I was pondering a question today, which I’ve had 6 years to consider, but only really thought about it now: What if the COVID pandemic had hit when I was at university?
That was back in 1988-91, when I only ever heard the word “internet” when the Yorkshireman captaining our football team was shouting to the striker where to stick the ball. (And “online” is where his mum hung his wet underpants). So, the concept of technology providing online learning to compensate for abandoned lectures and seminars during a lockdown was non-existent.
To be honest, for a big chunk of my 2nd year, I didn’t need a lockdown to prevent me from attending lectures. There were a range of barriers that proved consistently effective in that regard:
1. All day drinking the previous day
2. All day drinking on that day
3. Prioritising staying in bed to listen to the new Sundays or Stone Roses albums
4. Watching Neighbours and Going for Gold
5. Sheer bloody apathy
And unlike the unfortunate under-grads of 2020-21, we wouldn’t have cared if we were told to stay away from campus and just do our best to teach ourselves with books, because we didn’t pay for our tuition. No tuition fees and no student loans, so we weren’t mortgaging ourselves for life to pay for something we didn’t receive. We’d have been missing out on something we didn’t pay for and which we were only doing because we didn’t pay for it and it stopped us having to get a full-time job.
Many of us had gone there primarily for the social side of it, but a lockdown would have pissed on that happy little bonfire. We would have been told to stay in our hall of residence rooms. With no mobile phones with which to stay in contact with each other, how would we have coped I wonder? There’s an easy answer to that. We would have thought fuck this, gone and knocked for our mates, bought some cans from the local Offie and sat around dicking about day after day. Because you’re talking Generation X here. Cynical, sceptical, non-compliant and lacking any sense of civic duty at that age, so of course we would have broken the rules.
That still would have been a bit shit though, because pubs and hall bars would have remained closed, and there would have been no Friday Night Disco at the Student Union for us to regularly pin our hopes of “pulling” on. The fact that we never did “pull” at the Union isn’t the point. A lockdown would have robbed us of the weekly pleasure of futile optimism.
In all seriousness, I suspect that any sort of pandemic in the years before online communication existed would not have led to a lockdown, certainly not one as strict as the unprecedented COVID one of 2020-1. In 1988-91, the Cold War was ending and having lived under the shadow of possible nuclear apocalypse, I believe we would have under-reacted to COVID. The kids of the 70s and 80s had their own Blitz spirit based on a shrug of the shoulders and a response of “bollocks” to anything serious.
Therefore, my pondering of this question has been a frivolous waste of time. But then I did spend 3 years practising the art of frivolously wasting my time, so it’s nice to know I can still do it so well.
