The Tenth Thursday

On March 26, 2020, people across the United Kingdom applauded carers at 8 p.m. on a Thursday. The event was originally meant to take place only this once. After the applause ended, participants dispersed from windows, doorways, or the street, and that evening, too, should have returned to its prior order; there was no “week one” in the arrangement, because a second week did not yet exist.

Seven days later, the date had moved into April, while the weekday and hour remained unchanged, and people took part again. From then on, every Thursday at 8 p.m. left behind the same appointment. The third time through the eighth time are easily compressed in narration into “this happened every week,” but they were not one round of applause extended across several weeks. Each evening, hands would stop and the crowd would disperse; by the next week, those who had separated had to walk again to the window or doorway and wait for the same hour.

If this sequence of applause is read entirely as the same approval for carers, then the structure of stopping and starting again appears redundant: approval can continue without needing to sound anew every seven days. Conversely, it is also insufficient to see it only as a calendar routine. A routine seems to repeat by itself, yet each week there were still people who could choose not to appear. The sense of sonic continuity was pieced together from a sequence of evenings on which absence remained possible.

After the event had been held nine times, its initiator proposed that the following week’s tenth instance become the finale. This proposal did not extend the ninth time backward, nor could it confirm the ending for the tenth time in advance. It only changed the identity expected of the next occurrence: the same weekday and hour would be treated as a closing, but that closing still had to wait until it actually happened that evening.

On May 28, the tenth public round of applause actually took place. That night, it was still only the possible final time. The initiator who had proposed ending the event that week also joined the tenth round of applause in south London.