What the cat dragged in

 The domestic violence of being a renter living alone during a pandemic – a 2021 place-holder

 

I remember exactly where I was at noon on Monday 23 March 2020.  The first (and last) national Covid lockdown was just beginning, and I was watching the staff of the swimming pool over the road shutting-up shop from my front window.  Earlier that morning I had thought about having one last swim there, but had decided against it – in the circumstances, there would be too much pressure to make this a good memory.

 

Weeks before that day, with a loose mood of panic in the air, I had had a more concrete insight as to what was soon to become.  Via my newly-acquired habit of reading the letters to the editor in “the Age” – with the walls closing in, their gaucherie and banality was now food for thought – a short letter from a man in his early 70’s (I’m guessing) who lived in Middle Park (if my memory serves me correctly) caught my attention.  By way of background, at the time, someone in the CW government had suggested that, with Covid known to take its main toll out on the old, older Australians might care to limit their movements accordingly.  A plain enough and sensible suggestion (aka “personal responsibility”, to quote the label of its recent re-discovery, almost two years later), you may think (and certainly seemed so to me at the time).  But the baby boomer letter-writer from Middle Park saw the matter quite differently:  “How dare the government tell me to stay at home?” he thundered – and not rhetorically, it would seem.        

 

And so the sorting of the sheep from the goats for Covid lockdown purposes was set in stone for the next 18 months (if you were a Victorian). 

 

There would never again be another official suggestion, until very recently (and very gently), of older Australians limiting their movements.  Lockdowns, which wouldn’t be suggestions of course and although coming in a near-infinite permutations otherwise, would henceforth and strictly always be styled as demographically neutral. 

 

Even though, of course, they disproportionately affected certain groups, including younger people and renters, and hence disproportionately favoured others – including Middle Park retired baby boomers, whose main lockdown imposition probably was having their café catch-ups now held on the footpath, under the guise of waiting-for-takeaways and “exercise” (if you’re doing it holding a coffee-cup, and don’t live in a nursing home, it was and is not exercise – it was a fiction or loophole that you came up with, and a practise that Dan Andrews then predictably took his sledge-hammer to in 2021 with the 5km/2-hour rule – a rule that seemingly mainly kyboshed actual (solo) exercisers in regional Victoria, like me – so thanks a lot, social-club “exercisers” of inner-city Melbourne).

 

For the record, my entire consumption of, and spending on, takeaway food and drink during lockdown was zip.  During what is supposed to be a health emergency, with most travel banned, and with plenty of extra time at home to prepare supermarket food (I also never went to a butcher/baker/specialty-food store), the idea of gourmet, ready-cooked or “fast” food/drink being essential (at least for anyone but a handful of hard-pressed shift-workers) is absurd.  So in a nutshell, welcome to my Covid lockdown nightmare, where just about everything that was open was trivial and eminently forgoable, and most things I’d considered necessary were closed beyond recourse.

 

By “most things”, I actually mean just one main thing – home heating.  Unless you’re a renter, you probably won’t even understand what I’m talking about.  So let me briefly fill you in – rented homes usually have poor heating, and some are actually what could be termed “unheatable”.   My (cheap) rented home at the time, in regional Victoria, was uninsulated (AFAICT) and had large rooms with four-metre high ceilings.  I knew this before I signed the lease and moved in, but I also had a heating plan for winters:  regular swim sessions at the pool over the road would keep my outer extremities in operation, plus I would spend at least a few weeks each winter in the Northern Territory, or somewhere else at least as warm.  But under the pretence of a demographically-neutral lockdown, followed by the inevitable border closures in the wake of the corrupt Unified Security contract-induced second-wave, such “heating” was deemed much too big an expectation, of course.

 

Through April 2020, and with winter bearing down, I did get some swims in.  There was an algae-encrusted fire-dam in a state park out of town that I braved once.  I then remembered that there was a nice spot on the nearest clean-water river, 45km away.  Uncertain whether I was allowed to drive my car legally there for exercise, I rode my bike, timed so I would get to the river at the warmest time of day on the warmest days that autumn.  The river was nonetheless icy to be immersed in, and I would do just a handful of 30-second or so “laps” – punctuated by several-minute thaws on a rock in the sun – before getting on my bike for home.  It was a five-hour or so excursion in total, for about two-minutes total of “pool time”.  But that ratio – of 150 parts white-noise to one-part “real thing” – seems about right to measure the passing of life  in lockdown (my life, anyway) over subsequent months.           

     

Meanwhile, also in April 2020, Richard Pusey infamously drove his Porsche at high-speed along the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne, starting a chain of events in which four police-officers were killed.  He was in a hurry to get home and eat his takeaway sushi, apparently.  Remarkably, I think, the additional illegality of this having been done during Covid lockdown has been left wholly unexplored, as far as I’m aware.   Or perhaps the takeaway-food lockdown-loophole for Porsche-driving property-investors (and so definitely not renters) is even larger than that of the footpath social-club that was legislated for the convenience of inner-city baby boomers, and so Richard Pusey had every right to expect no one and no law get between him and his designer (and heated) home?

 

At the very other – my – end of the lockdown scale, there was – and in many ways, still is – the “car crash” yet to process:  the long, cold, unswimmable winter of 2020 and its grim domestic violence of man vs house, 24/7.