On 5 April, the Queen addressed the nation. Her speech drew powerfully on her memories of 1940, of evacuation and the Blitz. It played on a collective British memory, one that shapes our sense of “who we are” and “how people like us behave”. The shared mythology of the Blitz is different to how the Blitz was experienced, but it is not just what people experience that matters. The remembering and mythologising of events has the power to shape a nation.
We have now been plunged into a very different collective experience. How will coronavirus be remembered? Who will tell the story of this time in a way that resonates with the largest number of people? A great deal hangs on the answers.
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