… and an occasion to begin looking at what might be Next Normal
(c) 2020, Davd
You could call this a speculative blog: I am an old man subject to Emergency Directives to keep to my dwelling and not go out and meet people. Instead of observing the Mother’s Day activities and how a coronavirus pandemic has changed them; I am applying ordinary logic to the facts i know and the rules I have read on news and Government websites.
Mother’s Day is traditionally the busiest day of the year in Canada’s restaurant industry. This year, “Physical Distancing” directives will reduce the number of Mothers who can be treated to the usual restaurant dinner, and of course, the profitability of the day for the restaurants.
Standing in a long line, two metres apart, waiting to get into a restaurant, is not fun. Many prudent offspring will choose not to “take Mother out to dinner” as they usually did in previous years … because Mother is not likely to enjoy it. Mothers in wheelchairs, or using canes to stand, are especially likely to find such waiting unpleasant. In some places there will be rain, even snow.
In the Province of New Brunswick, Mothers who do not live with their children must sit 2 metres1 from them in a restaurant2, which is going to make taking Mother out to dinner somewhat strange, at best. Perhaps there will be many fewer families following what used to be a very profitable tradition.
Pity the poor restaurant industry? Perhaps. Perhaps restaurants have been too much a convenience and the craft of cooking one’s own meals deserves a revival. Perhaps a virus it is Politically Incorrect to say came from [ahem] has triggered a social change worth making.
(Perhaps two households representing a Mother’s two children, can sit at two tables in one of their houses, keeping the required distance and still being able to hear one another in the relative quiet of a private home.)
Perhaps a viral illness has brought to where we cannot ignore it easily, the fact that too many people, not all of them old women, “live alone”. If you are a man living with his brother, as two of my sons are, you don’t have the isolation problems that “men living alone” face now. You have company for meals and need to cook about half as many. You can carry an awkward or heavy object together without fussing over distancing.
If you are in the bathroom, whether or not bathing, and the telephone rings, your brother can answer it — no missed call, no elaborate fussing with “voicemail”, and whoever called can tell your brother what it’s about, and that you can call back soon. When you call back, you’re more ready for the subject of the call, and the caller hasn’t run off.
This Mother’s Day, fewer offspring are travelling to visit Mother — or for any other reason. More local children will be around, fewer distant ones will come. Warren Buffett, a billionaire investor famous for his sagacity, sold all his airline stocks before the restrictions became general — to him, the travel decreases were “in the works”.
Will the airlines, will travel generally recover? Not close to the travel volumes that recent years experienced, me[don’t]thinks. Business travel will not be practical if the [wo]men who travel are subjected to 14-day quarantine on arrival at destination and again on return. I made fairly many business trips in the 1970s and 1980s, and one at most involved two weeks at destination. 3-5 days at destination was a common duration. 28 or even 14 days in quarantine is too large a multiple of 3-5 days on business, to be practical.
“Pleasure” trips are much less pleasurable when interrupted by “self isolation” or quarantine… even when merely constrained by 2-metre distancing.3 Travellers whose destination experience involved much 2-metre distancing or “self isolation” might have quite different words than “pleasure” to describe the trip. “The fact is, more holidays in future are likely to be taken at home”, said a recent BBC article.
Travel is not a necessity for most people. Food is. Restrictions on how much food one may buy at one time — what was called rationing in World War II — have begun making food shopping more difficult and expensive. The United States faces a major meat shortage, BBC reports, due to coronavirus infections closing processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever becoming meat for someone’s table… while the number that do reach food stores will be too few for normal American demand. Canada faces a similar, perhaps less drastic problem: Rationing is not a complete surprise … because of the very large scale of meat growing and processing.
I have lived many of the past 50 years — more than half of them — “in rural areas”. Driving to a store costs time and money, and rural people pay more of both “per shoppng trip”. We notice the costs, and many of us “stock up” when a foodstuff is available for a good price. (I once bought 2-3 dozen cans of tomatoes at one time, because the price was especially good. Over the next winter, I ate them up.) I bought 10 kg of barley and 10 kg of dried peas, last year, because “they keep” and I could expect to eat them up well before they lost quality.
This month, somebody buying that much might be accused of “hoarding”… a word which might fit somebody who normally buys far less. For rural people prudently using their shopping trips, the phrase “stocking up” is a better one. Saving each shopping trip is significant; a few hours, perhaps up to a day, can be put to other work, and the money cost of the trip itself is in the tens of dollars… and a villager or country dweller can save dozens of trips per year by buying in quantity.
Perhaps city people are beginning to notice that shopping costs time and money. Definitely, even many city people are noticing that shopping in the customary way, pushing a cart through a store picking things from the shelves, is much more awkward with “physical distancing”. Wearing a face mask and being required to shop alone, are not fun. People will continue buying necessities somehow … but shopping may change.
My friend Farmer Bert4 told me, several years ago, about the Direct-Charge Co-operative where he used to buy most things. He would go there with a list, perhaps look up a few items in catalogues, tell the clerk on duty what he wanted to buy, and come back a week or two later to get his purchases and pay. He waited longer between choosing his purchases and receiving them, but spent less time on the process than driving to stores in the nearest small city takes him now. More efficiency, a little less speed.
Maybe that’s something that Canada will be coming back to. Whether Bert or his mother cooks Mother’s Day dinner, next year’s or the year after’s might be bought the way Bert said he used to buy things. He and his mother might do more of the cooking themselves (though they cook a lot already); they might grow even more of the food they cook than they already do — and the cost might be lower in time as well as money.
Bert would never put his mother in a care-facility. His father died not long ago — at home. Like monks I know in another province, like most families were a century ago and many were 50 years ago, households were age diverse and did plenty of work, which work was also diverse. There was work feeble old men [and women, but the monks are all men] could do as well as strong young men could, and so those who were aged ninety-something, contributed… as Bert’s mother, who’s only in her eighties, will contribute today.
The Next Normal won’t be like the normal of a century or 50 years ago, but it will probably include practices and features that were common then and rare last year. Work will almost certainly be more variable as to how many hours a man works from one day to the next… and where the work is done. Farmer Bert belongs to that past and that future… farmers keeping exact 8-hour days when the weather isn’t constant, is nonsense. Tradesmen who work with their own tools can and often do work different numbers of hours on different days.
There will be differences; computers did not exist 100 years ago. They were rare, bulky, and expensive 50 years ago. Bicycles have improved over the generations, though more slowly; and bicycle commuting, bicycle travel generally, is more practical than it was. Workhorses may become more common, riding horses, fewer.
The human life expectancy may decrease a few years. A very large fraction of the deaths so far from this coronavirus, have been in care-facilities. The people who are “cared for” there, are mostly more feeble, carrying more illnesses and disability, than those of the same age “on the outside”. Any disease capable of killing a weakened person, would most likely have killed perhaps different individuals, but a similar “demographic”.
If we are reasonable, we will reorganize in ways that increase average household size from about two, to five or ten. We will make caring for other people more personal and less commercial. We will steer ourselves toward work that is more diverse in what we do and in how many hours per day… including doing more than one major kind of work each day.
Bert’s mother is going to enjoy having Mother’s Day dinner at home… as normally. The rest of us would be wise to consider how the positive qualities of home in 1920 and 1970, that most people lack today, could be recovered. We won’t go back to 1920’s exact ways, nor 1970’s; and even more, we won’t go back to 2019’s.
Notes:
1… perhaps only 6 feet [1.83 metres] .
2.. unless one of her children has designated Mother as the other household in a permitted “2 household bubble”, in which case she may sit at a normal distance… but in that case two children who live in different households must keep the 2-metre distance. Last Mother’s Day, such seating patterns would have looked weird … one might even say crazy.
3, I should hope no readers “were invested in” cruise ships or their operating companies this spring! People who suffered when cruise ships suddenly became de facto prison camps, are not likely to want another cruise holiday … nor are the friends and relatives they tell about their experiences.
4 … not his actual name, out of respect for his privacy.
