Covid Clippings by David Hill

David Hill lives and writes in New Plymouth. His fiction for children and young adults is published in various countries.
 
The 2020 lockdown was an easy time. We slid into the groove of taking orders; became complaisant pupils in a class of five million; sat back and felt virtuous about doing so.
 
Almost instantly, Level 4 developed its own aesthetics. Orange-and-black, yellow-and-white diagonal stripes on the government website were Autumn's fashion palette.
 
Visuals blossomed. Cartoonists had a glorious time semi-anthropomorphising the virus; it became one of those super-bouncy balls that ricochet off interior walls, with nasty little arms attached. The same cartoonists worked hard to semi-anthropomorphise Donald J Trump (note how the US has followed a part-black leader with a part-orange leader), as he tirelessly turned his country into an Orwellian parody. Ashley Bloomfield proved far too modest-featured (and voiced) for caricature, but Jacinda's teeth remained iconic.
 
Some neighbours didn't know what they were going to do with themselves, at home all day. Others did, and it meant power tools. Our street was an atonal symphony of grinders, cutters, mixers, choppers.
 
We read instead. More specifically, we re-read. I'd managed not to get to the library before we avalanched into Level 4, so I eased books from our shelves, exclaimed at how their print had shrunk over the preceding 15....25....40 years, and began revisiting times past.
 
I went through Shakespeare's four last plays again: those golden narratives of reconciliation and innocence triumphant. They made a wonderful emotional antidote.
 
In 1963, at Victoria University of Wellington, I'd written a thesis on Aldous Huxley. Now I read the novels of that dapper, nearly 2m-tall polymath once more. Has there ever been a fiction writer less interested in narrative? His books are symposiums of talking heads. Oxbridge talking heads: exactly what I wanted to be when I was 21. Along with Huxley's printed words, I re-read my own hand-written words in the margins. You pretentious little prick, I thought.
 
Lockdown developed social aesthetics as well. People went walking along the footpaths, dlwn the middles of empty streets, even. Everyone greeted everyone else. Everyone smiled, including elderly male mouths usually pursed like dogs' bums. Smiles ranged from hesitant to orthodontic. Our cul-de-sac became a community, and it hasn't all faded.
 
Language suffered sometimes. The war metaphors were inevitable but dull. 'Eliminate' turned out to be less absolute than we thought. 'The New Normal' went from catchy to cliché inside a week. 'Honest' was kicked into new shapes: 'The government needs to be more honest about jobs....closures....border plans'.
 
And language was used well. I listened to, registered, admired the skills of our PM and her speech writers. The 1 pm news conferences were mistress classes in logic and lucidity.
 
I worried about money. We have National Super; I have royalties and the boosted Public Lending Right. But Bauer amputated its NZ magazines in an act of breath-snatchingly arrogant meanness. Other publications lost advertisers, therefore income, therfore book reviews and features. My little squirts of income were flicked off.

I tried not to moan to anyone except other writers; knew how fortunate I was in comparison to....well, to Air NZ pilots plummeting from $200,000 to supermarket shelf-stocking.
 
We didn't particularly want to leave lockdown. It had felt special, focused, worthy, exciting. We saved money. We reassessed a few priorities. We were praised for doing nothing. We briefly became....not a more compassionate society, but a more aware one. Aware especially of how potent any suspicion of unfairness or entitlement is. We were all supposed to be in this together; hints of anyone turning the crisis into personal gain brought out fangs and claws.
 
And of course the lockdown gave us stories. I've fallen upon them avidly. I was fortunate in that way as well.