On the 23rd of March, 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the British public “must stay at home, and that certain businesses must close” [1]. In that moment, the UK joined the rest of the world in a wave-like motion; a bunkering down and a turning inward of billions of people, necessary to avoid the threat of a global pandemic that swept its own figures over the earth, pouring through our cities, our communities, our bodies.

It was called the coronavirus, but virologists knew it as a variant of severe acute respiratory-syndrome related coronavirus, shortened to SARS-CoV-2, and a variant successor of earlier SARS epidemics that had spread through Asia [2]. We in the UK knew the acronym, if only that.

Earlier SARS epidemics eventually stopped in their tracks. This time it was different.

This blog will be my attempt at tackling a particular aspect of the lockdown experience. My experience. I am going to tell stories of creativity, burn-out, depression, inspiration, whatever happened and whatever continues to happen. Such an idea may seem slight in the foreground of such exhausting, difficult and tragic times, but I believe it to be necessary.

For those of us who believe in the value and beauty of creative work, as an art of communication, as an act of care and an area of exploration, the strictures of lockdown inevitably had an effect on our work. Besides this, it undoubtedly had an effect on our minds, our mental health and our routines. Self-preservation could seep into the language of self-care; feeling the corners of our social lives shrinking around us can make us feel desperate, reduced to our base elements.

But it could also lead to new forms of expression. Silence and solitude bring forth introspection, and allow us to pose new questions to ourselves. To work with these questions, to turn them into speech and words and pictures, is to locate ourselves within a space and come to terms with it. To become a wave turning inward is to pass over a familiar shore again and again, lifting its silt, pulling at its shape. A new familiar becomes…

So this means that I am also looking for your stories. As I share my own, I extend this invitation to you, and encourage anyone reading to submit their own pieces of art that might be relevant to the question of inspiration in the time of lockdown! Feel free to post or comment below.

Along the way I will be discussing the creative approach of autoethnography, and promoting interesting ways to encourage exploration in your writing.

Thanks for reading, let’s venture out on a journey beyond…

[1] Full Fact. 2021. When did lockdown begin in the UK? – Full Fact. [ONLINE] Available at: https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-lockdown-hancock-claim/. [Accessed 13 March 2021].

[2] Gorbalenya AE, Baker SC, Baric RS, de Groot RJ, Drosten C, Gulyaeva AA, et al. (March 2020). “The species Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus: classifying 2019-nCoV and naming it SARS-CoV-2”. Nature Microbiology. 5 (4): 536–544