Has Covid changed society for the worse... made it colder and less kind?

I WAS frantically looking for birthday presents for a man who doesn’t want anything. I’m sure you know this sort of male.

Over the years, a cascade of carefully considered, well-intentioned gifts have gone down like lead balloons. You have repeatedly failed to find a gift that delights him, as have his siblings and his parents. Once his children grew up and began to notice, they too found it impossible to get it right.

You know that sort of man. The kind who doesn’t really want anything. The kind who is foreign to meals out, weekends away, fancy aftershave, designer clothes or even expensive work-shirt-and-tie sets, The kind of person that personalised mugs and funny socks were made for. He doesn’t want those either, but at least it gets you through the gift gap because otherwise you’re reduced to giving him money and that hurts his feelings because it looks like you can’t be bothered.

So anyway, this year, I decided to cast my nets wide, collecting sundry unusual and diverse items as well as a year’s worth of Spotify, which after much interrogation he reluctantly conceded he’d appreciate, because his subscription was coming up for renewal (the kind of gift which I hate giving, because you can’t actually give it.)

Personally, I think an online app is a bleak and empty gift, but I gave in, then went out looking for some real, three-dimensional things in real shops, that one can actually give.

So, for the man who has absolutely no concept of his own comfort, and will come downstairs in the middle of a freezing winter night in hastily-buttoned jeans with his bare feet stuck into the nearest pair of leather shoes, to get a bottle for a baby or Panadol for a sick wife, I decided, shock, horror - and among myriad other bits and pieces - to buy him a pair of really good, really cool-looking and quite expensive designer slippers.

It was a gamble, but I have experienced so many gift duds before that I wasn’t overly attached to the outcome. In the shoe-shop, an older man was ahead of me, leaning against the till as he waited for the shop assistant to finish up with a previous customer.

We got chatting, as some of us still do, in these days of unfriendly screen-staring. It turned out that this was the first time the elderly man had been in town since before the pandemic.

Did you get that? I’ll say it again. This was the first time since he had ventured from his rural home into his local town since March, 2020.

The man was, I’d say, in his late seventies. The reason he had made the decision to enter a shop for the first time in more than two years was that he needed new shoes.

He didn’t like ordering shoes on the internet. He hadn’t ever made a habit of it. He didn’t know what he was getting. What he liked to do was to go into his local shop and talk to a friendly shop assistant, be shown a display of nice shoes, and pick out a pair or two that he liked. Then he liked to be brought the correct size, try them on, and, all going well, buy them.

His own shoes were falling to pieces, he explained. So he came in on impulse.

I was taken aback. He had had Covid, but it had passed over without too much bother, he said. I told him I’d got it too, and that I’d been ill with Long Covid for a year.

Next, we chatted about the economy and the price of fuel. His biggest current concern, he said, was the cost of coal. It was so expensive, but he had found a rural co-op where the prices had remained about as reasonable as you could expect.

The assistant came to us and the old man politely said I could be served first.

Of course, I said under no circumstances, that he had been there first and must be served before me.

Eventually, he gave way and as he browsed various styles and made his selection and I looked through the range of trendy slippers on display, I found myself thinking again about all the quiet Covid casualties who are still existing out there, struggling with fatigue and cognitive dysfunction in an increasingly impatient, image-obsessed and aggressive society with its crowded restaurants and shopping centres.

Someone in another shop told me about a close acquaintance who hadn’t got out of bed in months. It wasn’t Covid that had been the problem, he explained, it was the Long Covid.

I wrote a piece about the effects of Long Covid last week, and how many Covid patients experience this sensation of being left behind in a world which is determinedly doing its best to forget both that the virus ever happened or that so many died or were left in some way impaired.

Many people complain that Covid tore a massive hole in our social fabric, blaming it for making people angrier, more impatient, more entitled, more cold-hearted, less human; less kind.

I’m not sure about that. But there undoubtedly are a number of people whose lives have been banjaxed by the thing.

Including the reader who contacted The Echo, saying that she had cried reading the column about the effects of Long Covid. She recognised so many of the experiences and symptoms that I described, and said she felt it left her with “a weird sense of comfort to feel that you are not alone in all of this”

“Sometimes,” she said “I appear to be OK because I can have a conversation with somebody, but they don’t see my mind going to mush even while they are talking or the debilitating after-effects of it”.

It was hard to find the energy or the voice to talk about the things she was going through, she said.

That’s no great wonder, given the debilitating effects of the virus, and the silent but growing sense of social disapproval you feel if you try to talk to anyone about it.

As someone else told me recently, nobody wants to hear about it.

Well, I’ve been through it, I’m still experiencing the symptoms and I’m happy to hear.