Turns out the bright side was there all along

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? Because it reminded me of the complexities of normal life, and it suddenly made me appreciate the poetic simplicity of life under lockdown.

We no longer have to make decisions as to what to do when. All those duty calls to relatives, half-hearted dinner parties, tricky work meetings, hectic shopping days – they’re all in the past for now. 

On the face of it, life is pretty dull and we like to imagine we’d have more to talk about if we’d been away on an exotic holiday or had a night out at the theatre. But how many times have you been bored rigid by someone else’s holiday stories, or by the second-hand retelling of the plot of a play? We actually have more in common with each other than ever and we’re bonding in entirely new ways. And we can all share the same weak jokes: “Doing anything exciting this weekend?” And: “Any dinner plans for tonight?” etc. 

Another reason why it’s so much more rewarding to talk to our friends these days is that we always know where to find them. In our normal lives they could be anywhere – at the shops, the hairdresser’s, with relatives, on a weekend break or in another country. But now we’re all in the same boat, staying in every night, watching the same socially-distanced programmes, following the same daily briefings and sharing a common apocalyptic experience. And how bonding is THAT?

And then it struck me. I’ve been wrong about this blog all along. I haven’t been writing it simply as an exercise to prove to myself (and to others) that these unprecedented times have a bright side. It turns out they actually do have a bright side - but I was much too busy squinting ahead at the faint light at the end of the tunnel to perceive the gentler, kinder glow of the here and now.

I never thought I’d say this, but I might actually miss lockdown. There - it’s out.