The Times Magazine 25locked-down adults started to learn a new
language. Facebook and Instagram were
awash with newly motivated people showing
us their keep fit routines or novel planning
whiteboards. Sales of both Proust and War
and Peace rocketed.
However. Here we are a year later and
we can now call this one. Literally no one
changed their life for the better. No one. No
one wrote a novel, no one is now speaking
fluent French, no one is now a t’ai chi master
and no one finished Remembrance of Things
Past. Remembrance of Things Past is sitting,
covered in dust, next to the dusty dumbbells,
the dusty phrasebook and the six pages of
your roman à clef novel, titled All the Terrible
Bastards: A Full List of Everyone Who Stopped
Me Shining Bright Like a Diamond.
Actually, that’s not quite true. A couple
of people will, by the laws of statistics, have
finished that book/learnt that Welsh/got those
abs during lockdown. But they carry with
them the knowledge that to reveal this to the
7.8 billion other people who did not change
their lives during 2020 would be the least
welcome declaration ever made, and so will
never actually be able to tell anyone what
they’ve done, lest literally everyone hate them.
And so what, ultimately, was the point?6
Paths are having a terrible time
of it. Which non-sentient thing had the
worst lockdown? Paths. Or, to be more
specific, the grass 30ft either side of any path.
In the summer, this grass was ferociously
trampled and destroyed, as people dutifully
kept 2m apart.
Then, in the winter, when it rained, both
the path and these trampled margins turned
to mud, which meant people had to venture
out a further 2m to get back on solid ground.
So then that turned to mud. So the walkers
moved even further out, and so on, and thus,
and, as Yul Brynner says in The King & I,
“Ecetera, ecetera, ecetera.”
As a consequence, as I write this, at the
end of February, every path in Britain is now a
60ft-wide mud river, speckled with abandoned
walking boots and sad, soggy face masks,
and the only way to get across any park or
leisure land is with a small, flexible canoe. The
customary thing to say to people you paddle
past is a sighing, sorrowful, “It’ll take ten years
for that grass to recover. Ten years!”
That’s another one of our great corona
catchphrases, alongside, “Imagine going to a
pub and seeing the condensation on the side
of a cold pint”, “I’ve put on a stone”, “I’m so
bored of all this now” and “I call him Hat
Mancock. I find it oddly comforting.”7
The value of dogs has become a
political issue. Stuck at home and
allowed to go on one walk a day, the
world had but one, communal thought: “I
want a lockdown dog.” Prices for puppies
accordingly more than doubled. Due to
demand, 2019’s £1,000 cockapoo was suddenly
2020’s £2,500 cockapoo and purchasing a
French bulldog became roughly as expensive
as purchasing actual France.
And that’s if you could actually find one
to buy. Most people who wanted a reputable
breeder were put on year-long waiting lists,
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home was virtually
emptied overnight and the Daily Mail
started running dolorous tales of desperate
celebrities importing fragile handbag dogs
from Russia, from breeders so dodgy they
essentially seemed to be putting chihuahuas
in a padded envelope marked “ENGLAND”
and shrugging when DHL delivered an
ominously silent parcel to someone from
TOWIE three weeks later.
As an inevitable consequence of this
sudden demand, a shadowy black market of
dog stealers has sprung up. Dog theft has risen
170 per cent in a single year as criminals steal
puppies, and adult dogs, to order. There must
be more than one edgy geezer who, during the
pandemic, has gone from being a drug dealer
to a dog dealer. “Yeah, I’ve just got some really
nice pure Jack Russell in. I can also get you a
shih tzu and some Great Dane that will blow
your mind, if you want it.”
As someone who believes that when
market forces become socially destructive
government intervention is in order, I’d like
to suggest that all this means the government
should look, in all seriousness, to the provision
of state dogs. Nothing fancy or designer, but
good, practical, cheap-to-run mutts, provided
at cost price to the masses, to disincentivise
crime and deflate prices. A new NHS – theNational Hound Service. Like council houses,
but with four legs and a loyal heart.
To expand further a quote I’m sure Nye
Bevan would have got round to giving, had
he lived to see the heartbreaking British Dog
Crisis of 2020/21, “No society can legitimately
call itself civilised if a sick person is denied
medical aid because of lack of means – or if
someone who needs a delightful woofington
cannot have one because even a wonky beagle
has a street price of £2k minimum.”8
Time has been uninvented. You
heard me. Time is now a genuinely
meaningless concept. A whole year
has passed in what feels like a grey, unending
lump of “Sunday in November at 6.27pm”- minutes, hours, days, weeks and months
all smooshed in together and moving at
approximately the speed of meh. The answer
to, “What time is it?” is, “Still lockdown.”
The answer to, “How long will this take?”
is, “What does it matter?”
The answer to, “When will I see you
again?” is, “At half-past hope being injected
into everyone’s arm.” Time is nothing. The
clocks have, metaphorically, melted like a
Dalí painting.
A whole year has passed. But has it? After
all, here we are, a year later, and there have
been no weddings, no festivals, no exams, no
dancing, no new romances, no sex, no new
literary careers and not a single new person
fluent in Catalan. Instead, we’re fat people
with expensive, stealable dogs, bickering
about emails and swimming across paths.
And this was the first, good, honeymoon
year with corona. Next year is the cotton
anniversary, when all the delightful novelty
will have worn off. What shall we gift the
virus then? I think a fabric face mask with
“YOU’VE MADE YOUR POINT – NOW
LEAVE” written on it. n
COMFORT FOOD IS SO NECESSARY,
IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER A TIME
WHEN YOU DIDN’T EAT MCVITIE’S
JAMAICA GINGER CAKE STRAIGHT
FROM THE PACKET, LIKE A BANANA,
AT 3.30PM EVERY DAY
HAIR AND MAKE-UP: JULIA WREN AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING CLARINS AND T3 HAIR TOOLS