To The Future

To The Future,

My name is Flora Burleigh and, as I write, it is the final day of June – which means that Britain has now been on lockdown for just over three months (since the 23rd March according to my diary). I started writing in my journal a few days beforehand, so it has documented one of the craziest periods of, certainly my life, if not all history. In fact, I’ve wondered about whether in the future, school students might study my words in the same way that we have looked at accounts of World War Two in our History lessons.

Yesterday’s entry – the last one of that particular book – read:

In some ways, this quarantine has been the most rich, colourful and interesting time ever, yet in others it has been the most boring, stressful and tense time. One definitive positive of this whole thing is having Dad around for the week (usually he stays in London then and comes home for the weekend), which lifts the pressure off Mum. On the other hand, lockdown takes a huge mental toll on you, for example everyone has felt at least slightly lonely on certain occasions. Because of it though, I have realised how loyal most of my classmates are, as it takes lots of effort to maintain our friendships over social media.

I remember at the beginning, when people were terrified for their survival; we emptied the supermarket aisles of its stock and stayed in the house as much as possible. The world was in complete and utter panic. Together, my family were ironically reading a dystopian set of novels, in which a destructive virus spread among adults and turned them into fearful zombies! Funnily enough, the streets did feel a little eerie and post-apocalyptic, like the start of a grave storyline, eventually leading to a catastrophic disaster.

This time capsule contains the items that symbolise memorable aspects from these long three months:

Small hands represent the Clap for our Carers on my road every Thursday, as does the saucepan. We also spent many hours playing ‘Bananagrams’ and building jigsaws – yes I was very bored! – shown by the letters and puzzle pieces. It’s lucky we have a ping pong table because it was heavily used (hence the bat), and similarly in the first couple of weeks we tried to keep up fitness with daily Joe Wicks videos, although that quickly went down the drain (hence the weight).

Also I tried a touch of art and gardening (flowers and paintbrush), my mum’s two favourite activities, but of course after a while… I got bored of it. The blue medical face mask was given to me at my first protest in Brighton about ten days ago, and to me indicates a sense of safety because people feel far more secure going out with them on. Tinned food like baked beans and sweetcorn represents the immense panic buying which consumed us until the shops actually banned it.

There’s a clock resting on the handle, just showing the time that we spent and how time seemed to stand still at certain points. Over isolation, music became a large part of my life, as if the songs were my companions, so often I was found with headphones in my ears. Baking was another activity that took up time, mainly coffee cake, banana bread (who didn’t?) and biscuits. Stuck around the pan and on the inside of it, I have put photos from the pandemic, which are mostly either landscapes of picture of my hair dye. One of my favourite parts of lockdown was the fact that I was able to dye my hair, it was a real shame that it came out almost immediately. However, people would definitely disapprove when I rocked up to Sion with bright pink locks.

Please keep my letter. Perhaps you could give it to a British museum so I could be famous, or maybe put it back it the ground if you find this too early to do so.

Thanks!

Flora Burleigh