A short one today, to match my current attention span.
Post-lockdown world dawns. The country is reopening, the nation is able to banish grey roots and tame tousled beards once again. Yay, I suppose.
Still, saying goodbye to the pyjama part of 2020 fills me with inexplicable sadness. I am also more than a little lost what to do next. Am I the only one?
Nine or ten weeks ago the instructions were clear; stay at home, or else. I did, religiously so. The Stay Alert which followed, was a tad less clear, but I could live with that. I looked over my shoulder a lot and I was fine.
But now? What are we meant to do now? Is it still ok to stay at home all weekend, or are we supposed to play a frantic catch up game? Run out the doors, queue up at a drive-through, stock up at a garden centre, and get a takeaway latte?
A lot of things did not happen for me this year, Easter holiday and a trip to South Africa around now stand out the most. At the time, I felt deprived and very sorry for myself and my family. And yet, foreign travel is the last thing I would like to do right now.
I am going through a last-minute rush to quickly do something now that I should have started in April, but really didn’t feel like it during the long lazy early lockdown weeks. Is it possible that I am missing that blissful idleness already? The glorious slowness of it all? Lockdown nostalgia sounds absurd when dentists are still to re-open. And yet.
This morning, with nothing to show for our family lockdown except tupperware boxes perfectly matched up with their lids, I threw myself at the spare bedroom’s walls armed with a scraper and that thing you spray plants with. I spent a couple of hours frantically stripping wallpaper. Layer after layer after layer; fifty years’ worth of wall covering, all gone. I feel a bit better now, but I have a niggling feeling that I had left it too late.
Every day is beginning to come with its own agenda again and I wonder how much longer I will be able to resist the ‘back to normal’ trend.
I really liked the idea from a couple of months ago that if one day was proving a complete false start, I could discard it by about eleven in the morning, and there was another identical one coming in less than 24 hours which I could start properly. This doesn’t sound like a viable option any more. The expectation to have something to show for each and every day has returned, and I don’t like it.
Ania Heasley 