Welcome to what’s being called ‘the new normal’, which is anything but. (Dictionary definition: ‘normal’ – usual, regular, typical) We have a way to go.
Virtuous souls have spent the lockdown in the cultivation of multiple skills. I’m now a connoisseur of other people’s banana bread. I have used the time to practice avoidance. Thrown upon my own limited resources, this period of self-development has been borne (bar the odd whinge) without complaint and I’ve gained a self-conferred honours degree in Frittering and Lowering Expectations. I toyed with the idea of embarking upon ‘My Covid Diaries’, but it would be thick as ‘War and Peace’ and every page identical. “Got up. Nothing happened.” While the highlight of one’s day is the postman invariably delivering bills and junk mail, yet one’s disappointed when he drives by without stopping, Tolstoy’s literary reputation will remain in tact.
News of shops opening again I greeted with unexpectedly mixed feelings. Born with the acquisitive gene, I’m a self-confessed slave to the retail imperative, yet with miraculous self-restraint I didn’t join the horde of Gadarene swine hurling themselves over the retail cliff last Friday. The earlier opening of IKEA left me cold. I find it a psychologically disturbing place. Ten minutes in IKEA and you want to jettison the entire contents of your idiosyncratically curated home and start again, so your house can look like everybody else’s. And what is every other customer’s peculiar obsession with jumbo bags of tealights? Have they no electricity? I’ve only ever bought paper napkins and a garlic-press in IKEA. Oh – and a ‘Billy’ bookcase in a moment of weakness.
In a technologically sophisticated age no-one’s deprived of the opportunity to spend money foolishly. Internet ordering’s having a field day. I’ve lost count of the number of delivery vans dropping off stuff in our road, (some of it at my door.)
But mail order triggers a different buzz – the thrill of a parcel, opening it and finding the contents exciting. Or not. There may be size, colour or style issues. Let me draw a veil over the olive green jumpsuit, so chic on a pictured six foot model, so like a collapsed camouflage tent on someone who’s five foot two. And then there’s the whole faff of sending it back. Dear readers, you’re thinking, “Thank heavens! A jumpsuit? At her age?”
I yearn for the day the dust of novelty settles to resume my favourite leisure pursuit – shopping in real shops. Not for dreary old groceries or household necessities, but clothes, shoes and cosmetics. Only in personal shopping have you the luxury of multiple choice. Nothing beats the hands-on experience of finding, feeling the quality and, most importantly, trying on. There’s a magic moment when THE ONE garment or shoe rises unbidden of the rail or rack, puts itself in your hand and you just know it’s the RIGHT ONE. Gloom-mongers predict that long-term stringent hygiene regulations will change the way we shop for such items forever. Well, I’d be willing to be hosed down with Dettol in the street for the sake of the perfect purchase.
Grateful as we all are for the easing of some social restrictions, the ever-lengthening problem of ‘hair despair’ continues to plague all but the least vain of us. The land echoes to the keening of wild-haired women, many of whom have recklessly taken scissors to their own locks and others who’ve experimented neither wisely nor too well with home-applied colour. Let’s face it, hairdressing’s hardly open-heart surgery.. There are stylists more than willing to gown up in full PPE and supply masks for their clients, but due to the strange sense of priorities of our political masters, currently there are dogs better groomed than their owners.
Nobody’s been over my threshold for three months. I find that a pretty vase of fresh flowers in the hall gives the socially-distanced doorstepper the reassuring impression of a well-kept house. Now we’re permitted to invite people in. In fact, there’s no longer any excuse to keep them out. Oh Lord! Better begin cleaning and squaring round….
