It has often been asserted, since the beginning of the 'lockdown' that the days and weeks have, for many people, lost differentiation, that they have melted into each other. Jonathan Freedland wrote in 'The Guardian' that, except for those for whom religious festivals were important markers of time, that this loss of a sense of being anchored in time during this period was indeed a common experience.
It is worth reminding ourselves how recent in historical time our concept of the 'normal' structure of the working week is. The 'weekend', as a secular period of rest, is an invention of the twentieth century. As the great historian E. P. Thompson reminds us, in his article, 'Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism', (reprinted in his book, 'Customs in common') the measurement of time by watches and clocks was, for most Europeans, unknown until the early 19th century, when they were increasingly used as a method of disciplining the workforce. Before then, as Thompson reminds us, irregular patterns of work among the pre-industrial workforce meant that there was no sharp differentiation between periods of work and periods of leisure. Indeed, pre-industrial traditions, such as 'Saint Monday' persisted into the twentieth century. It is worth speculating that these traditions of unofficial days of leisure (frowned upon, from the 17th century onwards, by bourgeois moralisers) may have, at least in Britain, filled the gap left by the Reformation. The historian Keith Thomas, in his magnificent work, 'Religion and the decline of magic', recounts in some detail that the pre-Reformation calendar was full of saints' days and other festivals, often of pagan origin. It is anyone's guess how much this changed experience of time will permanently affect social attitudes.
I have also been thinking about the human experience of space during the pandemic, particularly the problematic concept of 'home'. This was, in part, prompted by a recent 'Talking Politics' podcast (I thoroughly recommend this series of podcasts, by the way, for their level-headed and rational discussion of current political issues). Part of this conversation referred to the recent mass migration of workers from cities, returning to their rural areas of origin, coerced into doing so by the Indian state's draconian lockdown when the pandemic hit India. Many migrants had been refused entry by their 'home' states in India (whether it happened to be Uttar Pradesh or any other state) as the authorities no doubt suspected that they would be carriers of the virus. Many of these migrants were asking themselves if they had any home at all in India, a place which they had assumed all their lives had been their 'home'. Such a constant state of migration, not only from state to state but within states, is, and has for a long time, been the experience of much of humanity. China, in particular, has been marked by a huge migration of farmers and labourers from the ecologically stressed rural areas to the rapidly industrialising states.
The concept of home is also far from straightforward for many in the industrialised world. For many who live in insecure and crowded accommodation, or who are locked in abusive relationships, 'home' is a place of extreme anxiety. People in relationships who have habitually lived in separate accommodation have had to make a difficult decision which place constituted a ;home' for both of them, when the lockdown happened.
This period has reminded us that concepts which so many took for granted, such as 'day', 'week' and 'home' are full of questions and uncertainties.