The Times Magazine 23always there. Even if you try to do “it” in a
cupboard, at any point a home-schooled child
could burst in saying, “The wifi’s gone down
and I don’t understand maths,” and it would
be game over.
And, anyway, you can’t do it in the
cupboard – it’s full of all the stuff you want
to take to the charity shop but have been
unable to because they’ve been shut since
November. Unless you can be amorous on
top of a pile of old shoes, DVD box sets and
unused jigsaws, you will not be having sex
until the schools and Cancer Research outlets
reopen and your mother moves back to Woking.
That’s July 2021 minimum.
3
We have been conducting a planet-
wide, long-term experiment on
the best coping methods during a
sustained period of stress. So, what’s been
your emotional coping method during The
Great Awfulness? There seem, broadly, to
be two camps: the “Feel Your Feelings” guys
and the “Icy Cold Total Shutdown, Deal With
It Later” crew. Both methods, annoyingly,
seem to have an equal amount of good and
bad points.
For those who decided last March
essentially to go on some manner of
“emotional standby” – shutting down 90 per
cent of thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams
and functioning as some manner of polite,
can-do zombie – there was a considerable
amount of time saved that would otherwise
have been spent weeping, doom-scrolling,
panicking, curling up in the foetal position
and being terrified about the future in ever
escalating detail. Due to being usefully
numb and dead inside, the “Icy Cold Total
Shutdown” guys have been able generally to
get on with stuff, hit their deadlines, comfort
the afflicted and anti-bac every item that
came into the house, March-June 2020
inclusive – a glowing testament to stiff upperlip and “Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of
the Day” levels of emotional repression. I am,
as I think you can tell, Team Soldiering On
Dry-Eyed.
On the other hand, the time saved not
crying will almost certainly later be spent on
repeated outpatient sessions of chemotherapy,
treating the raging stomach cancer caused by,
to quote Marge Simpson, “taking all your bad
feelings and pushing them down, all the way
down past your knees, until you’re almost
walking on them”.
So it’s very much swings and roundabouts,
emotions-wise.4
Cake. Or biscuits. Or chocolate. Or just
Nutella, straight from the jar, using a
big serving spoon. Comfort food has
become so commonplace and necessary that
it’s hard to remember a time when you didn’t
regularly eat McVitie’s Jamaica Ginger cake
straight from the packet, like a banana, at
3.30pm every day. How was there ever a world
where eating celery instead wouldn’t instantly
have made you break down in tears, feeling
that the world had just taken from you the
only ray of sunshine on an otherwise utterly
appalling day?
When the lockdowns finally end and
eating like a child at a year-long birthday
party is something we can consider once
more forgoing, this whole country is going
to go through a sugar crash so severe, I suggest
everyone agrees not to talk to anyone else for
the whole week it lasts, lest a small civil war
break out. We’re all chunky junkies. We are
high on cakecaine.5
The unexpected horror of having the
chance to change your life for the
better. At the beginning of lockdown,
all the Positive People rocked up and did their
usual, positive thing.
“Hey!” they said. “I know you might be
furloughed at home, isolated from everyone
you love, going out of your mind, but that’s
good news, guys! You know how you’ve always
said you wished you could take a year out to
write a novel/learn Mandarin/get really fit/
read the complete works of Proust? Well,
now’s your chance! This is it! The time has
come! Your entire life has been flushed down
the toilet, leaving you endless months of
boredom! Life has given you lemons, so make
some lemon-Proust-ade! Go! Go! Evolve into
something magnificent! Fly into your glorious
new future!”
And for the first few months, all these
things were seen as genuinely viable
possibilities. Apparently, 10 per cent ofA YEAR LATER AND LITERALLY NO ONE
CHANGED THEIR LIFE FOR THE BETTER. NO ONE
WROTE A NOVEL, NO ONE IS NOW A T’AI CHI
MASTER OR SPEAKING FLUENT FRENCH