01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 1/10 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 What we are waking up to this week is a kind of ultra-January G E T T Y I M AG E S Helen Rumbelow Tuesday January 04 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Times Share Save Do new years break, like mornings? If so, I think some people would feel that 2022 has “broken” already. But really what 2022 has done is not break but mutate. It’s not a “new” year, new like a box-fresh pair of Christmas pants. It’s a cross-eyed cross-breed of 2020 and 2021 — a variant. It’s the news that Covid-19 has entered its third year of making headlines. Or, to help those whose brains have also lived through Covid, I’ll say this very slowly: “2022 is like Covid’s version of a Netflix box set hitting season three.” What we are waking up to this week is a kind of ultra-January. A hangover, but on a grand, global scale: your tongue still slurring from the e ects of pandemic exhaustion, which did not MENU tuesday february 1 2022 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 2/10 mix well with the cocktail of Covid-related financial anxiety, seasonal depression and existential dread. If you are like me, festering under the duvet, because of course it’s my new workplace now — well I say work, but I mean “staring out of the window at the gunmetal sky while I glaze over so hard it looks to outsiders like an absence seizure” — then I have good news. The good news is that this blah, this meh, this fizzle and fatigue, it may be very good news indeed. This is how pandemics end: with a dribbling kind of detumescence rather than a bang (that you too?). There is hope in this hangover. Let’s assess the damage, like anyone checking themselves over after a hard night or more than 600 such nights. We are tired, can’t lie. A new survey by the workplace benefits company Juno found that three quarters of white-collar workers in the UK are considering quitting their jobs or changing careers owing to burnout, lack of “work-life balance” or poor working conditions. This tallies with what is already known about 2021’s Great Resignation across the western world; there is a Chinese equivalent called “tang ping” (lying flat). We’re also managing to bring our work-tiredness home with us because we’re already at home. January has, since the ancient calendar, been considered the scarcity month of hunkering down, staying in and drawing the cave’s curtains at 4pm. Yet we come to this January on the back of many artificially induced Januarys of lockdowns too numerous to distinguish. I remember the drama and intensity of 2020 — but looking back, 2021 feels like a Great Resignation on a personal level, a hazy, hard to recall confusion of dates and events that was the result of resignation rather than acceptance. ADVERTISEMENT 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 3/10 While December is lit from the past by the nostalgic glow of Christmas, January is endured by borrowing sunshine from the summer ahead, planning golden July holidays like drawing down credit on a seasonal bank. However, it’s harder to do when I have five web pages of Foreign O ce travel advice and PCR travel protocols overcooking my laptop and dreams. Same with resolutions, which are a very January hobby. Resolutions are built on resolve, which this year is built on sand: I wouldn’t sign up to a gym, not just because I know I won’t go, as ever, but more the fat chance that any sweaty Disco Inferno class will be blasting through February. Things are too slithery. TS Eliot wrote about January 2022 in his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which I will now notate in the manner of my child’s English GCSE, which no one is quite sure will go ahead this summer anyway. “For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse,” Eliot wrote, and I know exactly what he meant. “For I have known them all already, known them all: have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons.” Yes, TS, me too; I feel as though there isn’t an afternoon I haven’t examined from every corner of the sofa. We also greet every Covid-related edict with a sigh of recognition. We are now just thumbing through a rotating back catalogue of WFH, boosters and masks like an old DJ. “I have measured out my life with co ee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall,” TS goes on, and of course that’s self-explanatory, if you replace, in my case, “co ee” spoons with “cereal” spoons because the concept of breakfast has stretched to include “literally any visit to the kitchen”. Pandemic years are like children: your first one will always be memorable in every way, good and bad, the fear, the love. The second one is interesting only because it is the first time you have repeated any milestone and you are that bit more hardened to vaccine 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 4/10 refuseniks, and any more babies or pandemic years after that blur in the memory. Our patience with the long, slow slog from pandemic to endemic may be wearing thin, but that is exactly the point about pandemic cycles. Ivan Krastev, the political scientist, wrote a short book, Is It Tomorrow Yet?, about Covid and the typical story arc, or lack of it, of plagues. “The relationship between the epidemic and war resembles the relationship between some modernist literature and the classical novel,” Krastev wrote. “The strangeness of the pandemic experience is that everything changes but nothing happens.” It also does not typically just stop dead, like a war; no truce is called or papers signed. You want a pandemic virus to slide from the headlines, a washed-up drama queen made boring in her dwindling late career. To take the example of the so-called Spanish flu, which everyone associates with 1918. It had many deadly waves before it faded into mild ordinariness well into 1920. Or, to transpose wildly to Covid-19, the equivalent of this new year at least. No one knew who was the last “Spanish flu” victim, just as no one can say exactly when light breaks on a grey winter morning. Before the end of the pandemic can come, first people experience a dull fading away of darkness. If we get anywhere near a dull fading away, that would be very exciting for 2022. Coronavirus Related articles 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 5/10 Don’t call it a resolution, but I’m determined to be happy in 2022 January 02 2022, 12.01am GMT Aasmah Mir AASMAH MIR | WEEK ENDING By now we know to avoid and ignore people who make new year’s resolutions and invite us to do the same, right? I’ve done it... 34 best TV shows, films and festivals coming soon in 2022 December 31 2021, 5.00pm GMT Look ahead SNEAK PREVIEW Trigger Point ITV, Jan Vicky McClure and Adrian Lester play bomb disposal buddies who served together in Afghanistan and now... Reverse running and pickleball: the fitness trends for 2022 December 28 2021, 12.01am GMT Peta Bee BODY & SOUL Last year may have been all about Peloton classes and wild swimming, but what does 2022 have in store when it comes to... Comments are subject to our community guidelines, which can be viewed here. Comments (24) Add to the conversation... Sort by Recommended L Lucinda Whittall · 3 JA N UA RY, 2 0 22 I think this probably the most beautifully written article that I’ve read during, and about, this entire period of our lives. Thank you, Helen! Reply Recommend (59) L leechypip · 3 J A N UA RY, 2022 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 6/10 I concur. A wonderful read. Reply Recommend (10) 2 replies H Helen Rumbelow STAFF · 3 JA N UA RY, 2 0 22 Woah, thank you Lucinda. This has made my 2022! Reply Recommend (9) C ClareP83 · 3 JA N UA RY, 2 0 22 Oh, I had no idea how perfect The Love Somg of J. Alfred Prufrock was to describe Covid until this article! I’ve just re-read it and there are so many lines that fit (on top, of course, of the evocative ones Helen quotes): Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets There will be time, there wil...See more Reply Recommend (21) H Helen Rumbelow STAFF · 3 JA N UA RY, 2 0 22 Oh Clare, thank you for this: it's so good isn't it? I think we need it on a billboard. Or, am I getting way too cheesy, can imagine the poem read aloud as the soundtrack to a montage of the pandemic. I guess it's a sign of great art that it remains relevant. I am going to think about preparing "a ...See more (Edited) Reply Recommend (13) N Northerner down South · 3 JA N UA RY, 202 2 If the media stopped spraying Covid headlines around every morning I think it would be possible for us to get back to some sense of normal (whatever normal is for you). Reply Recommend (13) W William Peak · 3 JA N UA RY, 2022 It’s going to be like an addict going cold turkey, years of Brexit and Covid as the easy main stories, producing cheap and reusable copy. They must be hoping for another single event, or they will have to go back to being working journalists again. Reply Recommend (14) 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 7/10 A Alison · 3 JA N UA RY, 202 2 I was feeling like that, then read this article and thought ok not the only one 😊 Reply Recommend (6) K KCW · 3 J A N UA RY, 202 2 Same! I also liked the description of things feeling too ‘slithery’ to plan too far ahead Reply Recommend (1) S Si Man · 3 J A N UA RY, 2 0 22 ‘No one knew who was the last “Spanish flu” victim’ That’s because there hasn’t been a last victim yet. That virus is still with us, and it still kills people. Reply Recommend (5) H Helen Rumbelow STAFF · 3 JA N UA RY, 2 0 22 Yes, thanks Si Man for the clarification, you're right: there would have been a last patient who was diagnosed or classified as having "Spanish Flu" before that term was dropped. Reply Recommend (2) M martin leadbetter · 3 JA N UA RY, 2022 That is a very inspiring and stimulating piece of writing - I didn't know the poem but I must now study that too - looks fantastic - really get the "co ee spoons" idea - and the cereal variant !! Thank you - every day's a school day ! The daylight will come - very soon I hope - when we approach th...See more Reply Recommend (5) H Hedge Hog · 4 JA N UA RY, 2022 Thank you, I recognised my current experience throughout the article. I've been feeling thoroughly "meh" at best since Saturday. Reply Recommend (3) 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 8/10 R Roboticus · 3 JA N UA RY, 20 22 Unfortunately I tried to read and reread the first sentence but couldn’t understand it; what does it mean? Anyway, it turned my brain to mush so I couldn’t read the rest of it. Reply Recommend (2) 1 reply B Barry Boothe · 3 JA N UA RY, 2022 There are a couple of sentences that strain my understanding of the English language. Perhaps I'm a bit thick and just never took it all in during those interminable English language lessons with old Mr Weeks. However, if you read on it does open up into something quite beautiful. I'd give it anoth...See more Reply Recommend (8) 1 reply T TimesReader · 3 J A N UA RY, 20 22 Thank goodness you said that. I thought I was in a bad dream...what was the point of this piece other than to throw many words in the air and publish them as they land? Reply Recommend (4) V VixD · 3 JA N UA RY, 202 2 O to read that poem. Thank you for a beautiful read. Reply Recommend (1) S Sheila Park · 3 J A N UA RY, 2022 Rather than drawing your caves curtain invest in a timer for your lamp - there is great pleasure in adjusting this by 15 minutes every Sunday Reply Recommend (1) Feedback View more comments 01/02/2022, 10:43 Bring on the dull fading away of Covid-19 | Times2 | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-on-the-dull-fading-away-of-covid-19-8cx3bnb7t 9/10 About us Conta Help The T The Sunday Times Editorial Complaints Place Classified advertising Displa The Times corrections The S Careers GET IN TOUCH The Times e-paper Times Currency Services Times Print Gallery Times Crossword Club Times+ Times Expert Traveller Schools Guide Best Places to Live Sportswomen of the Year Awards Podcasts MORE FROM THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES Privacy & cookie policy Licensing Cookie settings Site map Topics Commissioning terms Terms and conditions © Times Newspapers Limited 2022. Registered in England No. 894646. 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