I’m writing this on the day the hairdressers re-opened. After drifting about for nearly three weeks in a cloud of dry shampoo, looking as if I’d stuck my head in the dustbag of a hoover, I’m my neatly coiffed self again. Don’t tell me. I know. It was an insignificant inconvenience in the midst of a pandemic, but already I’m fretting about our health minister’s thinly veiled threat to corral us all over again if we don’t behave.
I’m fed up. All this in/out, in/out of special measures is like a macabre hokey-cokey. The first lockdown (I wouldn’t be so rash as to call it a novelty) was hardly a pleasant experience, but it galvanized us. What a virtue-signalling flurry it was of deep-cleaning, DIY, home-baking, re-decorating and brisk walks. Lockdown was, we were told, an uncomfortable disruptive sacrifice, but a necessary means to a safe end. And we believed it.
A repeat exercise found our store of inner resources somewhat depleted. Knock away the supporting structures of our days and we crumble, our iron resolve turning to putty and our tenuous goodwill exhausted. Now, we’re weary, dispirited and bored rigid, our sole entertainment a concerted whinge-fest. Who’d have thought our scientifically sophisticated society would be stricken by the modern equivalent of a medieval plague?
A sense of purposelessness permeates the public mood. There’s little luxury in a long lie-in if you can do it any morning, or you’ve nothing to get up for. Our days become shapeless, indistinguishable one from another. I have to look at the top of the newspaper to check the date. ‘Going out’ isn’t the same as ‘GOING OUT’ out. Nobody dresses up for a hasty circuit of the supermarket. Throw a coat over the jogging bottoms, grab the list, the shopping bags and go. Halfway there, realise with many oaths and imprecations that it’s necessary to return for the mask, left on the hall table.
Masks are very disconcerting. I keep greeting people I think I know and they turn out to be somebody else. Also, my glasses constantly steam up, I can’t see where I’m going and when I remove the mask, there are two white stripes where my carefully applied blusher used to be. Worse, I’ve lost one each of three pairs of earrings.
Ever opportunistic, fashion wasn’t long jumping on the Covid wagon. I spotted a designer mask in padded silk for £114 in a magazine. The point is, unless fabric masks are washed daily, you might as well have a floorcloth wrapped round your face. Despite its comical blowfish tendency to inflate and deflate with every breath, it’s better surely to stick to the bog-standard disposable blue and bin it. And apropos of nothing, who invented our new sanitised form of greeting by touching elbows as if we’re part of a ridiculous folk dance?
Home to television and news and heartsinking statistics. The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of an unravelling of our moral fibre and the danger of the reckless imperilling us all. I detect already in myself a dumb, glum acceptance of the status quo, a loss of energy and incentive. Days empty of purpose soon turn leisure into lassitude – the mental equivalent of slouching round the house all day in your pyjamas, transfixed by the hypnotic power of rubbish television.
Covid has revealed the misery of many long hidden in plain sight – the plight of the new unemployed, the recently redundant, and a new poor whose enterprises have foundered in a suddenly altered and unforgiving economic climate.
Has any good come of Covid? Its few redeeming features are the tireless, selfless work of health service personnel; volunteers and charity workers, whose spontaneous response was a godsend to the needy – and the great anonymous army of decent ordinary citizens who looked out for their neighbours without thought of recognition or reward.
Meanwhile, commerce dictates that the frantic faux-jollity of Christmas must be sustained, relentless cheer casting a thin veneer over fear, loss, loneliness and increasing levels of hardship. Never have Christmas bells – nor Christmas tills rung more hollow….
