It’s debatable that lockdown has granted us all endless, fritterable free time to perfect our croquembouche tower skills or to weave elaborate, macrame hanging baskets. Some people on the frontline are not unbusy at all. Others found their actual jobs merely replaced with three or four other unpaid roles for which, until three weeks ago, they had no training. “Who knew,” said no sane person ever, “that being a full-time GCSE coach, short-order chef and Skype-based amateur social worker, all at once, could be so much fun?!” Big shouts going out to all the WFH crew necking 4pm shots of last-resort Pedro Ximénez straight from a fuzzy-rimmed bottle that has moved house six times, but that now tastes like sweet nectar.
Still, although some of us lucky ones’ jobs have changed rather than stopped, I do find myself with more time. Largely because tons of utterly pointless, life-robbing faff has been snatched away. Until recently, I wasted hours each week commuting on the Central line in London, my limbs and digits retracted into a space minute enough to pass the EasyJet carry-on baggage test. No more of that, for now.
Grooming was another huge time thief, my being of an age when time spent preparing to be seen in public far outweighs the length of time spent out of the house. Being sexy is an arduous task, involving several layers of sand and cement, some boob hoisting, tweezering, and two good goings-over with a lint roller. Knackering. I won those hours back this week, and spent them watching all six hours of Wolf Hall, while eating slices of Nigella’s onion supper pie (a Domestic Goddess recipe that will save your soul) and caressing my lovely Patti Smith moustache. Covid-19 has steamrollered over so much, taken loved ones, ruined livelihoods, leaving a weird, bittersweet backwash of diaries emptying of chaff; the meetings about meetings before the proper meeting, the catch-up drinks already cancelled twice, the team-building day, the school run, the quick scoot to the shop for six eggs and a birthday card, the terrifying corporate Glee Club performance and, for all these things, the donning of actual pants and shoes beforehand.
Still, like countless thousands of others right now, I am isolated from many people I’d give anything simply to hang out with. This open-ended separation feels often unbearable. The thought that some may never be seen alive again, and no meaningful funeral permitted, is, well, let’s not even linger there. Feelings are not facts, I mumble, letting the blackness come and go. Or banishing the gloom by batch-cooking lentil dal and deciphering the fast cooking techniques on my five-year-old Sage fast/slow cooker. Woooooh, steam! I lie about for hours, letting the cats use me as heated furniture, re-learning all the two-letter bridging words in Scrabble. And above all, I tell myself over and over, this has been only three short weeks and I am fortunate.
Recently, I’ve thought many times about my much-loved, acerbic grandmother, long since dead in 1993 but, in light of events, now all the more intriguing. During the second world war, my grandad was away for the best part of six years. She was alone, in the middle of nowhere, with one daughter (my mother), a sharp mind, a slightly lame leg and pernicious anaemia. He was not big on writing letters. She had, of course, no telephone or television. She did have a wireless, but it played only once or twice a week, my mother says, in order to eke out the battery.
I think of them both every evening as I climb into bed at the end of another weird day. “What did you both do for six years?” I’ve asked my mother on the phone several times recently, self-pitying my own drab lot; just sat here alone with my Netflix and Britbox and Zoom and Sky Q and WhatsApp. Will nobody think of my struggle?
“She was always doing laundry,” Mam says, struggling to remember. “Or baking, if she could get eggs. Oh, and she sometimes played gin rummy.”
“How did folk not go mad?” I ask.
“Well, some folk might have done, but we didn’t,” she replies, as if mental health is a modern notion.
“How did you get eggs? I thought they were rationed?” I ask.
“Oh, you had to secretly swap them for bread crusts with a farmer, so he could feed his chickens,” she says, as if this is obvious. “One of you had to pretend to be going on holiday and set off on the bus with the crusts in a suitcase.” Our chats, now that we have the time, never fail to surprise me.
“And don’t even ask how we used to get bacon chops,” she adds. “It’s not for the squeamish.”
I’m leaving that tale for Week Four of lockdown.
