By Richard Kelly

As Covid madness, or megalomaniacal plans, according to your world view, took over our lives, various authorities, and authoritarian tendencies in otherwise agreeable people, intruded into our daily activities. Working, shopping, moving around and even trying to mind one’s own business became an exercise in navigating seemingly arbitrary, pointless rules.

It all seemed wrong. It rankled. Injustice deserved to be exposed and defeated. Mistreatment at the hands of remote authority, like government, gave me a sense of united opposition that I now know I just imagined to be present in all of us.

A sense that the measures imposed on us were so evidently doomed to fail gave me, for a few weeks, a cocky assurance that the folly would soon be exposed and it would all go back to a true, not ‘new’ normal. But that assurance soon ebbed away.

Conventional protest in the form of letters to editors, MPs, think tanks and magazines was a pathetic, but necessary, ritual to observe. As expected, responses were dismissive if they came at all, and more often than not there was not even a response. What was wholly unexpected was the level of apathy and acceptance of the situation by those around me.