Diana Wichtel: cats, humans and next-level irritation over Covid lockdowns

'Cats know no Level 4.' - Diana Wichtel. Photo / Getty

In breaking Covid cat news, via Twitter (where else?), a pet owner has reported her vet is seeing an influx of felines made irritable having their humans home all day. We haven't got a cat to aggravate. Our last, a beloved if short-tempered ocicat, would certainly have resented any restrictions on the alone time she needed to destroy our upholstery in peace. Cats know no Level 4.

I can relate to lockdown irritability, any species. This time it feels personal: a degree or two of separation from a close contact, resilience harder to summon. I asked one of my children how they were doing. Answer: "I'm working on my laptop on a cardboard box." We know now it's a long game.

The daily level 4 walk lacks the Blitz spirit of the first, when everyone waved and there were teddies. Now we're too busy making Ministry of Health-informed calculations. We decide to take another route when the stairs to the park are blocked by a pacing man bellowing into his phone as his children play. By the conversation, he's a lawyer. He sounds … irritable.

There's a game of chicken with an approaching maskless couple. Should we cross the road? They blink first and cross. Should we carry on through their lingering aerosols? Like us, they are likely to be fully vaccinated. We march on.

There's still the sense of being in something historic together. Cynics may sneer – wake up, sheeple! - at a nation gathering around their screens daily as the Prime Minister and the director general of health tell them what to do. I watch the Covid Updates for reasons as old as humankind and, possibly, cats, scanning the horizon for new dangers to be avoided.

It's therapy for an overactive fight/flight response, like when you are 35,000 feet in the air, trapped inside a vibrating metal tube, downing a mini bottle of chardonnay against the existential panic and a flight attendant opens the door to the cockpit. For a moment you can see the pilots, chatting and laughing like normal people. Someone is flying the plane.

And – welcome back, Blitz spirit – between the case numbers and the genome sequencing is further evidence that we're a strange little country. "Look, it's a challenge … for people to get outside and to spread their legs when they are surrounded by other people," announced Minister Chris Hipkins unarguably, causing Ashley Bloomfield's eyebrows to fly north and go viral. Now unable to exit the double entendre express, Hipkins blurted to a delighted press gallery, "I'm sure you'll all have fun with me later."

There is also evidence that, somewhere in our school curriculum, we need to teach strategies for dealing with uncertainty. Otherwise, the knuckleheads will always be with us, protesting in the streets for the right to be knuckleheads. As misinformation spreads like a Covid variant for which there is no vaccine, papers carry too many stories that read like classical tragedy: "Florida radio host who called himself 'Mr Anti-Vax' dies of Covid-19." It reminds me of the days of the Aids denialists. There was an HIV-positive American woman, Christine Maggiore, who worked tirelessly to convince people that HIV did not cause Aids. Her campaign against new, life-saving HIV/Aids medication continued even after her 3-year-old daughter died an Aids-related death. Her followers maintained she was right even after she, too, died of Aids. It was better to believe the system was out to get you than to understand that some things in the world, viruses among them, were beyond your control. It breaks your heart.

There will always be people who push the hot takes, the simplistic solutions. See the opinion sections in the media most days. It's harder to front up to the uncertainty. People sneer at "be kind" but it's just another way of acknowledging we're all in the same leaky boat. So, we'll set off on the Covid walk and be restored by the sea, even when it looks as grey and irritable and level 4 as we sometimes feel. We carry on.

Next week: Steve Braunias