Covid lockdown: 5 years on

Covid was the end of several centuries of Enlightenment thinking, governance and culture. What comes next? It's too early to say.

Five years ago today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson shut the United Kingdom down. “You must stay home,” he solemnly announced.

Just a few weeks before, my husband and I had been at an award ceremony, getting an award for our very small but bustling restaurant. A restaurant my husband had bootstrapped into existence, quite literally built with his own hands. We were doing a roaring trade, getting rave reviews, and the future seemed bright.

The night of the awards party, I got a message that a journalist wanted to interview us about the talk of possible lockdowns coming. I agreed, but I was pretty unsure what to say — if there was a major health crisis coming and we needed to close for a few days, I guess that’s what we would do. I had absolutely no way to conceive of what was about to happen. But I assumed the people in charge had common sense and the best interest of their compatriots at heart. That would be the last time for five years that I would feel that way. Not terribly long into the lockdown process, it became clear to me that something was seriously wrong with everything we were being told.