For a few minutes each morning I think everything is fine. Spring is coming, the birds are singing, Covid-19 is retreating. And then I remember, oh yes. Russia is possibly about to bomb us back to the Stone Age. The shadow cast by nuclear Armageddon, the thing we have feared more than anything else since the Second World War, is solidifying.
Once remembered, the terror of the looming threat, the weight of the knowledge of human suffering happening right now, is almost paralysing.
I switch on the kettle, watched by the cat. I wish I was the cat and only lived from moment to moment and knew nothing of nuclear warheads or civilian casualties.
Everyone said about Covid, “Don’t doom-scroll,” by which they meant don’t obsessively rake through all the news and all the podcasts and all the social media posts looking for something that you can’t put your finger on, but you’ll know it when you see it. Everyone now says the same thing about the war in Ukraine. But for me, doom-scrolling is non-negotiable.
My son is eight and, like a lot of children, extremely anxious about all of this. So each day I do a full news shakedown, gathering robustly positive news and expert comment from newspapers and podcasts, so that I have answers to my son’s many, frankly unanswerable, questions.
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He confronts me with clickbait items from the sort of website that wants you to know about this weird trick for getting rid of belly fat, explaining with diagrams how a nuclear rocket could be fired from Moscow and reach London in a matter of minutes. Or I am shown a hypothetical sketch of Putin’s “Satan 2” missile.
To this I must have a response. “Don’t worry about it” or “It won’t happen” won’t do. Modern schools now teach their students to have inquiring minds, more’s the pity.
This is not an easy task for me because I only have a 2:2 in English literature, all those Russian surnames sound the same to me and, sorry, can you just remind me again how the oligarchs got so rich? How can you “steal” an entire country’s coal industry? It makes no sense.
I emailed my dad, who speaks Russian and used to work for the Foreign Office, to ask what he thought was going to happen. “The frightening thing is that I do not know,” he said.
So it looks like I’m the adult now, and I’ve got to be a five-minute expert on diplomacy, nuclear early-warning systems and ground warfare in muddy conditions.
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“Putin will not bomb us,” I say to my son firmly. “He doesn’t mean it. It’s a bit like when Dad threatens to take your iPads away if you don’t stop belching at the table, but he never follows through. It’s to make us selfishly panic about ourselves so that we don’t put the Ukrainians first, so that when he stops at Ukraine we think, ‘At least he didn’t nuke the world.’ Also, Putin has all sorts of money (probably) stashed in London and half of the Russian government’s ex-wives and mistresses and children all live in Kensington. OK, kiddo?”
It’s called emotional labour and it’s exhausting, which makes me reach for wine. It’s a habit we all picked up in lockdown. Back then the excuse was boredom, no early starts and disposable income. We briefly stopped in January and now we’re all back on it. Or is it just me? The wine makes me wake up at 3am with a racing pulse.
I had a thought that once Covid was on the back foot we would get back to normal, but we have just flopped directly into another long-term crisis with an unknowable outcome. Months ago everyone was talking about Covid and it brought us all together (when it wasn’t driving us apart). I can still chat for an hour to someone I haven’t seen for a while about how the pandemic was for them.
This is slightly different. I talk to my friends, who are as non-expert as I am about all this, about what anyone can practically do to feel useful, to alleviate guilt. Perhaps we should hire a van, crowdfund medical supplies and drive to Poland, although I did read somewhere that aid agencies would rather have the cash.
What can we all do except sit and talk endlessly about it, doom-scroll, stare at the cat, wish it was different? And wait for that brief window first thing in the morning, before you remember it all over again.
