If we’re lucky, we’ll find our way back to a new normal

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

‘When everything gets back to normal’ – such a hackneyed and familiar phrase that, up to now, never needed any further qualification. Normal was all we knew – and a new normal, by its nature, is normal no more.

Normal meant predictable, regular; a sameness to daily life, punctuated by the odd holiday or crisis – but almost immediately and inevitably, everything went back to normal.

Indeed, so normal was normal that it almost became a bad thing – a normal guy was someone without an edge, without that whiff of sulphur or excitement; nobody wanted to be seen as ‘normal’, because it was only a small step away from ‘nice’.

We longed for excitement, something out of the norm – a day that wasn’t predictable from start to finish.

Normal was getting up, showered and breakfasted for work, taking a coffee break around eleven, lunch around lunchtime and heading home at the same time as everyone else.

A normal week might have involved a midweek match on the telly, a few pints of a Friday night and a bit of diversion on the Sunday before the working week swung into view all over again.

But then everything we thought was normal was taken away in the blink of an eye; no long drives or pubs or haircuts or Mass or holidays or even straying more than two kilometres away from your own house.

Older people were confined within their own four walls for fear that contact with even their own family would kill them.

People found they could work from home when before this they never even contemplated it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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