort of kept me sane, and sort of let me go mad. In roughly equal parts.
Sometimes the lockdowns would ease. Then they’d clamp down again. Some months there was daycare. Other months they were closed. Sometimes you could go to a cafe. Then they shut again. But the whole time, all of our family remained overseas, in other timezones. And no one knew if or when we’d be able to visit again.
And then, vaccines were announced. Slowly, they were made available in Berlin. Then there were vaccine certificates, which you needed to go into shops. And eventually, along with COVID tests, and masks, use could use them to go on planes - allowing us to finally reacquaint our son with his grandparents.
And then, a few months later, after having to show your vaccination status everywhere, suddenly absolutely no one cared about them. In February 2023, masks were no longer required on public transit here in Germany. In April, they were no longer required in doctor’s offices. And then… things just kind of drifted back towards normal.
Now the pandemic years seem like a long time ago. But once in a while, I notice ways that they have lingered with me. I still keep hand sanitizer in my handbag at all times - an item I had never bought before 2020. I still don’t enjoy fall the way I did before COVID, and I loathe winter in a way I did not before the lockdowns. On the plus side, I still find myself grateful for ‘normal’ things. My son was turning three by the time we were allowed to have any kind of birthday party for him. Every year that I am able to bake a cake, and know that he will share it with friends, I am just so glad for him.
But what really brings those years back are songs. Ones that were in heavy rotation through that time. My top three songs of lockdown, hands down, are:
Sea, Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd. The Moon and the Melodies was the album I would put on when it was time to write; to shake out my weary mom thoughts, and try to create something for a little while. (Un-fun fact: Harold Budd died of COVID in the first lockdown winter of 2020.)
Under by Brian Eno. To me, this song is both overwhelmingly sensual and a little ghostly. There’s a great longing to it. I suppose it resonated with how I was feeling a lot at that time - like I was sort of haunting the world, rather than getting to live in it fully.
A Song From Under The Floorboards by Magazine. This song also captures how I felt a lot of the time - haggard and cranky, and so heavy I might as well have been down in the floor. And yet, still needing to get on with it all. The fact that it’s from an album called The Correct Use Of Soap also amused me a lot, what with so many people sharing handwashing memes at the start of the pandemic.
The full list looks like this:
A couple of these songs are from albums released during those years, like Pet Shop Boys’ Hotspot (January 2020), which was wonderfully innocent of the pandemic ahead, and Bo Burham’s Inside (June 2021), which was written during and about the pandemic (the film is the best work of art capturing that time that I know of).
The overall vibe is a little weighted down, though a couple of the songs are more upbeat. Most of my memories of music from this time, I realized as I was putting this together, seem to take place in the kitchen. I guess I did spend a lot of time in there (and still do, for that matter). I had a thing I called Kitchen Disco, where I would dance in the kitchen, and let off steam. Usually alone. But as time went on, and my son more sturdy on his feet, he would sometimes join in. He also went through a phase where he would sing bits of song lyrics he’d heard, whilst strumming on his ukulele, which was and is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. You haven’t really experienced Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary” until you’ve heard it interpreted by a tone-oblivious two-year-old in his jam-jams. But you can make do with the original here:
Lastly, you’ll find a bonus track on this mix. I don’t know how many fellow old Boosh fans are kicking around here on Substack, but listening to Pogo’s MB remix on repeat stands out as a high/low point of lockdown. The Crack Fox and Mr. Susan are almost certainly not the characters one should fill one’s head with while struggling to hold onto their sanity. But it worked for me. :)
What songs remind you of the lockdown years? I would guess that, in isolation, people leaned into their idiosyncrasies in many ways, including musically, and I would love to know what music others found themselves leaning on in that strange, strange time.