Dare I say it? Dare I...anticipate it? Dare I imagine it might be, for good..?
Schools reopen this week after an at times seemingly interminable stretch of ‘at home learning’ and for as many parents who feel giddy as a six-year-old on Christmas Eve there’ll be equal numbers nursing unease over quite how kids who’ve spent 12 consecutive weeks navigating no longer a commute than that from bed to kitchen table, whose only experience of the classroom has been via webcam, and whose social lives have amounted to occasional laps of the local park with a pal or two, will cope with the transition.
Welcome to the real world, kids. With all its bustle and mayhem. Again.
However we feel about approaching this latest gear change - be it with mixed emotions or unalloyed relief (at last - some quality solitude) - I imagine that most of us will be stumbling towards it...blinking at the light.
It’s fair to say I think that we are collectively over lockdown. This last one - please God the last one - has taken its toll. By the time it’s properly lifted lockdown #3 will have spanned 4 months, 2 seasons and a clock change. Even those still standing are stooped. What hasn’t killed us has not yet made us stronger - it’s left us frazzled, frayed around the edges and reduced. The grey hair is proliferating - on my head, at least - and I can’t be the only adult in the country who’s stood in front of a mirror at least once since new year, taken in their reflection and mused profanely over how significantly they’ve aged in the last 12 months.
Since half-term ended even the wifi connection in our house has begun to sputter - voicing quiet, unhelpful protest at how reliant we’ve become on it. There never seems to be enough food in the fridge - how many times in a day can a 12-year-old eat?? - our good will is ebbing, our sense of humour ossifying, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to muster enthusiasm for weekends empty of socialising no matter how blue the sky might transpire sometimes to be.
Along with the vaccine, we need an injection of something new, something different, something other.
Last week I signed up for an online choir, joining several dozen strangers in their homes via the gallery view on zoom to pitch in on a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Except we weren’t a choir in the true sense of the word: we were not many voices performing together, we were solo singers in our onscreen boxes, microphones muted so as not to cause zoom to implode and hearing only ourselves. It occurred to me that the whole experience was an apt metaphor for our lives of late - confined to our own square, lid on, absent the echo and the opportunity for harmony that is uniquely found in the company of others.
We’re missing the chorus, folks! We’ve been singing on our own for too long and we’ve started to lose the tune. May today, with its slowly opening classrooms (my own son's first day back isn't until Friday) mark the beginning of the end of our solo impasse, and herald the start of hope, healing and harmony.
Hallelujah to that.
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