I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I want to do differently after lockdown. Where for some a near-death experience prompts them to change their ways, for me these past 10 weeks have presented ample opportunity to take a long hard look at my life.
(Well, not long, but fleeting glimpses in between crawling around under the kitchen table picking up bits of half-chewed cucumber sticks, and shouting ‘this is not soft play!’ in the direction of the Good Sofa for the 8,000th time.)
To tell the truth, I’m surprised by how little lockdown has changed my life. Aside from the kids being at home 24/7, and none of us seeing other people, there’s depressingly little about my day-to-day life that has been impacted.
I largely work from home, so that’s not changed. In fact I’ve been glad to save the once-a-week schleps into London.
We don’t go on holiday on the whole - our last two breaks were France for a week in 2018 and a seven-months-pregnant waddle round Devon last May. Judith Chalmers is hardly quaking in her boots.
We go out for the evening here and there but handing £30 over to the babysitter just for the privilege of leaving the house rather takes the edge off proceedings.
And some of my closest friends live a reasonable distance away and share the same work/children/distance issues as me so I don’t see them as often as I’d like at the best of times anyway.
So the biggest irritation for me is simply the frustration that comes with being told I can’t do certain things. Things I probably wouldn’t have done copiously in the last 10 weeks under normal circumstances.
And it is that realisation that has convinced me that a little reassessment is due.
I need to make the hours between 9am and 3pm count. When the school is ready to welcome back my lovely little secret Covid carriers I need to switch off social media, shut down my personal email and get on with some work.
Not just pop a wash on, or get dinner in the oven, or go for a run. Just bloody work. I am motivated by nothing but fear and deadlines - if there’s still an hour to go before I need to file a job that takes 30 minutes, I will have no difficulty at all in cleaning out the fridge or watering the garden for half an hour before I begin.
No more.
But for that to be in any way realistic I need to find work that I am passionate about. (Don't we all?) I set up my own business specifically because (and excuse the lingo but this is my company motto) I no longer wanted to work for w*nkers. I’ve done too much of that in my time. And now I work with some lovely people but I’m still not sure I’m tapping into my strengths to the extent I could. And that only leaves me feeling frustrated, unfulfilled and demoralised.
We need to stop stressing about £7.50/hour + rounding up and just go out for dinner with our friends. Dinners where we all pretend it’s 1950, sitting at a gender-segregated table while the men talk about sport, beer and cars and the women talk about annoying children (their own and other people’s), annoying husbands (their own and other people’s) and about how mad their parents have become in old age. God only knows when the second wave will strike and we’ll all be summoned back indoors.
And as far as holidays are concerned, I need to plan one. But not necessarily an exotic one. We have now officially cancelled our week in Tuscany in August but, besides missing out on the company, that doesn’t bother me unduly. (Disclaimer: We're rebooking for 2021.)
Not only has the lockdown dented our finances but our daily exploring has reminded us how beautiful the British countryside is, so I will now be more than happy with a week in the UK.
Tents, cycling, pub gardens, camp fires, wetsuits, body boards, bluetooth speakers and pasties for every meal. Freckly-nosed kids running around till dusk with their mates until they’re all bribed, exhausted and filthy, into bed, the parents rejoining the gathering one by one as they each win the bedtime battle, pulling on an extra jumper ready to settle in for an evening of wine out of squishy cups, being bitten to death by invisible bugs and trying to work out who had the foresight to bring an illicit packet of fags.
And then there’s the small stuff - the lockdown has got me gardening more and I’ve remembered how therapeutic I find it. Maybe it’s being old now, or the rare sense of achievement, or being caught by surprise every time you see the once overgrown bed looking neat and colourful for the first time in two years - whatever it is I need to remember this feeling and do more of it when there are a greater number of demands on my time.
It is the same - in reverse - with reading. Lockdown has meant reading has fallen almost entirely by the wayside and I am craving escapism through fiction. There are no longer any train journeys, no evenings when Andy is out and I don’t put the TV on, no weekends with family where the kids are being entertained by grandparents or aunts/uncles/cousins and I let the other adults believe I’m working/having a shower/doing something useful when I’m just being plain lazy and reading my book.
Looking back over this post I fear it is time to accept that I am a simple creature with simple dreams. Which is just as well else I fear I would be monumentally dissatisfied with my suburban lot.
But you can pity me all you want, with my camping holidays and my library fetish - my dreams may not be particularly ground-breaking but they are mine, and I am going to live them.
You know, once Boris says it’s ok.
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