The long slog of Auckland's Delta year is all but over. Photo/Michael Craig
It was the toughest four months in many people's lifetime. Kim Knight reflects on Auckland's long lockdown and lessons learned in 2021.
For a while, they loved us from afar.
Auckland, with its bridge and Sky Tower and several suburbs made entirely out of dumplings, was a national hero. Staying safe, staying strong and keeping the rest of the country Covid-free.
Long-distance relationships never work. That sweet, vague memory eventually gets on a plane and takes off its mask to eat. Can you smell the pandemic on our breath?
A thing I learned in 2021: if it didn't happen to you, it didn't happen.
When Covid's Delta variant hit, the distance between Auckland and everybody else became long and hard. Four months, or 120 days, is about the time it takes for a baby to learn to smile spontaneously. It's the equivalent of 15 return trips to the moon on Apollo 11, or watching 750 back-to-back screenings of Gone with the Wind. For the people waiting for the city's borders to open so they could meet a new grandchild or hug their ageing parents or kiss a long-distance lover, it was an entire, aching lifetime.
In the same country - but another world - people got up when their alarm went off. They wore mascara and clothes with buttons and drove to work. They picked their kids up after school and watched them play football and said yes to dinner in a restaurant and maybe a wine in a bar or a movie in a cinema afterwards. Wherever they went, there would be other people. My nephew competed in a South Island sports tournament and the match reports felt like a subtitled film. I struggled to follow the action because it was all so foreign.
A colleague told me lockdown had made him more philosophic. It just made me fatter. My navel is definitely easier to contemplate now. On Day 100, my comb snapped in my uncut hair and it was a metaphor for something but I couldn't think what, because my brain stopped working mid-September.
Whole fortnights passed without event. Jennifer Coolidge was the delirious manifestation of my mood, but sadly White Lotus did not have Delta's staying power. It ended before lockdown had even really started and Succession's season three was still months away. Time slid sideways. Spring happened while I was on a Zoom call. Now, suddenly, the year that took so long to finish has finished way too fast. A quick recap?
January-August: Waikeria prison riot, East Cape tsunami warning, Papatoetoe tornado. Lead in Otago's water and water all through mid-Canterbury. A boat got stuck in the Suez Canal and Joe Biden was inaugurated. Rachel, Ross and all the other Friends reunited. So did Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
August-December: Focaccia.
Auckland's lockdown was so long that we went into it with pumpkin soup on the stove and came out with asparagus on the barbecue. For the first time in my stationary cupboard-adjacent life I had to buy a Biro because all the stolen pens in my house had run out of ink. If you had money, you spent it stupidly. I discussed "prawn privilege" with a friend who was having a 5kg box delivered weekly. My own fancy cheese habit cost $330.49 - $2.75 for every day of the border closure. In lockdown, I basically swapped takeaway coffees for mail-order camembert.
Did everybody leave a little something on the doorstep for their hardworking courier this Christmas? Things I had thrown at my porch included, in no particular order: Frozen almond croissants, five tubes of acrylic paint, a DIY embroidery kit that said "Ray of F***ing Sunshine" and two live tomato plants. One morning, I opened the front door to a plastic bag stuffed full of meat by a butcher who had apparently given up on freezer packs, chill boxes or hand-drawn smiley faces.
Last year, when New Zealand beat Covid, we found the silver lining in our enforced hibernation - a sense of community, of pulling together and achieving something incredible and world-beating.
In 2021, we did not do this. In Auckland, senior students stopped studying and went to work in supermarkets and warehouses to feed their siblings and their parents whose incomes had been reduced to a wage subsidy. Small business owners took out second mortgages. The inequities created by the Delta outbreak will hang over some people for the rest of their lives. During one media update, when the Finance Minister took the opportunity to wish the Covid-19 Response Minister a happy birthday, I felt the kind of blind fury that could make a person change their vote. They loved us from afar, but they didn't always read the room.
Another thing I learned in 2021: in the absence of anything, everything becomes something.
Once upon a long time ago, Aucklanders smiled at bus drivers, asked baristas how their day was going and made small talk in stairwells en route to the workspace they shared with many. We were nicer people, because of the million little moments that required us to be functioning members of a civil society. In lockdown, there was no face-to-face distraction. And we fell down rabbit holes looking for escape routes.
Eight days in, I tweeted: "My fiance just extracted his own wisdom tooth. In the living room. In level 4 lockdown. I am remaining COMPLETELY CALM and I am NOT WORRIED AT ALL."
The dodgy tooth, which was already under professional dental supervision, had basically fallen out while we watched Downton Abbey. I thought my tweet was hilarious and self-deprecating; that a small handful of friends might appreciate the drama queen-ness of the moment. It clocked 583 likes and 58 replies. One respondent used it as proof of the barbarity of the country's Covid response. Another said I was lying and demanded photographs. Radio New Zealand asked for an interview.
One morning, we were dimpling our foccacia and dreaming of fried chicken when it hit us: We were living with Covid. The best explanation of the confusion I felt came from a commentator who noted Aucklanders had been given around six weeks to come to terms with what most of the rest of the world had been adjusting to for 18 months.
It was the year we got real.
Much has (and will) be written about the big political implications of this shift. It's a change in mindset that has still not really reached the South Island. When Cantabrians started describing a supermarket visit three hours after a known Covid case as a "near-miss", I smiled like an indulgent, world-weary aunt. (Ignorance truly is bliss, unless that ignorance leads you down a path that does not include science and/or a double dose of an approved vaccine.)
In Auckland, I no longer cared about places of interest or even daily case counts. Life was mostly about not crying or shouting. It was about crossing your fingers and hoping that today, in your very small and immediate world, everybody's moods would collide: Good morning darling, would you like a cuddle or a sensory deprivation tank? The thing we all wanted - a return to normal - was as distant as the container ships containing Christmas.
On one of the many occasions that I was an absolute cow to live with, I baked for forgiveness. There is, inexplicably, no recipe for louise cake in the 2002 Edmonds Cookery Book. I made the recipe from the 1988 version and discovered it is no more a "cake" than Covid is a cold. Love is a sticky coconut and meringue jam sandwich and eventually you throw it in the bin along with the rest of your hopes and dreams for the year after we first beat the pandemic.
Remember that weekend in late August when case numbers tipped into the 80s?
I was 12 years old when my dad drove me to Greymouth for the combined town and country schools swimming sports. I'd done quite well at the latter, enough to make it into this big competition against kids from schools that had uniforms and more than one classroom. I finished third in my heat and was sitting on the bleachers when Dad said we'd be leaving soon. I was confused. "But the final isn't for another hour?" He broke it to me gently. Good, but not good enough.
That's how I felt in late August. No matter how hard you try, and no matter how well you did last time, you can't win every race.
Did we try hard enough? Auckland stayed safe and stayed strong. We also (mostly) stayed away. Out of sight, out of mind and slowly going out of our minds. It's easy to sit on one side and call the other side crazy. But then you discover an unvaccinated friend is withholding sex from a vaccinated partner. That a teacher who you personally know is a role model who has made so many students lives better, is among those who have left the profession. That one of your three children will no longer attend family gatherings. That we are "us" and "them" in more ways than we ever thought possible.
Last night, Auckland moved into the orange phase of the Covid traffic light settings. We made it - but we are changed. In 2021, we each defined what "freedom" meant. Now, we live with the repercussions.
One of the staff members was injured after being kicked in the face.