So, supermarkets in Wales have been told not to sell items deemed ‘non-essential’ during the firebreak lockdown. There are reports of great distress as people try to buy items like pyjamas for a relative in hospital, kettles or microwaves to replace broken items, or toys to help entertain their children during the darkening autumnal break: to no avail.
The official argument is reasonable, when you read it: selling such items, which might under normal circumstances be bought in other shops, will put supermarkets at an unfair advantage as they’ve been allowed to stay open. People can always shop online, the Welsh Assembly advise, though they don’t seem to have an answer for the arguments about unfair mercantile advantage there. Despite all this reasonableness, there are reports of increasingly frustrated shoppers breaking through the barriers and plastic sheets between them and the ‘non-essential items’, and there’s a record-level petition for the Welsh Assembly to consider, when the new week begins.
So much about the Covid-19 situation brings us back to considering what is actually, really essential. So many people have talked about what got them through the ‘big lockdown’ from March until the summer. TV box sets, films, books, audiobooks, music, podcasts, magazines, the daily paper and just whatever happened to be on TV… in no particular order, these seem to be some of the most commonly cited cures for lockdown struggles, along, of course, with the permitted and advised hour of leaving the house to take some exercise, and doubtless some quite unhealthy habits with food and drink.
Are any of these things essential? Probably not, in that most of them aren’t needed to ‘keep base life afoot’. You can live quite simply, they lecture us in those ‘back to basics’ articles which often appear in weekend newspapers each January, advising us to become more spartan after the excesses of the Christmas weeks. You can eat simply. Drink only water and perhaps the odd green juice. Sleep more. Spend less time on screens of any kind. Cut your social life right back and consider cleansing your friend list at the same time as you cleanse your diet, your viewing and your mindset. Sounds a bit like lockdown, doesn’t it…?
One of my favourite texts to teach is Shakespeare’s play King Lear. Allegedly written during a plague which closed the theatres, it’s a dark, cold, grim play which is (typically of its genre) ultimately uplifting about human nature and potential. Lear is an aged King who abdicates power to his three daughters, but first subjects them to a public love test: ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ It all goes wrong, of course, with the daughter who really does ‘love [him] most’ unable to say so and the others lying, and Lear finds himself stripped of the hundred knights he’d chosen as followers, of his dignity, his power and even, eventually, his sanity. As his harrowing sufferings grow acute, he asks the powerful question: what do we really need?
‘O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s...’
Lear is driven to these piercing, perceptive words as his two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, perform a chilling, auction-like rundown of what he should and should not retain in terms of followers and status. And it reminds me of some of what’s been going on this year.
A recent government initiative, with the strapline ‘Rethink, Reskill, Reboot’, was aimed at people whose work (and therefore livelihood) was adversely affected by the pandemic. It offered opportunities to ‘rethink’ your career plan. There was a slightly sinister poster campaign, the most famous featuring a dancer whom they called Fatima, whose ‘next job could be in cyber. (She just doesn’t know it yet)’. Many memes followed, featuring cabinet ministers and imaginative ideas of what they might do next… but the implication was clear: those with jobs in the arts might need to rethink their plans.
Writing (we think) King Lear when the theatres had been forced to close, Shakespeare reasoned out the need. He wrote about the highest and the basest incarnations of human life, and showed us the redemptive power of the theatre and of writing. He used the tragic form in a play in which the suffering is simply so great that it can feel almost unwatchable, unreadable; yet the tragic arc resolves, catharsis happens, balance is restored (if only just). And it’s incontestable that in books, and music, and the theatre, and film, and top class tv, and the arts in general, we can still find this sense of human potential at its greatest. Whether it’s the heart-lifting beauty of what human beings can achieve, or the uplifting themes we should aspire to: it's there. We’re not going to find that ‘in cyber’. Instead of sealing off this allegedly inessential stuff with plastic sheets and barriers, in the hope that we'll just learn to live without it, the government should be trying to find more ways for the arts to continue, perhaps in different forms. They shouldn’t just be reasoning out the needs and telling actors, musicians or backstage crew to retrain.
I’m all for government strategies to protect us from pandemics. I’m all for keeping as many of us as possible alive and well at the end of all of this. I’ll wear my mask; I’ll follow the safety instructions at work or anywhere else I go. But we have to hope that all of this will end, and we need to hope that, when it does, there will be a life worth surviving for. And that life includes more than we really, basically need. It includes those ‘non-essential items’ like the theatre and music, books and films, comedy and tragedy and performance. Applause that’s because our spirits have been stirred, not just because we’re grateful that we’ve survived another week.
And for that to happen, we need the stuff behind the barriers marked ‘non-essential items’. We can't just forget about these items, and the people who create them. We need to appreciate that, reasoned truly, we need more than just the basics.
That’s the ‘rethink’ we really need just now.
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