A Car Journey Up North Into Self Isolation Territory

With rumours of a 15 day long lockdown in London, and Cambridge having been put on code red, everyone is fleeing back home in this time of a global pandemic. The last few days have been a whirlwind of cancelled plans, rash decisions and hastily booked cross-country travel. That is how we’ve found ourselves, my mother, step-dad, brother and myself, reunited and speeding up the A1 at half 2 on a Friday afternoon. 

I think it’s been a particularly sad and possibly slightly anxious week for my brother who’s 3 year long university career has been unexpectedly cut short, leaving him in a sort of state of limbo between now and graduation. His university administration have advised that exams will not take place at the college, the students most likely looking to some sort of online assessment in the upcoming months. My brother, understandably, isn’t taking this news very well. Especially given the fact that Cambridge tend to place all of the emphasis of the degree on the final term of the final year, leaving no paper trail. It is with a heavy heart that he trundles down the stairs of his student home with several suitcases, boxes of books and a few house plants. Only the essentials of course. 

The car ride begins in a slightly tense fashion as my parents arrive ahead of schedule and hurry us both along into the car, eager to get out of red alert territory. Of course, the fact that Cambridge has been deigned ‘Code Red’ comes from an invented traffic light system and therefore this information actually holds very little significance. Nevertheless, it is just worrying enough to have my parents stress-drive down to collect us both. I arrived to Cambridge the night before on an unsurprisingly virtually empty National Express coach. Uncertainty around the accessibility of London was enough to frighten myself and most of my university mates out of the city and back home before the weekend. One of them even had plans to wait until Easter break but within two hours his parents had rung him saying they would be there in a couple hours to take him home. We helped him clear out his room and waved him off at 1am.

 There is a strange sense of calm in the middle of the pandemic, purely because it all feels so surreal. London seems split between panicked residents desperately stock-piling and staying indoors, and students who have just been going around doing what they normally do: drinking and sleeping and hanging out in communal spaces. I feel helpless when my Chinese flatmate asks me whether I think the lockdown will actually happen, and consequently how I think she would be able to get home given that her flight is not for another week. I have no solution to offer her so I just wish her the best and tell her to help herself to anything I’ve left in the kitchen. 

Around Stratford in East London, it feels almost as if we were all living in a bubble. We don’t reap any of the rewards of London City Living so why would we be affected by the impending infection seems to be the general consensus of the area. Hence why, my flatmate and myself spent our last few hours together drinking wine, cooking crumble and piercing our ears, a standard Thursday night in flat 204. 

So here we are, all trapped together in this small vehicle until we reach Newcastle, where we will engage in another kind of confinement together in our home. I pretend to sleep for the first half of the journey, and even still my brother manages to annoy me by reaching over me for various things and blasting videos from his phone with no headphones on. It’s impossible to say how long we’ll be in isolation, but the journey so far doesn’t bode well for how well we’ll cope as a family. Divorce rates have already gone up  in China, turns out the key to a long-lasting relationship is a good balance between personal space and togetherness. Part way through typing this article, my brother leans across and asks me to remind him of how old I am. Dear God. Maybe this period of self isolation could actually be essential so that as a family, usually dispersed throughout the country, we can relearn the things we should absolutely already know about each other. (Thanks J). I suggest setting up the house as a sort of ‘Big-Brother’ stimulation, turning off the internet and secluding ourselves from the outside world to see who breaks first. Unfortunately, out of all of us I think it would probably be me. My flatmate even broached the idea of getting a tent and camping out in her garden so she has her own personal space. I think she was only joking. One thing is for sure, over my dead body will we be playing monopoly to get through these trying times. 

The days are unprecedented and none of us are quite sure what the upcoming weeks or even months could have in store. My heart goes out to victims of domestic abuse, for whom this time could potentially be very dangerous. My brother in turns brings up how unfortunate this is for people with new born babies, for whom this ought to be a vital stage of growth and development. The only thing we can say for sure is that this global pandemic will undoubtedly affect how we as a species behave and interact with each other. Already the government are suggesting a UBI (a universal base income) for those who can’t work in the same sort of way they have been their whole lives. Why has it taken a global contagion for measures like this to be put in place when this is how society should be functioning anyway to ensure that everyone has what they need to survive? It is a test for humanity, one which we could very easily fail if we’re not careful.