Covid Chronicles looks at my experience in the first national lockdown during the Covid 19 pandemic.
I live in East London. It’s a sought-after location, with its green spaces, wide array of eateries and independent shops, most of which closed their doors and our once vibrant high street fell silent. Places slowly start to open and queues grow longer. You can find your days are spent in lines for the smallest of things and the longest of time. With social distance the focus of the future and dates set out for the opening of our consumerism how will our days be spent, and will the high streets have lost the final battle.
For 10 weeks I’ve spent my days in a shared house with no social space, each room converted into another bedroom, with only a kitchen and bathroom as communal areas, and no one hangs out in a bathroom!
I’ve walked around this house, each step a creak to alert that there is movement where so many have moved before, in what was once a grand Victorian home. I found myself observing and documenting the spaces available to me in minute detail using my camera: the warp in the bathroom door that stops it from staying shut unless locked – I listen to it open and close till I can take it no longer and close the window; the many wires that trail around the house without purpose; the threadbare carpet of the hall – using the word ‘carpet’ in the loosest sense, so thin you can see every floorboard. Where there is thread you can no longer tell the original colour with the many unidentified stains and sun-bleached spots.
Most of my bedroom walls and the ceiling are papered with underlining, each piece coming away, only remaining in place thanks to the many layers of paint that mark a new start for the many tenants who have passed through. The gaps in the floorboards show what could be a shiny coin lost, and years of dust the Hoover can not reach.
The kitchen is no better, a spongy bounce on the floor before you enter. The landlord replaced the laminate last year and fixed half the flooring underneath when the fridge began to fall to one side. Obviously not enough as the other half is now on its way out. The cupboards don’t line up, each door leaning to one side, and few actually close.
The laminate peels from the drawers and most are a shade of yellow when they should be white. I’ve captured so many more details through my lens, I’ve stood on my crumbling doorstep each Thursday evening, the only sounds to be to heard of the outside world.
As lockdown begins to lift, I wonder if I have survived this horror, or if its just the begin. I worry the work wont come and my panic spreads. Our freedom may slowly be returning but my saving aren’t, and I fear could be trapped in this decaying house for longer than I’d planned.
