The first time I heard of a “support bubble” was in the very depths of the pandemic, when there was that sense that every high street was rigged with invisible laser grids and the slightest wrong move would result in a loud and ringing death.
I had a six-month baby at the time, and a six-year-old, too, for whom school was a distant memory and a regular game for me was to consider which parts of my body I would chop off and donate in exchange for 24 hours alone. It was around this time that I became aware of a mother of two called Emma Hauck, who had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Germany in 1909, where she wrote a series of letters, now archived online. The words on the page look like a murmuration of thousands of starlings – they overlap and darken, and though quite gorgeous, when unpicked reveal exquisite desperation. And my point is, if I had written a diary during those grim months, I fear it would have looked like this. My partner and I balanced our extreme privilege with a sometimes psychedelic desire for help. Then we heard about support bubbles.
I am thinking about them again this week, because of the revelation that Boris and Carrie Johnson had their friend Nimco Ali (godmother to son Wilfred) over for Christmas at a time when lockdown restrictions in London meant we were only allowed to celebrate within our “support bubble”. Plans to ease Covid restrictions for the 2020 Christmas period had been abruptly cancelled as the infection rate increased, and “Tier Four restrictions” (gosh, a rush of nostalgia with these words, like sucking a Murray Mint) were introduced for much of southeast England. We had been told to stay at home and were not allowed to travel to see family or friends.
That lockdown announcement brought a new chill to our house on an already cold day. We discussed, I remember, potentially seeing my parents who, in theory, were in our bubble (a support bubble was allowed if someone lived alone or if a household had a child aged under one and, “if reasonably necessary for the purposes of childcare, where there are no reasonable alternatives”), but it seemed too risky – my dad was “vulnerable”, Covid tests cost £50 each and their accuracy was unclear, and the news was gritted with stories of people being fined after misunderstanding the rules. Plus (we admitted grimly), if there was any day of the year when we shouldn’t need childcare it was Christmas. The prime minister’s office has been quick to point out that they did not strictly break any rules, which is great, but does leave me curious to see how their modelling of these rules might impact British families’ choices this coming Covid Christmas.
And, as the days pass, I fall more and more in love with the concept of a support bubble itself. The aim, according to New Zealand’s Tristram Ingham, who came up with the idea in 2020, was to “capture the containment and protection required during the pandemic, and to do so in an empowering way”. He used the image of a bubble because it could be represented visually for people with low literacy, and because it reflected a “fragile yet beautiful structure that has to be nurtured and preserved”. I hope this is one of the things we will keep once the pandemic fades, like appreciation of the NHS and bralessness. People often repeat, with varying degrees of wryness, that it takes a village to raise a child, and then they stumble away, back into the existing world where money and housing and work scrape against each other to ensure people feel increasingly isolated.
It’s not just about children, of course – it takes a village to raise an adult human, too, sometimes raise them just from bed, where they’ve been drily weeping for a weekend, or raise them out of a smouldering relationship, or bad job or blighted opinion. And now that concept of a village has evolved into something new; a metaphor in soap.
I love it. I love the formality of the thing – you name your people, you admit support is required, that you alone cannot successfully traverse this rocky life, not in these shoes, not in this weather. I like that it makes us think again about care and responsibility, that it has the potential to stretch and disrupt the accepted current legal forms of partnerships, like marriages, easing us away from old and weary structures. And I love that a support bubble quietly embraces the sweet chaos of a chosen family, where somebody doesn’t have to be related to you in order to love or look after you, acknowledging the real ways people live and want to live, often far from where they began, both in terms of distance and expectation.
It takes the best bits of a family and refreshes them gently, leaving us with a blueprint for communities that are both kinder and more realistic. A new way of being together, there if we want it.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
