What I Missed In The Lockdowns

Regular readers will have long ago realised that I am not the life and soul of the party. I don’t have people knocking on the door because they “were in the neighbourhood”. I don’t spend a lot of time on my mobile in conversations about whatever it is that those people who do spend lots of time on their mobiles have conversations about.

My needs for contact with the outside world are fairly modest. I like to sit in cafes for a while, watch people go by and hear the background chatter, or walk along a shopping street and see people going about their daily lives, or wander round a bookshop or a record shop, or go to the movies, or maybe some dance, and have something to eat in a restaurant now and again, where the presence of other people is part of the experience.

None of that is too much to ask. It has been provided by cities since the first one was founded only historians know when. Yet it vanished like sunshine on a cloudy day in March 2020, and did not really return until 2023. (Sure there were people moving around in 2022, but only in the second half, and the mood was still a bit odd.)

 

(Going home from the dentist: Piccadilly Circus 13/1/2021 18:50)

When discussing the Lockdowns, I have tended to focus on the feeling of threat, not from a bad flu virus, but from the Government, the so-called “experts” advising it, and the local council officials implementing and even interpreting many of the ever-changing regulations: they were unaccountable and unregulated, and the “experts” were often acting from ideological motives that don’t bear examination. That would scare anyone.

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate that what I really missed was the very little I asked of and for my social life. Partly because, well, who could really miss so little? Does it even qualify as a “social life”?

Well, it doesn’t matter whether someone else doesn’t call it a social life.

What matters is that I missed it and it affected the way I felt. It wasn’t much of a mooring cable to the rest of the world, but it was enough, and when it was cut, I drifted.

What about the work? I was working from home, dealing e-mails, taking part in conference calls (and Teams when they finally shipped us decent laptops in autumn 2020), and so on. Wasn’t that a mooring cable?

Well, clearly not. Work is not the same as life - which is why we contrast it in the phrase “work-life balance”. “Relationships” at work rarely translate into acquaintanceships in real life. A busy work life does not fill the gap of an empty personal life.

People with domestic relationships may not have felt the lack of being able to wander through the daily tide of people. Perhaps they even found it a relief.

I didn’t.