Pandemic diary: March

Now that there's a pandemic, several people have said we should write diaries. I already have this blog, so why not.

In my mind, our pandemic experience starts on March 9, when we took the boat to Sweden. We'd booked the trip on Silja Serenade ages ago, and there was no official word at the time on any travel restrictions. I was also quite keen to visit our friendly overseas gaming store and pick up a copy of Star Wars: Armada for 75% of what it costs in Helsinki. Given that it was a Monday departure, the ship was surprisingly crowded. We mostly kept to ourselves and tried to practice good hygiene, and had a nice, quiet trip to rainy Stockholm and back. I had an excellent lasagna at Michelangelo's in the Old Town, where they have a printout from Puma Swede's Instagram on the wall.

The trip turned out to be kind of a blessing in disguise. I had a regular cold shortly before it, but with all the talk about covid-19 and so on, I was a little bit nervous about continuing my teaching. Next Monday we were due to start the second run of our history of heavy metal lecture course in Kallio, and that Wednesday I was supposed to give my next lecture on the history of Britain in Hamina. The course in Hamina is specifically for pensioners, and the average age is well into the risk group for covid-19, but I was already anxious enough about giving them my cold. I loved giving those lectures, they were a great crowd, so I didn't want to skip out on them either. The issue was resolved when our government advised that everyone who's been abroad should quarantine themselves for two weeks. Shortly after my lectures were cancelled, both the Helsinki and Hamina adult education institutes were shut down.

Speaking of our government, the current cabinet has really risen to the occasion. At first both our politicians and civil servants took a very bizarre and frankly irresponsible line of trying to assure everyone that we would be fine and nothing was going to happen. One of our chief health officials even said we would only have "some individual cases". Of course, in a country where no-one is ever responsible for anything, you can say anything. There's a far more learned critique than mine here (in Finnish). After this initial nonsense, though, they've done very well and been decisive. I can't sufficiently express how delighted and relieved I am that we kicked the previous clowns out. Had the elections gone differently, we might still be ruled by the most incompetent peacetime prime minister in history: a religious fanatic and idiot. Not to mention his buddies the fascists. They'd be setting up concentration camps.

It's difficult to not feel a real sense of horror at what's going on in the UK and US. If anyone had written a satire say five years ago, where the president of the United States is a completely debile reality-tv con man who seriously suggests forcing Americans to go to work in a pandemic to save the stock market, and his sycophants solemnly declare that maybe the elderly need to die for the great leader's hotels and portfolio, I would have thought it vulgar and unrealistic. Shows what I know. I'm so sorry for everyone who has to live in these idiocracies, and genuinely terrified of what might happen.

A lot of people are struggling with social media and news in the middle of all this, and I get it. It's a fine line for media to walk between keeping people informed and stoking panic. For example, I read the Guardian online regularly, and I have to say I don't like the entire front page being nothing but coronavirus news. I mean yes, it's a pandemic. But there are also other things happening in the world, and I don't think it does much good for anyone's mental health to be bombarded with black backgrounds and huge headlines on the latest covid mortality.

The social media have been interesting. I'm happy to say I wasn't following anyone on anywhere who spreads disinformation, but what I didn't expect were the people who took this occasion to unleash their inner authoritarian. It's quite something to see people who previously self-identified as whatever particular shade of left-anarchist or something like that take to the social mediums to scream "shut up and obey" at anyone with the slightest criticism of the official response. Even a pandemic is not a time when we suspend democracy and discussion, no matter how badly someone's inner commissar wants to. The serial trolling and disruption the far right get up to even in these times is another thing entirely, but if you can't tell the two apart, well. Like the Finnish joke goes, if you can't tell the difference between a cow's ass and a mailbox, I'm not sending you to post a letter.

On a more personal level, we've effectively been self-quarantineing since we got back from Sweden. I made one last trip to the university library the day before it closed, and since then it's been groceries and the occasional walk, all while maintaining social distancing. We've obviously cancelled all our board- and tabletop gaming and are trying Here I Stand by email; it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I'm experimenting with shopping at the 24-hour supermarket nearby. It's a bit of a walk, but it's very quiet there after midnight. The infuriating thing is that there are constant shortages. Not because of any disruptions in supply, but because my idiot countrymen are hoarding everything. On one particular day, the bastards had cleared out all the peanut butter. Peanut butter! The only thing more ridiculous was the great toilet paper panic, which as near as I can tell was based solely on news and social media posts of people hoarding toilet paper abroad. We as a nation have a permanent hard-on for "exceptional circumstances", and then when they actually come about we go berserk over toilet paper. We are a very silly people.

I'll admit that I've been feeling some anxiety, and apart from midnight walks to the grocery store and the occasional spot of cooking, have struggled to be particularly useful or productive. I'm obviously worried about my parents and some of my friends, especially my colleague in lockdown in Italy, but I also have some very bad childhood experiences related to calling in sick, and having to cancel lectures brought them back very strongly. Even now with my employers shut down and my courses cancelled, I feel like I should be working and everyone is angry at me for skipping out. I know it's stupid, but there you are. I've already rescheduled some lectures for August, but we'll see. I think we're in this for the long haul, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some movement and socializing restrictions in place well past summer.

But at least for now we've been reasonably healthy, and I'm getting some painting done. Some parts of my previous life, which has always mostly felt wasted, turn out to have been surprisingly good preparation for a pandemic. Keeping very late hours and walking around deserted suburbs at night? Now useful experience for midnight grocery runs. Mentally habituating myself to extreme feelings of loneliness? Incomparably useful, and also now there are no social events to feel left out of. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to past me for buying boxes and boxes of miniatures without the least inkling of when I'd ever have the time to build them, let alone paint them. Well, that time is now.

Anyway I expect I'll be doing several more of these. I hope anyone who reads this is well and stays that way. Happy quarantine, everyone!