pandemic behaviour

The Northern Line’s morning service is a bizarre environment at the best of times. 

Adults cram into carriages, creating a human “how many sweets in the jar” challenge, all suffering from overtiredness, overheating and overhearing someone’s shit drum and bass playlist blaring out of some Apple earphones. I don’t think anyone has ever been happy to be on the Northern Line. It’s the dentist of commuting methods: a dread-filling, sweat-inducing necessity of modern life.

Yet, despite the day-to-day sense of enduring a Bushtucker Trial, we tolerate it. It opens up the world of cheap (in the same way that designer gear is considered cheap at outlet stores when it’s still fucking ludicrously priced for what it is essentially a logo to showcase on “the gram” to people that essentially give zero shits that you just paid 500 quid for a picture of a posh carrier bag) rent in London and a path to Inferno’s for anyone that has had too many beers on a Saturday night. In fact, maybe we love the Northern Line.

What we probably never expected throughout our love-hate relationship with the TFL’s most “don’t lean against the doors” announcement-graced line, is that it would be considered a death trap.

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Okay, so a death trap might be a little strong, but you know where I’m going with this. If you don’t, then you need to crawl out from under a rock larger than the ones Post Malone shoves up his nose before a gig and take a look at the news.

COVID-19, or coronavirus to those with shares in Desperado or Sol, has struck the world and sent it into a frenzy. There have been several moments in recent history that have threatened to send the world bonkers – Trump attacking Iran, Trump sparring with North Korea, Trump denying climate change, Trump teasing Russia, Trump supporting every clinically insane, right-wing leader in world politics, Coleen Rooney outing Rebekah Vardy – but the outbreak of this pandemic has genuinely done it. The straw has broken the camel’s back.
The world is, understandably, in a state of panic. But here, in ye great old isle of the United Kingdom, we are ready: we love a panic. We are a population that has spent years over-reacting to milli-metric amounts of snow, tepid “heat-waves” and Black Friday. The British people have been in militant training for moments like this since they learned about wartime rationing in school. The tabloids may have scrapped Page 3, but a capitalised headline declaring PANIC is more than enough to get this country horny.

COLIN, GET IN THE CAR WE NEED TO GO DOWN THE ASDA, NOW, says every Sue, Sandra and Sharon in middle England. 

It is indeed the supermarkets where we begin our tour of chaos, or should I say Pandemic Peregrination*. Such is the insanity of your local Sainsbury’s, you will find it difficult not to keep going back. The moment you step through those doors, you officially enter a game of human Pac-Man.

Every aisle becomes a gauntlet. Elbows are sharpened, ready to decapitate any rival that even attempts to make a reach for the last tub of Lurpak. There are no lists, there are merely instinctual decisions: Kevin decides he needs eight packs of Jacob’s cream crackers; Helen remembers she likes Kellogg’s corn flakes so much that she needs seven boxes of the stuff; Tony becomes a titan of toilet paper, rolling a trolley of six Andrex mega-packs around like a double-ply dick extension. 

Where does that leave the rest of us? Standing, a pathetic shadow of a man, looking at the last box of lasagne sheets and wondering if it cooks like normal penne. Oh but don’t worry, you look down at your basket and realise you have the essentials: Doritos (Tangy Cheese, worst flavour), a £3 tin of crab meat, a frozen bag of onion rings and a four-pack of Lucozade Sport (Mango & Passion Fruit, not the worst flavour, certainly not the best). 

You’ve paid (circa-£15 for a cupboard of food that would send Jamie Oliver into a coma) and left the arena, contemplating just how you might clean your arse for the next two weeks. You could go European and use the shower as a bidet. Go desperate and use those papers you brought home from work. Go bold and not wipe. After all, in the words of Ian Beale, you’ve got nothing left.

Not Tony, though. Tony has a lovely clean bottom, the smug bastard.

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It is at this point that we return to our beloved Northern Line. As I mentioned, it’s a tense place at the best of times, but COVID has cranked it up a notch.

Before I venture into the tunnels of doom, it is worth saying that it is fucking mental that everything was running as normal for so long, forcing commuters down into the cesspool of dirt, grime and over zealous breathing. Let’s face it, if you’re going to catch a contagious virus, it’s going to be on the underground. Obviously BoJo and his peers probably didn’t consider that from their velvet-seated, chauffeured hatchbacks but why would he care about common people?

To step onto a Northern Line train, or any other train for that matter, in this day and age is to subject yourself to a full body evaluation from every passenger watching you enter their space. You are a risk. Guilty until proven innocent. As you precariously take a spot in the most spacious area possible, you spot eyes darting back and forth between you and other ‘newcomers’. Don’t sniff. Don’t cough. Don’t breathe. 

Of course, whilst you give every ounce of your virus-ridden body to act completely healthy, there is a fellow passenger who isn’t so lucky as to understand the etiquette. One throaty cough, two sniffs and a few wipes of the nose is enough for the jury to decide. Target X, acquired. Others twitch in their seats, directing disapproving glares at Target X whilst they continue to wipe their hands on every pole in the carriage. The poor sod wouldn’t have lasted two second in Lord of the Flies. Death by hand sanitiser.

We reach Stockwell. The suspect leaves to mass relief from the remaining passengers. One member of the jury exhales a little too hard and is forced to clear his throat. Target acquired.

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This whole thing might be a bit less apocalyptic if those in charge of looking after us weren’t fucking buffoons. Let’s take a look at some quotes produced by, no not a twelve-year-old boy, but the most powerful man on Earth:

“Now they have it, they have studied it, they know very much, in fact, we’re very close to a vaccine” Donald Trump on February 27th, 2020 THIS COULD NOT BE LESS TRUE

“We have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better.” Donald Trump on February 28th, 2020  PEOPLE GETTING BETTER BY GOING TO WORK?!

“I like the numbers being where they are [without a stranded cruise ship docking in the US]. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” Donald Trump on March 6th, 2020 SURE, YEP, JUST LEAVING HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE STRANDED SO YOUR NUMBERS LOOK GOOD

"It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away... be calm. It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen.” Donald Trump on March 12th, 2020 THE ONLY GOOD THING THAT HAS COME OUT OF THIS IS THE RETURN OF THIS BLOG

And my personal favourite:

“People are really surprised I understand this stuff (i.e. MEDICAL FUCKING SCIENCE). Maybe I have natural ability.” Donald Trump on March 9th, 2020 - ah, man, cba anymore.

I could go on but, really, what is the point?

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The reality of this pandemic is that it is scary, fragile time for all of us. As I write this, the majority of us have been condemned to working from home for the foreseeable future (that’s another content tap of a concept that will end up on this blog) and those that are working on the front-line are bravely holding up our society at their own risk. NHS workers, we are forever indebted to you.

Through the hardship, fatigue and anxiety, it is a fascinating time to open our eyes to the world around us. When else would we receive a squirt of hand santiser with every gin and tonic in a bar? When else would we contemplate the potential of using red pasta? When else would you see a queue for the sink in the men’s toilets? When else would the word “bidet” ever make it into a post like this?!

If in doubt, I will personally be channelling the spirit of a hard fuck that I overheard walking down Tooting high street on Saturday afternoon: “I don’t give a single shit about dying. I’m getting a pint.”

Stay safe everyone, thanks for reading. Please watch the below for what I believe to be a realistic, expert view of how this pandemic is set to proceed.

*Yes I used a thesaurus to find a word beginning with ‘p’ that also meant ‘tour’ and yes I found peregrination which is a word meaning a long and meandering journey that peaked in popularity in the 1800s. Knowledge.