The Upside of Lockdown

 It is half-term – though admittedly, for many parents who have been home-schooling children for much of the past year, it probably doesn’t feel much different to any other week. 

This time last year, I was following my normal holiday practice of inviting myself to stay with my parents while catching up on seeing as many friends as I could in a few days’ stay.  My appointments diary for 19^th February 2020 schedules a frantic whirl of activity: coffee with one friend in the morning, lunch and a sh
ort walk with another friend, mah-jongg with family in the afternoon, and attending a student production of HMS Pinafore on the university campus in the evening.

My father, much as he enjoys Gilbert and Sullivan, decided to give HMS Pinafore a miss.  At the time, I assumed that this was just because he was feeling tired, or because theatre seats have insufficient legroom.  But perhaps he was also being cautious about the new virus which was spreading across the world.  After all, there were plenty of international students returning to university after visiting family back home over Christmas, many of whom were Chinese, and some of those might have come from the area affected by coronavirus.

At the time, PDB11 and I, and my mother, decided to take the risk.  I assumed, with a blitheness that astonishes me now, that probably all of us would catch this bug sooner or later and that we might as well get it over with.  Not many people were being so casual about risk, and the auditorium was half-empty, which at least made social distancing easy.

Mercifully, we escaped unscathed.  In the months that followed, we, and the rest of the world, made changes to the way we lived.  Some have been frustrating but necessary responses to a pandemic that has killed 119,387 people in the United Kingdom and over 2.4 million across the world so far.  However, in other ways, the pandemic has spurred me on to do things that I wish I had started doing years ago.

Obviously, my social life has changed.  I was sorry not to be able to go to stay with my parents again after last February, or visit a friend’s house.  I was very sorry not to be able to invite a friend, who normally comes to stay with us over Christmas, to join us in 2020.  I missed chatting after church services and at coffee mornings. I missed hobbies like amateur dramatics, choir, writers’ group, and role-playing games, and PDB11 missed orchestra practice.  I missed get-togethers like the village summer fête and the harvest dance.

On the other hand, I have probably spent more time this year having actual conversations than ever before.  As the media warned that loneliness was likely to be one of the biggest problems of lockdown, I started making time to phone people I hadn’t talked to in ages, just to ask, ‘Hello, how are you getting on?’

Some were people (my mother, and old family friends) whom I normally only phoned to rant at them when I was upset about something and felt that I had spent longer ranting at PDB11 than was fair to him.  Now, I called when I wasn’t in a bad mood, and was actually willing to listen to them talking about their lives, their gardens and their writing projects.  What they had to say was generally a lot more interesting than my ranting.

Some were people I didn’t talk to nearly often enough, and felt awkward about calling in case we didn’t know what to say to each other.  One is an intense, eccentric man (even compared with me) whom I had sometimes nodded hello to at coffee mornings, but usually not said much to.  But, talking on the phone without the distraction of other people, he has time to tell me about how his philosophical, psychological and spiritual journey is developing.  We aren’t good at small talk – but on the phone, we are free to go straight into philosophical debate.

Another renewed relationship is with one of my brothers, whom I haven’t been close to since he was ten.  Much of the time, I’ve avoided him because I still think of him as the snarky pre-teen who kept complaining about how embarrassing I was, and expressing ultra-cynical opinions in order to sound sophisticated.  Now, discussing science fiction or the news, or reminiscing about our childhood, it is striking to be reminded that, in the past quarter-century, he has grown up into someone I can actually like.

Not everyone is comfortable with talking on the phone, of course, and not everyone will be in the mood to chat at the time when I ring.  Sometimes, people feel lonely and regard phone calls as a lifeline one day, but the next will feel stressed by the requirement to talk to anyone.

Nevertheless, it is much easier to phone someone every few days on the off-chance that they might answer – particularly friends who live alone, or are in poor health, or have psychological problems – than to arrange to visit them and then find that they’ve forgotten the arrangement and gone out.  If someone doesn’t feel like talking, they can easily not answer, or pick up the phone to say, ‘This isn’t a good time – can I call you back tomorrow?’

For socially inept people like me, hobbies like acting or role-playing can be a fun way to spend time with other people – but also an easy way to avoid engaging with them as people and just know them as the pantomime dame or the dragonborn warlock.  At coffee mornings, if there’s a board game on, I can play without even needing to learn people’s names – which is a lot easier than hovering on the edge of a conversation between a group of close friends, and wondering how to join in.

Phone conversations remove these distractions.  They reduce interaction to its most basic: I am contacting you because I care about you and want to hear how your life is going.  If you want to talk now, splendid.  If not, call me when the time is right.  It’s not as if I’m short of time, after all.