The Rory's Stories Lockdown Lookback

Preface

I had planned to write another book down the road, but I certainly didn’t think I’d be writing a book about a pandemic or a virus that stopped the world moving!

The idea came to me after I posted on my Rory’s Stories Facebook page on the evening when most restrictions were finally being removed, saying, ‘To think back to the days when ya couldn’t go further than 2km from your gaff, guards everywhere asking where ya going, queueing up to do your food shopping, burning your hands with sanitiser and starting to think Guinness tastes nice from a can. We’re in some place now!’ It was just a few throwaway words, but what happened next led to the inspiration for this book. Talk about gathering momentum! Everyone and anyone was posting comments under the post, talking about their various experiences of lockdowns, and some of them were absolutely comical. The post gave so many people such a laugh, and it hadn’t been easy to laugh about what had just happened in the world! So the laughs led me to write this book. I hope you enjoy it, and that it brings back some funny memories of a crazy time in all our lives. In the book I share some of my own experiences during these ‘mad’ times, which included moving my family back into my parents’ house to save for a mortgage (in the middle of a pandemic!), my wife falling pregnant with our third child (Lockdown Lucy) and also being lucky enough to move into our own home, all during the mad years of 2020 and 2021. There are also some stories from the public that are too unbelievable to have been made up! I promise that the one thing you will take from this book is that we Irish are simply unique.

Chapter 1: Rules, Rules, Rules

The start

In the early part of 2020, nobody could have predicted what was ahead of us, not just us in little old Ireland, but the whole world. You’d hear on the news about China and this ‘coronavirus’, but I, like probably a lot of Irish people, wasn’t really paying any attention to it. Funnily enough, my daughter Ella would be listening when the news was on and maybe she had a sixth sense of what was heading our way! Once it started spreading in Italy, we knew that it was dangerous, and when the Italians started planning a lockdown to curb it, that’s when my ears properly pricked up.

Fast-forward to around mid-February, and the first case of Covid was confirmed on the island of Ireland. ‘Oh shit,’ a lot of us thought, but again we still could not foresee what was coming our way. For me, it really started to hit the fan on 12 March, when it was announced that schools were closing because of this virus. I certainly don’t remember schools ever closing for such a reason, so it was all starting to go belly up now. Then, when they cancelled the St Paddy’s Day parade, and when the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told us all to stay in our houses and keep away from others was when this nightmare started to get very real.

Myself, my wife Emma and our two children, Ella and Zach, moved in with my parents in December 2019 for a year to try to save for a mortgage. We had been renting a house in Ashbourne for seven years, but our landlord was selling the house and, with rent increasing, we said that it was time to bite the bullet and try to get our own house.

Moving back in with your parents at any stage is not easy. Now don’t get me wrong, they were so good and supportive to allow us to move back in, especially with two young children, including a wild toddler. But Holy God, such a year to pick – the year of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, where for long periods nobody could go any further than 2km from their houses. I had had visions of Emma and me heading off on weekends away and leaving the kids with the built-in babysitters, but nope, it was going to be a nice, cosy house for the bulk of 2020.

But there were plenty of positives, no doubt. One was going back to the glory days of my mother’s home cooking and washing. Hard to bate that!

The early days

But to go back to where we were all at in mid-March 2020, it definitely was a scary and weird time for most people. When the first lockdown was announced we all believed (well, I did anyway) that we would just have to be very well behaved for a few weeks and that would be it. And most people were, to be fair. Talk about washing your hands until you reach the bone! I never washed me hands as much. And I remember there were even ads on the TV showing us how to wash our hands correctly, like what the actual fuck, when you think about it: fully grown adults learning how to wash our hands! And don’t get me started on the hand sanitiser, or should I say ‘gold dust’. Very hard to get the stuff anywhere – and the price of it! Whoever had a slice of that pie must have made a fortune. I wouldn’t mind but it would burn the hands off you with too much of it, flat out putting the stuff on the poor paws no matter where you went.

Whispers and WhatsApps

The old saying goes, ‘Do you want the truth, or do you want a good story?’ As Irish people, we love a good yarn, and the rumours and pure waffle were on another level at the start of the pandemic. Twenty years ago, rumours would have travelled by word of mouth or maybe a forum on a website, but not these days! Rumours can spread like wildfire in this day and age due to technology, especially WhatsApp messages. Do you remember some of the stuff that was sent around terrifying people? Some of the top-end ones I heard and got over WhatsApp were:

My mam’s hairdresser said that her neighbour has a friend she went to college with, who told her that the person who minds her dog when she is away on holidays said that at 12 a.m. today the Irish army will be marching the streets.

Lads, keep this to yourselves, but my mate was telling me that they are digging loads of graves around the country at the minute in preparation for all the people who will be dead in the next two weeks with this coronavirus. I know this for a fact because my mate’s dad went to school with a man who used to drink in the Gravediggers in Glasnevin and only the best gravediggers drink there and he said a WhatsApp leaked from the gravediggers’ ‘Don’t forget your shovel, lads’ special WhatsApp group, and it pretty much said, ‘Calling on every man who has ever dug a grave to come out of retirement and help us dig these graves.’ So keep safe lads. Wash your hands and stay in your bedrooms. This shite is getting real!

Well folks. Have yas seen these messages? [screenshots included] I’ve a friend in the army and he sent them on to me. They have been told to be on O’Connell St at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning with their bags packed, ready not to be home for a week. They have to pack all their wet gear, dry gear, torch, compass, lights, bells, whistles, everything. He said there has never been more preparation for anything in the history of the Irish army. Scary times. Stay safe!

How’s things? I just got sent this WhatsApp by a mate of mine who works in Centra, and they have been told that the company that makes cans of Heineken have run out of aluminium, so they just got their last few crates of cans into the shop there now! So get to all off-licences, as there will be no more cans of Heineken in the country by the weekend.

Wait till yas hear this – so ya know my old mate Dermo? Well, I haven’t heard from him since we did phase two FÁS together. Well, he randomly sent me a text today saying that his da’s mate works for Diageo, and they have been told that from 3 p.m. tomorrow until 9 p.m. every pub in the country will be open and it will be a free bar, because they want to get rid of all the drink before the country is locked down, as it’s going off anyway. Now don’t tell too many people this. In fact tell fucking nobody, cause otherwise the boozer will be wedged and we’ll be left with just pints of scuttery Tuborg! I’ll see yas at the pub no later than 1.30 p.m., because there’ll be a massive queue outside once word spreads. Anyways, see yas there, men. We have one big last session left before lockdown!

You see, with the power of WhatsApp, these messages could be (defo are!) made up by one person at home who’s bored and sends it on to their mate, then their mate forwards it to a big WhatsApp group, and then it moves quicker than lightning! Then, just like that, half the country is shitting themselves over rumours! As the old saying goes, take everything you hear with a pinch of salt, especially in Ireland!

Stories from the public

My brother-in-law had just come back from Italy when Covid cases were starting over there. He then had a cough, so rang the HSE to be on the safe side. Not long after, an ambulance came with people in hazmat suits to test him. People were standing outside, taking pictures of him, putting it all over Facebook saying, ‘Coronavirus is now in Waterford!’

Turns out he just had a cold.

(Roisin G.)

Remember the report on the news a few months into the first lockdown? A man coming home from Australia, and his parents came up from Leitrim to collect him with a horse box. Transported the son home from Dublin Airport to Leitrim in the horse box.

(Seamus K.)

Staying in my partner’s mother’s house over Covid. We had to dip our feet into a basin of bleach at the front door before going into the house in case our soles were full of Covid. She had heard on the news the French were doing it. It was like a hybrid between Covid and foot-and-mouth disease.

(Mary C.)

Some people were very cautious when it came to wearing a mask. I was driving through Westport at 1 a.m. of a Sunday morning and there was a young guy stumbling along a footpath barely able to stay on it, but fair dues to him he had a mask on. There wasn’t a sinner for half a mile either side of him.

(Majella T.)

I went