It’s life, but not as we know it

As we enter what feels like our tenth lockdown by now – it’s all merged into one and I’ve lost count – I find I am struggling to remember what life used to be like. It’s as though we’re living in a strange dream-like state with no end and no beginning. Was there ever a time when we travelled outside our own country or was that just in a film I once saw? Did we once hug and kiss our family and friends rather than gazing at them on a flat screen? And as for strangers, surely we spend so much time trying to avoid them on our one permitted daily walk that we must clock up twice as many miles as we intended. Although there is a silver lining here as it helps with my goal of walking 1,000 miles this year.

This is how I live now: I get up, make coffee, cover my eyes with my hands and then cautiously peer through my fingers at the latest newspaper headlines. If the world is still just about spinning, I make breakfast. I then embark on one of my many and varied forms of exercise ranging from tai chi to yoga to avoiding strangers on the footpath. I think a lot about what I’ll have for lunch and how lovely it’ll be. Sadly, it’s only 10.30. I tidy something.

I look at the TV listings in the hope that there’ll be something interesting to watch that evening. I record a worthy documentary about Greta Thunberg. Yeah, it’s lunchtime! I empty out half the fridge in my enthusiasm and put most of it on my plate. All this unaccustomed exercise is making me very hungry. And delightfully greedy. I have a cup of tea and start to think about dinner.

The afternoon is passed in listless online searching for some dreary household item such as sheets, which are deceitfully called Cornflower Blue or Sky Blue and even look blue on the screen, but which invariably turn out to be grey when they arrive. It appears that at some point in the last couple of years the colour grey staged a coup and took over the design world. I vaguely recall a time when I could have mounted some resistance by going into a shop and wilfully choosing sheets that were Not Grey, but that was long ago.

Yeah, it’s dinnertime! I search through the pungent piles of food that are still hanging around in the fridge from Christmas, wondering how I can artfully incorporate some of the leftovers into our meal. I decide that no-one will notice if I use brandy sauce instead of white sauce in the tuna pasta bake. I’m wrong.

Finally, we collapse in front of the TV and, tempted as we are by the worthy documentary on Greta Thunberg, we watch an episode of The Queen’s Gambit instead. I think that in our previous life we might have watched Greta, but now we feel we can’t cope with too much reality and it’s all about escapism. I thoroughly recommend it.