Notice how the memes have dried up? The good ones. The funny ones. The ones that ricocheted like pinballs round whatsapp in the early days of lockdown when we were all feeling a bit bewildered and it was both reassuring and hilarious to know we were thinking the same things and laughing at the same inevitabilities. Namely weight gain, liver damage and despair.
There were dozens of them. On those themes. The dancing man in denim cut-offs who went from toned to tubby in a pre/post quarantine scene change,.. the lady on her doorstep enquiring after the wellbeing of an early morning jogger whilst brandishing a glass of red (“why are you running? it’s only 7am”),..the bawling toddler who accidentally discharged a toy pistol into her own forehead.
Nine weeks plus on and the sound of empty glass bottles cascading into recycling bins is as familiar almost as birdsong and the elasticated waistbands that were reassuringly roomy in March are beginning to feel snug. How well we knew ourselves!
Maybe there’s simply less to laugh about when you’re feeling hungover and bloated but behind the shift in mood is more I imagine than mere overindulgence. The novelty of our predicament has waned, and what remains is a familiar looking yet altered landscape humming with disquiet and more questions than there are definitive answers to, or even consistent thinking about: ‘Is a second wave inevitable? Could Covid-19 be around...forever?? When will we take to the skies/ return to the workplace/ visit our parents’ homes, again? Does Dominic Cummings know something we don’t? What about Christmas? And so on, and on, and on...
Everything appears the same, but little really is. The space behind our front-doors has become office, classroom, playground, canteen, night in and night out. We have become more dependent than ever upon technology given all it unquestionably enables yet we are far from realising the implications of that dependency. And though their voices and faces can be tantalisingly near thanks to the aforementioned tech., the touch of family and friends feels increasingly far away - whichever direction we look.
To be clear, my household - partner, son, dog, me - are not at the sharp end of this pandemic. Our work does not involve delivering a front-line service. Our income has nose-dived, but we are not - so far - destitute. No-one’s being abused. No-one’s hungry. And crucially, most thankfully, no-one is ill or having to deal from a distance with the ill-health of family or friends. We’re doing OK. We live in a nice house, in a nice area, where the gardens often echo to the sound of children practising musical instruments and the guys who run the currently-closed wine shop up the road have taken to doing same-day deliveries if you get your order in on time. We always do. We’re about as shielded from the darkside as it’s possible to be outside of New Zealand and we have nothing ostensibly to complain about. And yet...
An unpleasant reckoning is beginning to dawn. That whatever this is now, whatever it looks and feels like, it is in some semblance or other - for the long-haul.
Many of us who’re toiling from home will not be going back to the workplace anytime soon. The days of swapping small-talk and hearty laughs with colleagues are past and maybe it’s the sunshine but even the morning commute, with coffee in a cardboard cup and music through headphones has taken on a distinctly nostalgic hue.
And whether they return to the classroom in June or September, kids won’t be careering around schools or playgrounds, reaching out to each other, bumping into one another, defining their own boundaries. Those will already have been set.
Meanwhile our diaries will remain scarce of the fairs, festivals, parties, and people with which any summer is ordinarily replete and the closest most of us are likely to get to a palm tree this year will be the ones on sale in tubs in our local garden centre. That’s a real choker isn’t it? No. Summer. Holiday.
For sure, none of us are going back - to anything. Like a divorce we didn’t ask for this pandemic is forcing us to come to terms with a different future. One we didn’t see coming, described by face-masks on the street, wide-berths on the pavement, social distancing everywhere, and isolation and hardship all around. As we raised toasts to the new year and a fresh decade less than five months ago whoever would have imagined this dystopia lay mere weeks ahead?
But. Precarious though the future is, and for all the inconvenience, confusion, suffering and heartache the current landscape holds to some degree for all of us, there are maybe more enduring and empowering truths: that the only certainty - ultimately - is uncertainty, that for all the travel denied us in the months ahead still the greatest journey we can ever undertake is the one within ourselves, and that no matter what state the world is in or how crap our hand...all any of us really want to do at the end of the day, one way or another, is throw our arms around the next person and have a bloody good party.
Isn’t that a fact!