What did the world look like when everything stopped? Clearer skies, quieter streets, and a chance to rethink our lives. Steve Gleadhill’s Reverberations Oh Brave New Normal World Living with Coronavirus, Book Two takes us back to those strange days of the pandemic — not just the fear, but the reflection, the resilience, and the unexpected insights that came with it.

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Welcome to this edition of Newsgram!

Remember those early days of the pandemic? Not just the empty streets or the empty grocery store shelves, but the way life itself seemed to pause. Skies were clearer, traffic was gone and for many of us, the noise of daily routine gave way to a deeper kind of self reflection.  Many of us began to reevaluate our situations in an effort to figure out just what exactly are we doing with our lives? A lot of books were written during the pandemic and a lot of personal stories were shared that may not have been otherwise.  

Where were you when it all began to happen? In February of 2020 I was on a cruise ship which turned out to be one of the last cruises for quite some time because in March the world began to change. Steve Gleadhill was also on vacation. 

Steve Gleadhill – We were in Australia at the time, because my wife and I used to spend six months in Australia to get out of the British winter. And we got to love Australia. But as it happened, when COVID happened, Australia was one of the first countries to be very strict about letting people in and out. And so we were there. We were meant to go in April and we were there till July. So we were actually there for nine months, not six months as normal. So that also prompted me to think, right, well, this is something I’ve never experienced before.

As you can see Steve Gleadhill is more than just a casual observer. He has spent a lifetime asking questions and serving his community.Born in Hull England in 1950, he studied English at Leeds University and spent twenty years with the Newcastle City Library, before moving into community and government liaison work across northeast England.So when the pandemic hit, his instinct was to start documenting, not just for himself, but for everyone. 

Steve Gleadhill – I was in the habit of emailing friends back in the UK on a regular basis.And normally it would have gone down to the beach, got sunburned or whatever. But this time it was about, well, I’ve read about this, I’ve read about that. It started with me emailing almost weekly bulletins to my friends in the UK about all the different aspects of Covid. Kept me busy, kept hopefully of interest to them.

This is where Steve says he had mixed emotions because while he was living safely in Australia his loved ones were having a much tougher time of it in the UK. It was pretty bad there. Anyway, what started as a series of e-mails and conversations turned into something much bigger. Ultimately it will be a four part series of books on both the immediate catastrophic impact the crisis had as well as its long-term ramifications. 

The first three books are readily available and they’re titled “Oh Brave New Normal World: Living with Coronavirus.” Today, let’s focus on Book two, Reverberations.

Steve Gleadhill – So the idea is to remember what we went through and then sort of think, well, did we actually learn from that experience? And that’s what the reverberations are about. It’s about the repercussions because of the COVID. That’s what I try to outline in that book. 

Future books in the series will widen the lens to take on politics and global affairs. Think back to the Capitol riots in the U.S. — enough said, we all remember. In Britain, leadership turned into a revolving door of Prime Ministers. And across Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and Germany there were also leadership changes showing how much political change was happening at the time.

Steve Gleadhill – But in this one, it’s about how that initial effect affected us and what we were, you know, how we reacted to it. And then I would like people to go back and think, well, did we lose that? Did we lose something as a result of having been forced to lock down and do all the other things?

So let’s take a step back. Think about those early days of the lockdown. I realize that for many of you it’s not a pleasant memory but it’s an exercise to help gain some perspective, which will hopefully bring a new kind of strength and wisdom.

Steve Gleadhill – We were stuck at home most of the time. And I just started reading some of the daily news. And whereas normally I skip over it, I started to get more interested. What I got interested in was not just the medical side, but how it was affecting us, society, the planet, etc.

American philosopher George Santayana once said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. History gives us wisdom. When something new and overwhelming hits, we rarely get it right the first time. We certainly made mistakes here in the U.S. But if we take the time to look back, to examine the choices that were made, we do have the chance to evolve and maybe avoid repeating the same mistakes and that’s what’s at the heart of Steve’s series. 

Steve Gleadhill – In Britain, you had Johnson, who decided he was going to go to a rugby match. There was a football match held in Liverpool against Madrid, which actually at the time was the centre of where most of the illnesses and deaths were happening. At the time, Madrid was like a no-go area. And yet, if you saw Johnson, it was almost as if he was like, well, I think I can braid my way through this, and that’s what he tried to do. But then reality came, and he realized that he needed to do a lot more. And I just felt that, with the leaders, that there was a thing where, at first, I think they were hoping it would just go away and when it didn’t…

Well, the rest is history. He focuses primarily on the UK, Australia and the U.S. but  the books are global in their focus and he does touch on the crisis in India. 

Steve Gleadhill – India had a very bad bout of doing it, of deaths, et cetera, and what was happening. So I did want to make sure that I didn’t just, I certainly didn’t want to just focus on the UK, because I didn’t feel that would give people the idea of exactly what was happening globally. 

Something I found particularly troubling was how numb we became to the ongoing death toll and I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but in isolation all we could do was watch the numbers climb.

Steve Gleadhill – But I didn’t want to home in. I didn’t basically want to say, oh, well, here are the statistics, I think, because it wasn’t that it wasn’t incidental, but it was only one factor of everything that was happening to us.

He focuses instead on things you may not have considered like animals and our environment. 

Steve Gleadhill – But the animals, it was quite interesting because, again, once COVID came in, you suddenly found these animals reappearing where they used to be. And the story in Australia is that there were kangaroos going along the streets of Adelaide during the COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were bouncing about through the streets because nobody was there and they were doing it. There’s a wonderful cartoon of these animals looking through a window at humans like we would look through them at a zoo. And it was quite funny. But, yeah, then, of course, what happened was, again, with pollution, for instance, one of the statistics I came across in one of the books was that the amount of deaths through pollution normally is very high, and suddenly it dropped fantastically because the factories were shut, etc. There wasn’t all the stuff there. But yet, very quickly, of course, we’re back to that level of pollution.

Have we learned any lessons at all? That is a key takeaway. He says for a moment our country’s wildlife got a reprieve but now the number of animals on the endangered species list is absolutely horrific. We do have the wisdom of perspective but are we smart enough to do anything with it. I guess that is the million dollar question. It’s also why his book cover features a finger pushing the globe off a cliff. 

Steve Gleadhill – When I came across this, I couldn’t believe my luck because it’s not just the globe. It’s the fact that somebody is pushing it over the edge. And that’s exactly the feeling I wanted to generate among readers in looking at the book. We came close. I don’t want to be overdramatic. I don’t think we came close to the world ending, but we came close to pushing ourselves and certain things to that edge. And to some extent, I still feel even now when I look at some of the politics, even now, they are results of what we went through in that time.

The book is Reverberations, Book Two: Oh Brave New Normal World: Living with Coronavirus by Steve Gleadhill. Was COVID a turning point for humanity, pushing the world to the edge? And are we wise enough to apply the lessons it taught us? The answers will differ for each of us, but the questions are worth asking. You can find the books now on Amazon or wherever you shop online. And that will do it for this edition of Newsgram from Webtalkradio.com.

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