2 weeks yesterday Johnson announced UK lockdown. 2 wks yesterday I taught last class of term & one of us who had gathered together on Zoom made a nervous joke about leaving enough time between class & the Johnson briefing to grab a glass of gin. Yesterday tears came #Covid19 1/

for the first time and maybe it was because I no longer feel physically ill and am meant to be back at work and psychic pain can be more easily felt since you're no longer so physically weak and frightened about getting really ill, getting pneumonia 2/

Before yesterday you were concentrating so hard on getting through it and dealing first with the square walls of the bedroom and then later with the tasks of quotidian life. But now you look outside at the blue & want to walk outside 3/

and for the first time you really take in the awful reality of the lock down since you're no longer imprisoned by illness. You think back to thinking abt psychoanalysis & history & Nachträglichkeit & grief in that last class 2 wk ago yesterday. When you were already ill but 4/

didn't quite know it. 2 wks ago yesterday you didn't know what was happening to those students who cdn't join online, to their families. You still don't know & you still worry. You look outside at the blue & want to go out but you can't because you still might make others sick 5/

You remember far back to 18 March when you went outside before you got sick & everything felt too close and too far away all at the same time. The world changed while you lay in bed & slept right through, 18hrs, that important meeting you didn't send apologies for 6/

because you slept right through, tied to the bed. While you slept, comrades started posting about the deaths of loved ones in their mutual aid groups, & yesterday a friend spoke of their shock that a friend they'd been joking online with a few days ago is now in an ICU. 7/

Yesterday almost 2 weeks to the hour after we grabbed gin and Johnson announced the lock down, we heard he's in the ICU. The first thing you felt before anything else was relief that the brutal reality of his illness had been finally acknowledged 8/

after days of press office disingenuousness that made you angry because that illness that you saw & knew was being denied. And then you read the statement about him 'working like mad' to try to get through this but it's not good enough so far – made by an MP in his own party 9/

& a friend said: Friends Like That. You think back to the early morning of 13 Dec 2019 when you cried when the parliamentary candidate you canvassed for in NE London lost to that same Conservative MP, the Friend Like That. You think back to her tears for her mother who died 10/

after years of dealing w racism & fighting for disability benefits that had been removed by the Friend Like That and his Friends Like That. So many who have died or are v sick are Brown & Black & you still can't easily find UK mortality/morbidity data broken down by ethnicity 11/

even as hideous statistics making enduring chronic racism crystal clear now pour from the USA. 12/ https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1247176506452905986?s=20

The news of 'cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology' broke at WHO China Country Office on 31 Dec, just as we were bidding the many pains of 2019 farewell.

2019's tears mix with 2020's. Even if you can't know exactly whose tears they are and why exactly they fall now 13/13