The day before everything changed

The day before the pandemic announced itself, I went to Birmingham to teach on a course.

At the time, it felt entirely ordinary. A train journey like so many others I'd made that year — early start, slides reviewed one more time on my phone somewhere between stations. I had given this particular course before. I knew the format, the room, the rhythm of the day. There was nothing in the calendar to suggest that anything about this Tuesday would be different from the last one, or the one before that.

I remember standing in the train station surrounded by thousands of commuters, all moving with the particular efficiency of people who do this every day without thinking about it. Newspapers folded to the sports pages. Phones angled towards inboxes. Headphones in, eyes forward, the choreography of a normal Tuesday morning playing out exactly as it always did. There is a kind of comfort in that kind of crowd. You don't need to think for yourself when everyone around you is moving in the same direction, at the same pace, towards the same unspoken agreement about what a normal day looks like.

And then I noticed him.

One person, standing slightly apart from the flow of the platform, wearing a gas mask.

Not a surgical mask. Not a scarf pulled up against the February cold. A proper gas mask — the industrial kind, with the round filter canisters either side of the mouth, the kind you'd see in a photograph from a different decade, a different emergency. It looked entirely wrong for the setting. A costume worn too earnestly. A protest with no placard and no crowd behind it.

I stared longer than I should have.

I remember taking my phone out and calling my wife before I'd even reached the platform edge. I described the scene to her — the size of the crowd, the ordinariness of everyone in it, and then this one figure standing apart from all of it. I laughed as I said it. Called him a clown, I think, or something close to it. She laughed too. It was an easy laugh, the kind that comes when you're both certain of the same thing without needing to say it out loud: that this person had misjudged the moment. Overreacted. Missed some memo the rest of us had quietly received.

The zeitgeist, at that point, did not include fear.