David Penberthy: If Trump became the T-word for my American mates, Covid-19 has become the C-word for Aussies

Now the only talk left is the “vaccination debate” and each day Aussies inch closer to doing to Covid what Americans did to the T-word, writes David Penberthy.

A great mate of mine from Adelaide is married to an American woman and has spent most of the past 30 years living in the US.

Over the past four years when Trump was president, they and their friends formed a pact that whenever they got together, no one was allowed to talk about him.

It wasn’t so much because of the potential for arguments, even though he is a lifelong Labor and Democrat supporter and his wife from a solid Republican family, albeit one that swung to the Democrats on account of Trump.

It was more so because Trump’s presidency was so headline-grabbing, so all-consuming, that it meant normal dinner conversation would involve nothing else if politics was the topic of chat. No sport, no movies, no how are the kids going. Just Trump, Trump, Trump.

If Trump became the T-word for my mates, Covid-19 has become the C-word for the rest of us over this past 18 months as the pandemic has infiltrated our lives.

It infiltrated every sphere of our lives, from the home to the workplace to the pub, when it’s been open, when we catch up with our mates for some sit-down beverages.

Former US President Donald Trump leaves for Florida. Picture: AFP

Being a lifelong newspaper tragic, and a former chief of staff and editor who lives in fear of being scooped, I have always enjoyed reading newspapers backwards not only to avoid any anger at being beaten on a news story but more so to enjoy the quiet escapism of reading about sport.

Even the sports pages have become the Covid pages over the past 18 months, with stories on everything from match scheduling to player quarantine breaches to crowd sizes to anti-vax players facing bans from major tennis tournaments and minor-round footy matches in the AFLW.

There is a large copper bowl in my office that I look at every morning and shake my head. It sits outside on the shelf of the office barbecue on our Hindmarsh Square balcony and has been there since the early frightening days of the pandemic when the full impact of the virus was not yet known, when all sort of contingencies and workarounds were being imposed to keep us all safe.

Someone had read that the coronavirus had its shortest lifespan if it came into contact with copper. For a few weeks last year the idea was that we would place our headphones and foam microphone covers into this copper salad bowl after the radio show to kill it, lest it had snuck into the building.

Maybe it worked. I mean, none of us died. All hail the copper salad bowl.

That bowl is to me a symbol of a time when every single conversation in the office involved Covid, be it the revenue, staff and salary impact of collapsed advertising revenue from tourism operators and the hospitality sector, the daunting logistics of doing radio shows from home, challenges around having guests banned from entering the building, bans on travel to attend conferences or commentate on football games, every single meeting (and there were many) suddenly being held over Zoom or Teams.

Even the simple act of making cups of instant coffee during the show became the topic of Covid-safe chat.

Away from work, the C-word has taken hold much more than any of us would prefer at t

he family dinner table with friends. I am not a mollycoddling parent and, save for stories of harrowing brutality involving kids, such as school shootings in the US, I am quite happy for my four kids (aged four to 18) to live in a house where the news is often on TV and the radio in the background, and where news events are also discussed. But Covid has kicked the normal balance totally out of kilter.

For the older kids it has involved everything from school formals, team sports, compulsory mask use, concerns around public transport use and excessive computer-based learning at both uni and school.

For the younger kids it’s different. The only minor logistic issue involving our six year old is the weirdness of school pick-up, where for a while there the “Covid-safe” strategy for the retrieval of our reception-level son meant the parents couldn’t enter the schoolyard and spread out and wait in the open air, but stand huddled at the front gate in a much closer group.

The thing that bothers me with our young kids is how much they have absorbed about Covid with it forming almost constant background chat, a fact borne out by our son’s excited announcement earlier this week that he’d borrowed a cheery reception-level reader called Germs, Bacteria and Viruses. Sounds like a real page-turner.

Cars queue for COVID-19 testing at Adelaide's Victoria Park. Picture: Emma Brasier

With the exception of the vaccination “debate” – I put that word in quote marks as for the sensible 90+ per cent of us it is not a debate at all – I have real sympathy with everyone who has passionate views on either side of the argument about how to emerge from all this crap.

I can understand the people saying, hang on, if we have no Covid here, and people are still dying in large numbers in Victorias, what’s the rush with the borders when we have doubts our hospitals can cope?

Equally, I can totally understand those who say: Enough, already, if you’re vaccinated you’ll be right, we can’t live like this forever, life brings it with a degree of risk and we need to start living it again. I’d also fess up to being in the second camp.

But the best thing, though, is that, while these arguments will no doubt continue, they cannot go on forever.

With every passing day we are closer to the day when we can and will talk about anything but the corona-bloody-virus. And that will be even more entertaining than having a beer while standing up.