Lockdown Diaries 2020/21

We’ve all been here before. Hairdressers have been closed for months again which means our collective locks are once more well and truly out of control. Boris Johnson has been in his element. His absurd blond tresses suddenly appear relatively normal and he can go about his business with his mad hair worn like a badge of honour to prove he’s one of us.   Brian has adopted the look of a crackpot professor, whereas I’ve regained my rat-peering-out-of-a-bush persona from Lockdown One.   Some people have been cheating. There were reports of people crossing national borders to circumnavigate the ban, while others have been sneaking off to rogue coiffeurs for Illegal Haircuts. You know who you are.    Most of these transgressions went unpunished. After all, do the police really have time to caution people for having unacceptably coiffed hair? And in any case, illegal haircuts are hard to prove. Who’s to say the person in question hasn’t trimmed their own hair with the aid of a pair of eBay s

This time last year I firmly believed that Easter 2021 would be different.   I even blogged about it, complaining about the limitations of Easter 2020 and ending with the words: “I’m already excited about next Easter when we can take to the busy roads and do whatever we darn well choose.”   Well, I look pretty flipping stupid now, don’t I?   This period of our lives has been a bit like living through World War One. Only it wasn’t called WWI at the time, of course – for who could have guessed that a second world war was just around the corner?   So when we all went into lockdown last year we simply called it “lockdown” in the assumption that it would all be over within weeks, or months if we were unlucky. And from our new vantage point in the midst of Lockdown Three we find ourselves wondering: Will this one be the last?    One glimmer of positivity, however, is that this week’s minor easing is making Easter 2021 feel slightly different to last year. We’re now allowed to invite people i

This week it occurred to me. We’re all living a life straight out of the 1950s. It struck me when I was walking along the Weymouth seafront with an ice-cream cone in my hand. I wasn’t actually wearing a kiss-me-quick hat, but I might as well have been. Though according to the government roadmap no-one is allowed to kiss me until June 21 at the earliest, and I don’t think a “kiss-me-in-around-two-months” hat would work quite as well as a concept.   Anyway, Brian and I were enjoying a newly-permitted jaunt following the March 29 “easing”, and a day by the seaside turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered. There, you see? I’m speaking like a character straight out of an Enid Blyton book.   We’ve already experienced the wartime spirit, the make-do-and-mend attitude and the food rationing (“Only two packs of flour per customer!”) And with foreign travel now banned we’re all busily planning our summer holidays by the seaside, in the Cotswolds or at the New Forest. Just like we did bef