As I said in my previous post, I kept a “coronavirus diary” during the early months of the pandemic. I’ve always kept a diary but I wrote this alongside my normal everyday one. Partly for posterity and partly because it felt important.
I also said that we need to remember. And what I have just read in my five-year-old diary has shocked me.
You can see how gradually life became less and less normal. And then suddenly, very not-normal at all.
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A social distancing T shirt sold during covid in aid of Age UK, modelled by a 94-year-old woman. |
Suddenly everyone is reminding me that covid was five years ago.
Well, covid started (officially) five years ago. It never finished. All that talk about “see you on the other side” turned out to be optimistic. There is no other side. There’s just now, when I’m usually the only person on the bus wearing a face mask. And when I have friends who still have to self isolate and have invited me to a Facebook group called “Still hardcore coviding”.
So, no, there is no "after covid". But there is a "before covid", and it feels like another world. What happened five years ago divides my life, and my memories. Once, we’d measure out our lives in holidays or jobs. Now, I just finding myself saying "that was before covid".
As for “during covid”, I’m revisiting it now.
This book from the US-based public service broadcaster is a spin-off from a longstanding project aimed at putting women musicians centre stage. It proves its point with a rich, readable and revolutionary overview of numerous women musicians who have earnt their place in history.
NPR is a public service radio network, and they are doing a public service with this book, appropriately subtitled A Revolutionary History. But the book is only a small part of what they are doing. In 2017 they launched a multi-platform series called Turning the Tables; this book is a selection of material from its various strands, supplemented with fifty years’ worth of coverage of women musicians.
This memoir by the Buffalo Stance star is a story about identity and roots as much as a story about music. And threaded through all these strands is a lifelong relationship with creativity.
David Bowie’s 1972 appearance on Top of the Pops singing Starman has gone down in history, making him a role model for many fans. But Neneh Cherry’s appearance on the same programme in 1988, singing Buffalo Stance, must go down in history as equally groundbreaking. Full of boldness and style – and unignorably, unapologetically pregnant – she was a new kind of role model for women.
Five years ago, a musical about the Liverbirds called Girls Don't Play Guitars opened at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre and was so popular that it’s coming back again later this year. The title was taken from a notorious throwaway remark by John Lennon on meeting the Liverbirds at the Cavern, but this isn’t about him. This is about four women who proved him wrong.
