Page 11 - Luce 2021

I nternational Perspectives

that we dwell on the happier moments
that brought communities together,
including the small kindnesses extended
to strangers as well as to neighbours.
Early on, a Czech postdoc sent a home-
made mask hand-stitched by her friend
in Prague; around the same time, on
the other side of the globe, my elderly
mother was sewing a hundred scrub
caps in cheerful fabrics for the doctors
and nurses of the Royal Melbourne
Hospital where my sister is a consultant.

I particularly recall the surreally beautiful
English spring of March-May 2020, when
the sun shone, the birds sang, and we all
carefully tended our burgeoning gardens
despite the dismaying news all around
us. Successive lockdowns have made me
so grateful that I do not live in a high-rise
urban tower-block, but rather in a south
Cambridgeshire village surrounded by
open countryside and criss-crossed
with public footpaths. Discovering
and traversing these ancient ways has
brought a new appreciation of the East
Anglian landscape, with its fields of
wheat, sugar-beet, cornmeal and rye,
its wide horizons and its enormous
skies. It has taught me to look for the
wildflowers that nestle in the hedges,
fields and woods, to watch the cycle of
the changing seasons, to collect conkers
and pine cones, and to recognise the
distinctive tail feathers of the majestic
kites that swirl overhead, catching the
currents with the full span of their wings.
The other thing we have appreciated
afresh are the simple pleasures that
we once took for granted, such as
meeting a friend for a cup of coffee
or tea and an affectionate hug. Not to
mention the excitement of boarding a
plane to visit parents and grandparents,
sisters and brothers who live interstate
and overseas. These separations have
renewed our sense of the tyranny of
distance.

How, then, will the pandemic be
remembered by future generations? This
was one of the questions we asked this
year’s candidates for undergraduate and climate change? What will we
admission during their interviews a few consciously and unconsciously choose
weeks ago. Their answers proved to be to edit out and omit? How long will it Alexandra Walsham CBE (1989)
both thought-provoking and illuminating. be before COVID-19 ceases to dominate Professor of Modern History, Chair
Will it be fixed in collective memory the headlines and is consigned to the of the Faculty of History, and Fellow
as a formative and defining event? Or realm of past history? No-one yet knows of Emmanuel College, University of
might it be partially eclipsed by other and only time will tell. In the interim, it Cambridge.
developments – political upheavals, is a case of weathering the storm, seizing
constitutional crises, civil wars and the day, and keeping alive the hope that, Fellow of Janet Clarke Hall.
revolutions, environmental degradation eventually, this might all be over.

J anet Clarke Hall 11