Lockdown Diaries 2020/21

I looked in my diary last week for the first time since March. And I didn’t enjoy the experience. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have to perform any complicated juggling acts to realign my appointments. The week was completely blank – much like every other week, in fact. Looking in my diary was more of a reflex action before confirming another walk with Sue. I don’t use an electronic diary, by the way, nor do I use the calendar on my computer. I find those things infuriating because they decide for themselves what’s important to me, and I can’t for the life of me work out how to remove these “appointments”. So there I am, trying to visualise my week and recalling that I seem to have had engagements written in for the Wednesday and the Friday. But when I check it turns out that Wednesday is Earth Day and Friday marks the birthday of a bloke I met on holiday in 2011. Helpful. But I digress. Why didn’t I enjoy this particular peek inside my old-fashioned 2020 paper diary? Becau...

It’s the end of an era. Robbie goes back to his London digs tomorrow, so last night was officially our last night at the Quarant Inn. Setting up the “pub” was supposed to be a bit of fun dreamt up on the Friday before lockdown. We’d decided against going to the actual pub because Brian and I were still self-isolating after our trip to Vietnam, so we congregated in Robbie’s room at around 5pm - at the same time as the daily briefing was being aired.  And as we downed our drinks in our pretend “pub” we were entirely oblivious to the fact that politicians were at that very moment announcing the shutdown of REAL pubs from the following day.  We’ve now been traipsing up to Robbie’s room every Friday since March 20. That’s 10 Fridays. Unbelievable. We even have the T-shirts to prove it. When Robbie was at a low ebb early on in the lockdown he whiled away an hour or so designing a motif to look like a pub sign. So of course, we humoured him when he suggested we order...

Change is in the air. You can feel it on the streets, in the parks and on the common. Things are gradually easing up and the excitement is palpable. Everyone has responded gleefully to the decree that we’re now allowed out to exercise as many times as we want. People to whom the word “exercise” was once an anathema are now swarming to the nearest open-air space to jog, walk, throw frisbes, kick balls around, ride bikes and generally run amok.  Meanwhile the garden centres have opened at last - to the boundless joy of us older folk for whom the urge to grow stuff seems particularly strong. I went to a nursery last week and joined the queue of happy seniors snaking around the perennials, scooping up bedding plants like gasping nomads who had finally happened upon a water source in the desert. And socially-distancing friends are now allowed to meet up in pairs, provided they walk two metres away from one another. Ha. Doesn’t work. My friend Sue and I tried it the othe...

I’m someone who grew up between communication eras. Letter-writing was going out of fashion when I was young, and landline telephone calls were still pretty expensive – particularly if the recipient happened to live more than a few miles away. So we’d all come home from school and immediately phone our schoolchums, trying to block out the sound of Dad grumbling about the bill in the background. This state of affairs lasted for decades. I worked as a local newspaper reporter in the 1980s and we’d type out our news stories and hand them to a courier who would actually drive them the nine miles to the printer’s. On one occasion the courier was involved in an accident en route, and my boss was more concerned about the possibility of bloodstains on the copy than at any injuries he might have received. Then came the fax machine (clunky, noisy, and only good for spitting out screwed-up balls of thermal paper) and the Brother (ditto) followed by emails, which were erratic and easy...

The world will be an entirely different place when we emerge from partial lockdown. It’s a pity no one warned us about this back in March – we might have given yesterday’s world a better send-off. But still. A few short months ago the generations were firmly divided about politics, world views, climate change – well, everything. Young people began deriding us oldies on social media, labelling us “Boomers”. Yes, children, we have our spies. Youths were particularly enraged about our apparent lack of concern for the planet. Extinction Rebellion emerged and began recruiting the very young, who would bunk off school to stage their protests. Bet they now wish they’d made the most of those schooldays while they still could. Meanwhile, we older people felt light-years removed from these youngsters with their apps, attitudes and Instagram accounts.  Society was also firmly split between the haves and have-nots: those who could afford immaculate grooming and exotic holidays and...

On Sunday came the big announcement. The lockdown was easing and we could finally take our first baby steps back into the world. So what did we hope the PM would say?   Turns out it entirely depended on who we were. My sister-in-law is desperately missing her grandchildren and was listening closely for the word “bubble”. Her daughter’s young family live a short walk away, and she would love the two households to join up. My friend Michelle was hoping to hear the word: “hairdresser” as she’s in dire need of a cut. And the presenter of a comedy programme we watched last night described the announcement as so much white noise without the inclusion of the word: “nursery”.  He wants to offload his very young kids as soon as he decently can. It made me wonder: what am I missing most about this lockdown? Technically it should be Auntie Jean. But love her as I do, my weekly visits are often pretty stressful. After my 40-minute drive to her care home she reels off a l...

Remember FOMO? Fear of Missing Out – or FOMO for short - was an acronym spawned by the Facebook generation. It marked a point in our lives when we were in a constant state of envy and misery because we weren’t living the glamorous lives that others appeared to be doing - at least if their social media posts were anything to go by. But FOMO has temporarily disappeared from our lives because we’re all MO these days. Glittering parties, exotic foreign holidays, riotous pub nights – they’ve all been cancelled and all of us are suddenly in the same boat. Except it isn’t a boat, as that wouldn’t be allowed. However, on VE Day I did have a brief FOMO reprise. Our plans for the day had been pretty modest: we would watch the Churchill address on TV, drink a toast to our fallen heroes, then go to our ersatz pub (well, it was a Friday, after all). But then I spotted the residents of the houses opposite stringing up bunting around their hedges. I’d heard rumours that some people were ...

Tomorrow is the 75 th  anniversary of VE Day. By the time World War Two officially ended, people had been struggling for years with food shortages and restrictions. Their love-lives had stalled and their careers had been put on hold. And many had lost family members and friends.  So VE Day marked a bitter-sweet occasion when some were able to celebrate the return to a new normal while others reflected on what they’d lost. Sounds familiar? It seems entirely fitting that we’ll be celebrating the 75 th anniversary of VE Day in our own homes, under lockdown and with our careers and lives on hold. And weirdly, the occasion also happens to coincide with the expected easing of lockdown conditions due to be announced on Sunday. Every November we observe a two-minute silence for our war heroes before immediately resuming our Sunday routines. We head to the shops, go to the pub or get together with friends. So until now we have had little in common with the wartime ...

Regular readers will be aware of a few facts about our little lockdown bubble. These are a) that I’m exercising online with Joe Wicks; b) Brian and Robbie are working out regularly with weights and c) I’m trying     - not altogether successfully - to grow vegetables. Turns out everyone else is doing pretty much the same thing. According to recent Google search data we’re a resourceful nation with great plans for using this lockdown time to good effect. The gyms may have closed, but not to be thwarted we’ll carry on exercising the best we can in the space we have available.  Not surprisingly, then, the search term “rent gym equipment” is going through the roof. In fact it has mushroomed by a whopping 3,600 per cent over the past 90 days while “yoga online classes” has risen by 800 per cent and "home workout” by 700 per cent. Google also reveals that we won’t be put off by food shortages in supermarkets: instead we’ll grow or bake our own. The sea...

I n a previous post I mentioned how we used to feel like the angry offspring of bickering parents in the run-up to Brexit. Now, however, we’ve become the good little children of a proud Mum and Dad. “Well done!” they say in their daily briefing. “You’ve done a great job! You’ve stayed at home, protected the NHS and saved lives. Keep it up!” As a child I was a bit of a goody-goody so I respond quite well to this sort of feedback. And Brian and I have actually kept pretty much to the rules. Though there was that one road trip to Dunstable to pick up some pre-ordered toilet rolls from Brian’s office, with me riding shotgun….. a big day out it wasn’t. But even the best-behaved child can become restive sometimes. And an increasing number of us are beginning to say: “Enough already! I’m sick of being inside. Why can’t I go out and play? It’s not FAIR!” The Americans are going one step further and are taking to the streets, honking their horns and waving placards in protest a...