When Kings Cross was empty
My train was on time. That was the first sign I had that things were about to get scary. My commute takes me from Welwyn Garden City to Kings Cross, where I get off a train and walk over to St. Pancras and get a train from there to my place of work in Kentish Town. Every single day, there is always at least a two or three minute delay. These trains from this station to my station are NEVER on time. The only exception was the second week of March 2020. Under any other circumstances, this would be a cause for celebration, but I was deeply unsettled.
Passengers who usually got the same trains as me had spent the last week slowly vanishing. I don’t know any of them by name, I just recognise faces and jackets. An innocent suggestion would be that everyone had chosen the same week to take a holiday, but I was plugged into social media. I had been paying extra attention to what was happening since a certain story had started creeping up the news agenda in about mid February. I knew what was going on. Memes about the rarity of toilet rolls had been in my feeds for a few days by the point my trains started being on time.
As the days passed, more passengers vanished. I got a seat on every train I got on. There were no staff going around checking tickets. There was no one to tell me not to put my feet on the seat opposite me. Theoretically, it should have been bliss.
Theoretically.
At the same time as my commute was emptying, the shops were filling up with customers. It was like it was Christmas Eve again. I couldn’t fit a trolley round my local supermarket, so I had to manoeuvre the crowds with two hand baskets, and obviously all the toilet roll shelves were empty. Most shops had been cleaned out of fresh fruit and vegetables, so I had to go walking around local stores outside my work on my lunch break and bring home shopping bags full of whatever I could find. I had to mix and match different stores depending on what they had. The Co-op had onions. The Tesco had broccoli. I couldn’t find chopped tomatoes so I had to just get a jar of passata from the Sainsbury’s and hope it had the same effect on the meal I’d be trying to cook in a couple of day’s time.
I remember being stood in the middle of a throng of people in my local supermarket that Saturday, seeing the crowds of customers queuing down every single aisle in the shop, more customers pushing past them to get to their desired groceries, and I thought to myself, “what in the actual living fuck are we all doing?”
There is an incredibly infectious, potentially lethal virus out there. That’s what’s causing this panic. And yet the response everyone has taken is to go out and spend MORE time in the company of strangers, getting close to them, pushing past them. There’s probably someone with Covid in this shop right now, and if one person in a crowded room has Covid, it won’t just be one person for much longer.
Of course, you can’t blame people for panicking. The reason they were doing this was that they didn’t know what was about to happen. The Government weren’t saying anything. There wasn’t even a hint of what a national lockdown would actually look like. Would you still be able to go to the shops? If not, we need to buy as much as we can right now, right?
And all we were getting up until March the 23rd, when they couldn’t avoid the topic any longer, was silence. Allegedly, behind closed doors, Boris Johnson was spending this time “laughing at the Italians”, he was so certain that it could never happen here, even while it was already happening here and he remained in apparent blissful ignorance. Even while the airports were still open and we were still taking in passengers from other countries that had large amounts of Covid cases.
This is what his supporters later started calling “getting all the big calls right”. I remember being incredulous when I started hearing those words to describe Boris Johnson on Covid. We were all there. We knew what it was like. I remember screaming at my news feeds day after day for someone to just fucking do or say SOMETHING. ANYTHING.
In America, they had a loudmouthed idiot who ended up suggesting on live TV that people could try injecting bleach to cure Covid. In Britain, we had silence. At least injecting bleach was an OBVIOUSLY bad idea that no one except the really stupid would actually do and everyone could make memes about it.
Dominic Cummings has spent this week at the UK Covid inquiry making out like he was the only one in Government who realised how dangerous the situation was. Since he likes to think of himself as some kind of Machiavellian super genius who sees everything before it comes, what he won’t tell you is how stupefyingly obvious it was to anyone with half a brain in their head that shit was hitting the fan. I don’t consider myself to be particularly perceptive and smart. I didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on, but I knew that what everybody at the top of government was doing (or not doing as the case may be) was going to get people killed.
On Friday the 20th of March 2020, I went to work as I always do. The train on my way into Kings Cross was completely empty. There had been one or two fellow passengers for most of that week, but now it was just me. When we stopped at Finsbury Park, a pigeon got on the train. I filmed it. I found it pretty funny that now there were no people around, pigeons were using the trains.
We then arrived at Kings Cross, and the entire place was completely empty. As I walked from platform 11 out into the court and headed over to St Pancras, I saw two or three people making the same walk. I couldn’t even hear cars in the distance. It was silent. Me and the other two or three people in the vicinity were probably the only ones of a very select number of people who had ever seen one of the biggest railway stations in one of the busiest cities on the planet look and feel anything like this. It was unsettling in a way I find impossible to describe. Its one thing to see a scene like this in a post-apocalyptic film, its another to actually walk through it.
I got to work, where the work itself had been drying up all week, and my boss said it was highly likely I’d be put on furlough starting next week. He sent me home early, and kindly let me take home a big pack of toilet rolls from our supplies cupboard, as that was the one item I’d failed to find in my lunchtime trips around the local shops.
I walked back through an empty Kings Cross and went home. Fortunately since there was no one there, I didn’t have to defend my precious toilet rolls from knife-wielding bandits.
I woke up the next day not sure what I was allowed to do now.
It took a few days until I needed to go to the shops, and you couldn’t get home delivery at any supermarkets, all the slots were booked up. They said you were allowed to go out once a day. Could I go to the shops AND for a little walk later with my partner? What was I allowed to do?
Turns out I could have had a party in my back garden and none of it would have mattered. Apparently Boris and cronies didn’t break any rules when they did it.
I don’t want anyone to come away from this thinking I’m claiming I was perceptive. As said: all of the insanity of that period was obvious.
It is a national travesty that the people responsible for the insane climate I just described won’t see any consequences. It took two full years for the removal of Boris Johnson after this, and his removal had nothing to do with his handling of Covid. His chancellor at the time, nicknamed “Dr Death” by one of the chief scientific advisors, is now Prime Minister, and is likely to continue squatting in Downing Street until January 2025, at which point we’ll all be told by these people to move on and that no one cares about Covid anymore.
I still care. It didn’t take a genius to see that what was happening at the time was a travesty. They’re going to try and rewrite this particularly embarrassing piece of British history at the next election, but I remember that two week period in March 2020. The people responsible for it shouldn’t be allowed to claim it doesn’t matter anymore that they did such a catastrophically poor job. They shouldn’t be allowed to forget.
