List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Remembering the COVID-19 pandemic Anxiety Birdsong Cancellations Clap for carers Deliveries Fear Funerals Furlough Gratitude Grief Guilt Home schooling Hope Key workers Lockdown projects Luck (new) Normal PE (Physical Education) Shielding Shops Stay alert Stay apart Stay home (dog) Walking WhatsApp Working from home Zoom Conclusion: Presenting everyday life Notes References General index Index to diarists

Early in the 2020 lockdown, Mass Observation asked the UK public to record the extraordinary times. In this innovative collage-style publication, Nick Clarke cleverly unites extracts from 5000 heartbreakingly tragic and devastatingly funny accounts, while skillfully contextualizing the diaries with other pandemic literatures and Mass Observation's own history. Highly recommended.

The Mass-Observation Critical Series pairs innovative interdisciplinary scholarship with rich archival materials from the original Mass-Observation movement and the current Mass Observation Project. Launched in 1937, the Mass-Observation movement aimed to study the everyday life of ordinary Britons. The Mass Observation Project continues to document and archive the everyday lives, thoughts and attitudes of ordinary Britons to this day. Mass-Observation, as a whole, is an innovative research organization, a social movement, and an archival project that spans much of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The series makes Mass-Observation’s rich primary sources accessible to a wide range of academics and students across multiple disciplines, as well as to the general reading public. Books in the series include re-issues of important original Mass-Observation publications, edited and introduced by leading scholars in the field, and thematically-oriented anthologies of Mass-Observation material. The series also facilitates cutting-edge research by established and new scholars using Mass-Observation resources to present fresh perspectives on everyday life, popular culture and politics, visual culture, emotions, and other relevant topics. Series Editors Jennifer J. Purcell is Professor of History at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, USA. Using Mass-Observation diaries and directives, her first book, Domestic Soldiers (2010), seeks to understand the day-to-day lives of six women on the home front during the Second World War. She is also the author of Mother of the BBC: Mabel Constanduros and the Development of Light Entertainment on the BBC, 1925-1957 (Bloomsbury, 2020). Benjamin Jones is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He is the author of The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England (2012), which was positively reviewed in Sociology, American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, Journal of British Studies, The Historical Journal, Economic History Review, Contemporary British History, Twentieth Century British History, and Planning Perspectives. Lucy Curzon is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art History at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain (2017), which was awarded the 2018 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800. Editorial Board Fiona Courage, Head of Special Collections, University of Sussex in Brighton, UK Claire Langhamer, Professor of Modern British History and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange in the School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex, UK Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University, UK Kimberly Mair, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Lethbridge, Canada Rebecca Searle, Lecturer in the Humanities, University of Brighton, UK Matthew Taunton, Lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, UK