I’m writing this on the sofa, on a Sunday afternoon. I’ve got a mug of tea – currently too hot to drink – and we’ve just been for an approximately 3 minute long trip to the recycling bank at the end of the road. It’s really, really lovely out there right now, the type of charming spring early evening that seems to hold a lot of promise.
I will say that perhaps that promise might have felt rather more tangible if it weren’t for the fact that walking ten metres up the road carrying a bag of empty cornflake boxes and heinz tins could well have been the highlight of my day, but still. Feeling the actual outside sun on your greying inside skin is to be appreciated, especially in 2020.
This is the weirdest year ever, isn’t it?!
I keep thinking that when this is over – let’s not get into if or when it might be over, or indeed what ‘over’ might actually look like – I’ll stride straight back into March and pick up where I left off, like what’s actually happening is that we’ve slipped into a vortex rather than a global pandemic. That’s probably partially do to with my long-held obsession with wasting time, a fixation which is having a RIOT in lockdown, I can tell you. Still, whether I like it or not (I do not) and whether I feel I’m making good use of it or not (I also do not), time, it transpires, cares very little and continues to pass.
So lest I come out the other side with no written recollection of this whole sorry scenario, I thought today we could have a casual little catch up. Sort of like those ones I used to do last year, except that any ‘activities’ I mention in this will likely be quite different from anything I would have mentioned then, because (quelle surprise) I don’t have a huge amount of happenings to tell you about.
And that’s actually one of the weirder things about keeping in touch over this time. Maintaining contact with my nearest and dearest is something I’m absolutely terrible at anyway, but of course now that we can’t be in each other’s physical presence, phone calls and zoom quizzes and messages have become even more important.
Something about those things is exhausting anyway, but now that we’re so far in to our enforced time at home, there just isn’t all that much to catch up on. For certain types of people (me), this adds another level of difficulty: say something interesting! Why don’t you have anything to say? God, you are a really boring individual.
If I was to say what I have been doing, I suppose it would be these things:
I’ve read some books, although not as many as I would have hoped in two months at home.
I’ve been running, and I’ve been irritated to discover that after a period of inactivity I’m not good at it.
We’ve learnt how to make gnocchi. Immediately after I wrote this we made a really terrible batch of the stuff.
I’ve watched all three High School Musicals and I tried to realise my teenage dreams by learning part of the dance to We’re All In This Together. I might learn the rest this bank holiday.
I’ve watched as my fringe attempts to take over my entire face, and then I’ve gone on and on about that on Instagram.
I’ve worn make up to stay at home to make myself feel like ‘me’, and I’ve also worn no make up to stay at home to make myself feel like ‘me’.
I’ve gotten dressed before sitting down in front of the laptop; in mom jeans, in workout clothes, in summer dresses, and in ‘daytime’ pjs, and I still can’t quite work out which works best.
I’ve experimented with photography, and have been self-shooting more than ever.
I’ve baked four lots of the Pret vegan cookies, and zero banana breads.
I’ve watched the weather oscillate from depths of winter temperatures to midsummer sun and back again.
I’ve also watched my 30th birthday approach with rapidly increasing speed, and have felt many different things about that.
I’ve worked (and worked, and worked), and found it hard to extricate myself from that when ‘leaving work’ now means ‘standing up and closing the laptop’.
I’ve felt somewhat mis-sold to, because I was under the impression that I would have loads of time for doing all the things that I say I never have time to do, or at least some extra time for relaxing, and this doesn’t seem to have been the case.
At the same time, I’ve felt entirely useless – some people are quite literally keeping the world turning at the moment, and I’m sitting here in my living room writing marketing plans and pondering whether to put an exclamation mark at the end of a piece of copy (it’s a strong no from me – I hate exclamation marks), and twatting about on Instagram. PERSPECTIVE, people.
And that’s…all I’ve done? Which is fine, of course, because as the internet is always telling us, we don’t need to make productive use of this time. That’s what it’s telling us when it’s not telling us we need to make productive use of this time, anyway.
How have you been spending your time? I’m off to learn the second half of We’re All In This Together, see ya x
Sophar So Good 