The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be normal again | Gaby Hinsliff
From examinations to the five-day week, the pandemic is making us question our daily practices, states Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff
F# SEEEE or days now, the list has actually been growing in my head. All the conferences, all the working coffees, everybody I ran into in the street over the recently or more. The suppers with old pals, the book launch celebration, the kids’ pajama parties, the pet dog strolls with neighbours and cups of tea produced the contractors. Even a dull middle-aged life, residing in the nation and working much of the time from house, is more friendly than it looks.
And although I stopped shaking hands with interviewees 10 days back, to prevent any possibility of handing down an infection I probably do not have, even Lady Macbeth-like levels of hand cleaning unexpectedly do not feel rather socially accountable enough. Never ever mind “dancing like no one’s seeing”, as the twee inspirational quotes have it; “living life as if an NHS contact tracer is counting the number of individuals you’re breathing bacteria over” all of a sudden appears a better suited slogan.
Nobody must be blamed for unintentionally contaminating others, undoubtedly; we’re all in this together. We are going into the next phase of coronavirus now, where life will alter and maybe considerably . Journals will clear nearly as quick as train carriages, as all however necessary conferences are ditched. That’s simply the start, as the shutters come down all over Europe. We might be going into a grim, uncontrolled social experiment exposing which daily routines and practices we ‘d miss out on if they were gone, and which might be swept away remarkably quickly.
This week Jenny Brown, the head of City of London School for Girls, required independent schools like hers to dump GCSEs in favour of fascinating task work that does not turn the currently distressed teenage years into a pressure cooker. Crazy concept? Educators currently having a hard time to encourage hesitant students, even with the risk of examinations, might believe so; and it might be dreadful for less scholastic kids whose greatest scholastic credentials will be a GCSE. If the worst case infection situations come real, then by mid-May squeezing thousands of kids into examination halls may make no sense.