This book will be published by Bloomsbury on 16 May 2024 (see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/everyday-life-in-the-covid19-pandemic-9781350434691/). Below, I provide a summary. Before that, let me see if I can tempt you to read on by transcribing four endorsements/reviews of the book:

‘I defy anyone who lived through the lockdown months of 2020 not to be struck by a lightning bolt of recognition as they read these pages. Nick Clarke has brought us a spellbinding portrait of that time fashioned from the writing of diarists who voluntarily offered their words to the Mass Observation project. It is a symphonic work full of surprising harmonies and tragic dissonances, syncopated by the unbreakable will to keep on keeping on. This is collective writing at its very best’ (Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex).

‘Early in the 2020 lockdown, Mass Observation asked the UK public to record the extraordinary times. In this innovative collage-style publication, Nick Clarke cleverly unites extracts from 5000 heartbreakingly tragic and devastatingly funny accounts, while skilfully contextualising the diaries with other pandemic literatures and Mass Observation’s own history. Highly recommended’ (Annebella Pollen, Professor of Visual and Material Culture, University of Brighton).

‘I read this book with mounting excitement. It takes us right back into the daily routine of the Covid-19 pandemic with the immediacy of a modernist novel. Clarke’s framing discussion of Mass Observation makes a compelling case for recasting the sociology of everyday life as a science of the people’ (Nick Hubble, Professor of Modern and Contemporary English, Brunel University).

‘The immense toll of death during the COVID-19 pandemic brought us face to face with life – and the specific lives of people often invisible to us. Shop workers. Bus and train drivers. National Health Service staff […] We stood outside our homes and clapped them. And now we seem to have forgotten them. But thanks to Nick Clarke, there is now an opportunity to reconsider the importance of the lives around us. His book Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic provides a “humanising and democratic account” of one day during the pandemic – May 12, 2020 […] It is a magnificent piece of work’ (Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet).

My starting point for the book was a few lines from Richard Horton’s The COVID-19 Catastrophe (Polity, 2021). Reflecting on health-science accounts of the pandemic, Horton wrote:

‘This was a pandemic that was described and reported in terms of statistics […] Lives were transformed into mathematical summaries […] But those who died cannot and should not be summarised […] Our way of describing the impact of the pandemic erased the biographies of the dead. The science and politics of COVID-19 became exercises in radical dehumanisation’ (pxvi).

‘So what must we say about the politics of COVID-19? We must say, I think, that it is our task to uncover the biographies of those who have lived and died with COVID-19. It is our task to resist the biologicalisation of the disease […] It is our task to understand what this disease means to the lives of those it has afflicted’ (p153).

My aim for this book was to remember the Covid-19 pandemic, as it impacted the UK, through an alternative account. This would be a humanising account focused on biography and meaning; a supplement to the ‘dehumanising’ accounts described by Horton. It would be a democratic account presenting the voices of many different people; a supplement to existing ‘expert’ interpretations by journalists, historians, and cultural theorists. It would occupy the space between the ‘factual narrative account’ of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry and the symbolism of the National Covid Memorial Wall.

But how to construct such an account? The book presents extracts from diaries collected by the Mass Observation Archive. Mass-Observation was originally founded in 1937. One of its earliest projects was the day-survey of 12 May 1937 (George VI’s Coronation Day). In 1975, the Mass Observation Archive was founded. In 2010, it established a new 12 May project, collecting day-diaries from volunteers across the UK every 12 May. In the weeks following 12 May 2020, the MOA received over 5000 such diaries.

Who are the diarists? As volunteers, they are not formally representative of the UK population. Indeed, many of them are what might be called ‘the usual suspects’: archivists, academics, teachers; often older, female, middle-class. But across the 5000 diaries, a broad range of voices can be found. To ensure this broad range of voices appeared in the book, I sampled 500 of the diaries, filling quotas for age group, gender, region of the UK, and occupational category. This gave me plenty of ‘unusual suspects’: carers, chaplains, cleaners, company directors, customs officers, delivery drivers, diplomats, doctors, electricians, engineers, farmers, finance managers, hairdressers, midwives, nurses, painters and decorators, sales assistants, schoolchildren… Also, when considering the question of representativeness, we need to ask what determined someone’s position during the pandemic. Demographic characteristics clearly played a role, but so did other factors, such as having a mother whose dementia got worse during the pandemic, or having a father living away from home due to his job as a doctor, his close contact with Covid patients, and his reluctance to put his family at risk by returning home after shifts at the hospital.

Diarists were instructed by the archive to anonymise their diaries. Because of this, many of the diaries submitted are seemingly frank and honest accounts of how the pandemic was affecting the diarists and their families, friends, and workplaces. They are also generally observant, containing plenty of details about everyday life during the pandemic; and reflective, containing plenty of interpretation – of events, thoughts, and feelings prompted by the pandemic. The diaries are focused on just one day (a Tuesday towards the end of the spring 2020 lockdown), but many of the diaries look backwards over previous months, and forwards to what the future might hold. Together, the diaries capture much of everyday life in the pandemic for millions of people in the UK and elsewhere: the activities, events, and rituals (e.g. funerals or home schooling); the sites and stages (e.g. shops or zoom); the roles and subject positions (e.g. ‘key workers’ or ‘vulnerable people’); the frames (e.g. luck or the ‘new normal’); and the moods (e.g. fear or hope).

If one challenge I faced when writing the book was how to select diaries from the 5000 (the statistical challenge of representativeness), then another was how to present extracts from the selected diaries (the aesthetic challenge of representation). To address this latter challenge, I took guidance from other attempts to narrate pandemics (Defoe, Camus, Grover, Spinney…). I learned from these other attempts to keep the scope wide (to include multiple portraits from multiple communities); to include details that communicate experience (both novel and mundane); and to use this combination – scope plus detail – to refuse myths of the pandemic and the society it impacted. I also took guidance from other attempts to present everyday life (Joyce, Woolf, Mass-Observation, Jennings, Benjamin, Alexievich, Perec, Barthes, Gumbrecht, Pile & Thrift…). Here, I learned to avoid humanistic cliché by including: events, actions, thoughts, and feelings; sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures; multiple voices and perspectives; the familiar and the strange; contradictions and paradoxes. To accommodate all this, and to put the reader there, I learned: to limit the focus on just one day or place; to use devices from Surrealism (fragments, montage, juxtaposition); to use devices from encyclopedias (entries, alphabetised sequencing, cross-references); to present instead of representing, to show instead of telling, to ‘let quotes constitute the main work’ (after Arendt on Benjamin).

All this gave me a book topped and tailed with essays on how to narrate pandemics (the introductory chapter) and how to present everyday life (the concluding chapter), but made up for the most part by diary extracts arranged in encyclopedia entries: anxiety; birdsong; cancellations; clap for carers; deliveries; fear; funerals; furlough; gratitude; grief; guilt; home schooling; hope; key workers; lockdown projects; luck; (new) normal; PE (Physical Education); shielding; shops; stay alert; stay apart; stay home; (dog) walking; WhatsApp; working from home; Zoom.

The resulting book could be criticised as a cacophony. Readers may ask: what’s the point? Where’s the politics? My response is that a democratic politics informs the book. It seeks to be a democratic account of the pandemic that gives a range of people voice, captures elements missing from summary accounts, and encourages new connections, ideas and questions. It also seeks to be a humanising account that presents society as complex, diverse, and eccentric; that undercuts myths of ‘the people’ and encourages a modest, careful engagement with others. In my own moments of immodesty, I like to see the book as a model for a revived ‘science of the people, by the people, for the people’ (once attempted by the original Mass-Observation): a research programme studying people from every walk of life, in which people are mobilised as writers (about their own lives) and readers (of writing by others); through which people might be mobilised as democratic, humanised, modest, careful publics.

I’ve managed to get to the end of this summary without providing example extracts from the diaries. To do so would not be in the spirit of the book, where the scope is meant to be wide, the voices are meant to be multiple, and the quotations are meant to be fragments juxtaposed within a montage. Having said that, I have a book to sell. So just as I started this summary with some transcribed reviews, I’ll finish with some transcribed diary extracts. Before that, let me just mention a few acknowledgements. The book grew out of research for a project funded by the British Academy (Special Research Grant COV19\200422). It is dedicated to Clive Barnett, who was my co-investigator on that project, my dear friend, and who died suddenly in December 2021. I’m grateful to the trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for permission to use the diaries and publish extracts from them, and the archivists of the MOA – especially Jessica Scantlebury and Kirsty Pattrick – for their expert assistance while sampling and reading the diaries. I’m grateful to Ben Highmore, Annebella Pollen, and James Hinton for providing comments on early drafts of the book, and to the team at Bloomsbury – commissioning editor Rhodri Mogford, series editors Jennifer Purcell and Benjamin Jones, two anonymous reviewers, and the production team.

Anxiety

Diarist 1692 (female, 60s, North of England, retired teacher)

Tonight I have a slight cold which immediately makes me worry as to whether I have got Covid. I don’t have any underlying health conditions but I do worry about dying. I have started to write family stories for my granddaughter and daughters.

Birdsong

Diarist 3552 (female, 13, Scotland)

My mum, my dad and I went for a walk along a lovely canal that we lived really near to. I have been following the journey of a female swan that has been nesting further up the canal since the start of the lockdown. My mum and I have been going daily to see when the eggs would hatch. As we neared the nest my eyes practically burst out of my head! Inside the nest, lying next to their mother, were four incredibly fluffy and cute cygnets! I was ecstatic! […] I walked home very happy […] In bed, I thought about how I would normally never have had enough time to see the swans every day, and I would never have known the cygnets existed! At least that is one good thing that has come out of lockdown!

Cancellations

Diarist 1289 (female, 50s, South East England, creative producer and artistic director)

I’m feeling down because I spoke to my Mum & Dad, via Skype, last night. My Mum has vascular dementia & was doing pretty well, visiting a day centre twice a week & lots of lunches, coffees etc. with friends. That’s obviously all stopped since the lock down […] Mum was really struggling to express herself & get her thoughts & words out; couldn’t put a story together or focus on a train of thought. It’s a devastating drop in 8 weeks!

              I obviously knew it was coming, but here it is & I’m completely powerless to help […] Today I’m imagining that maybe I’ve already hugged her for the last time. It’s devastating.

Deliveries

Diarist 989 (female, 60s, retired)

A book arrives in the post. We treat it with caution. Should we put it aside for three days until any virus on the packaging is dead?

Fear

Diarist 200 (female, 30s, London, visual designer)

Mum is classed as vulnerable […] And my little sister seems likely to be back at work in June […] I’m so scared and sad and concerned for my family’s future, more than my own right now. I found myself in a moment yesterday where I didn’t even know how to feel anymore. I sat in the bath and cried so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Funerals

Diarist 4269 (female, 20s, South East England, editor)

Tuesday 12^th May was the date of my grampy’s burial. He […] died from Covid […] in a care home […] When it became clear that he had just a few hours left to live, the care home said that a family member could briefly visit […] My granny couldn’t go because of her age and the associated risk of contracting Covid […] My brother, a trainee GP, is exposed to the virus anyway through work so went on behalf of the family […] We were given permission to have a very small, brief, open air burial on 12^th May. [Sister and I] pulled up in the car park next to the church at 2.00 and my aunties and their families were already there in their cars […] At 2.15 we got out and said hello to each other, kind of awkwardly and warily, keeping much more than 2 metres apart […] My nurse sister and my brother and his fiancé stood (separately) much further than 2m away from everyone, given their close contact with Covid patients at work […] After the service, we all stood around at the edge of the common and talked for a bit […] We let the dog out of the car so that my nurse sister could hug her, since she didn’t have another person to comfort her.

Furlough

Diarist 2707 (female, 40s, South East England, painter and decorator)

I am a self-employed Painter and Decorator, and during this Covid lockdown I am unable to work due to the social distancing restrictions. This means I am spending my days much more leisurely than I have ever done since being of a working age! Even with the restrictions of not travelling or socialising in person, this time feels like the freedom of the long summer school holidays of my childhood!

Gratitude

Diarist 3761 (female, 30s, South West England, lawyer)

I return to study at my desk. I enjoy the view of our garden […] and I feel grateful that I have my health and the support of my fiancé to get me through this bizarre time. I keep reminding myself that I have so much and that I shouldn’t feel downtrodden by the weight of the whole global crisis […] I also remind myself that although we have had to cancel our wedding because of the pandemic, there are far worse problems in the world to have […] But I also allow myself a little cry or feel a fraction of self-pity at times just because I think maybe it’s ok to grieve over the carefully laid plans that have been unravelled.

Grief

Diarist 759 (male, 30s, East Midlands, student)

I have recently become a widower as my wife passed away from Covid 19 […] Like the last four weeks since my wife died I wake up either thinking that she is still alive or knowing that she is dead. I wake up and already everything is different, not like it was in March, no one to ask me how I slept and I them, no one to ask if they would like a cup of tea […] Today I changed my routine of the last few weeks and showered and got dressed. Something very weird about having a shower, it instantly makes you cry. I’ve never cried so much in my life since she’s died. Sometimes it is silent tears, sometimes howling and sometimes I just want to shout at the top of my lungs […] After I’ve had my shower I walk through into our living room, past the urn containing my wife’s ashes […] I think the thing about my Tuesday is that I never expected I’d be a widower sitting here in the middle of a lock down, not really knowing where my future will lead […] I wanted to talk about my older brother, my younger sister, parents, other family, friends and interests but my life has taken a devastating turn and so I need to share about the truths of living after someone dying of Covid 19.

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