[I am going to litter this post with pictures of holidays past, partly for lack of any other relevant images but also because they make me happy.]
Yesterday I woke up and not only thought it was Saturday, but momentarily forget about All This. It was a double whammy of forehead-smacking, heart-sinking devastation.
You start to forget after a while. Where I used to wake with a heavy heart at the thought of another day home-schooling and shouting and not getting anything meaningful done until 8pm when you have two hours to cram as much of your professional and personal life in before collapsing into bed, now I don’t give it a second thought.
Then things happen that remind you this new normal isn’t real normal.
The food shop is insane. We spend over £200 once a fortnight in the supermarket, which we then have to try and store somewhere. (I’m damned if I’m running the Sainos gauntlet more than I absolutely have to.) Each shop consists of, on average, eight loaves of bread, 25 pints of milk, a couple of kilos of frozen peas and a shit ton of pasta. But never, ever any sodding flour. Who the hell is buying all this flour and what are they doing with it? I just want 500g of plain flour. Please. Someone?
Surely not everyone has turned into Mary Berry with the munchies? For a start I refuse to believe anyone with children has time for that sort of frivolity, and people who live alone can’t be doing all that much cake making, which discounts a lot of households.
And if I’m the only one not putting away a whole Victoria sponge three times a week, the NHS is going to have an obesity crisis on its hands when they’re done reeling from the Coronavirus. I could understand it in the first few weeks but we’re about seven weeks in. Stop hogging the flour, people.
We’re also having fun with the laundry - another normal part of every day life pre-Covid that now looks very different. Take, for instance, the pre-wash trouser pocket clear out.
Andy’s trouser pockets before looked something like this: golf tees, train tickets, half-stamped loyalty cards for various City-based sandwich and coffee shops, pristine, still-folded handkerchiefs, the shed key and a lot of loose change (which, if I was doing the laundry, I kept in lieu of payment).
Trouser pockets during lockdown: an empty packet of chocolate buttons, the lid of a Cornetto, a nerf gun bullet, two filthy handkerchiefs - one covered in blood, the other mint choc chip ice cream - a hair slide, the shed key and, to my horror, half the neck of my loo roll giraffe from a couple of weeks ago.
(If I ever need to get into the shed I don’t look in the key drawer, I go straight to the pocket of his shorts.)
That may seem a lot to unearth in one round of pocket emptying, but it also seems not many of Andy’s clothes have made the laundry basket lately. I guess like the rest of us he doesn’t feel the need to be presentable, and it has largely gone unnoticed, but I’m pretty sure he’s on a rotation of one pair of shorts, one pair of jeans and three T-shirts.
It’s like when we spent 10 weeks backpacking in Asia and he arrived home the day before we left with a newly-purchased rucksack suitable for no more than a weekend away. Apparently he was planning to live off a rotation of £1 Same Same But Different and Chang Beer T-shirts purchased from Bangkok market stalls.
Back to 2020, while it is very refreshing not having five suit shirts to iron as standard every week, I think there’s probably a compromise to be had on *some* clothes being washed. (I should clarify here that I am not the housekeeper. He launders and irons clothes as much as I do. When 3/5ths of the household get as much food on their clothes as in their mouths, it’s all hands on deck.)
And then there’s the talk of this year’s summer holiday. Ha! Until March we had a week booked in a Tuscan farmhouse with my family. We still have the booking but only because we don’t have to officially cancel until July and I think we’re all still holding onto a tiny shred of hope that this is all actually a bad dream.
On a family Zoom call last night to mark my sister Julia’s birthday (Happy Birthday Jelly!) we spent half an hour debating the best thing to do. A holiday in the UK? (Everywhere will be packed, no restaurants or pubs will be open, it’ll be relatively very expensive.) Tuscany without my (vulnerable) parents? (Not an option.) A drive to northern France? (Dodgy weather, different isolation rules, too risky.) Go without a holiday altogether? (I don’t think any of us have ever needed a holiday more.)
And then someone pointed out that even in August we probably won’t be allowed to all be together for a week in the same house, so should be just wait and see? By which point we’d never be able to book anywhere. But then if we book now and can’t go because of the virus, we’ll never be insured.
Never has the discussion about a family holiday left me feeling so depressed. And we spent a week in southern Ireland in about 1998 when it was freezing cold, rained constantly and the biggest highlight was getting served in a backwater boozer which only resulted in Julia falling up some stairs when her inaugural Bacardi Breezer went straight to her head.
(I should clarify that holiday wasn’t so bad but I’ve never been back. And my God did it rain.)
So all in all I’m not sure I’m a fan of this so-called ‘new normal’. I’ve clearly just become institutionalised and have accepted that resistance is futile.
I’ll only be happy when I’m wading through an ironing pile that is exclusively school uniform and white shirts, when I have cause to dust off my passport again, and when there’s some naffing flour to be had in the whole of Hertfordshire.
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