I imagine if you were a fresh-faced teen at the tail end of your gap yah, emerging from whatever forest or collection of temples you’d lost and subsequently found yourself in, that if you and your tie dye t-shirt stumbled into a newsagents now and scoured the headlines of a newspaper; any newspaper, you’d think you were still riding the tail end of that ayahuasca trip. In fairness, the rest of the world has watched this simmering, and then angrily boiling over, for over two months and it still feels weird and foggy; like the faint confusion that hits you the moment you first wake. The world has been vigorously shaken and tipped upside down by a vengeful toddler. Words like ‘unprecedented’ are being hurled around with wild abandon and, as fearful as I am of being flippant, I feel like this is the closest I’m ever going to get to understanding what living through the world wars was like.
Carlo and I were fine but cautiously self-isolating with persistent coughs, a week and a half before a crumpled and drawn Boris stood in front of us all and told us to stay at home - three blissful days working without a toddler, four with, once entire families were told to self-isolate - so we almost felt like pros by the time the rest of the country (bar, of course, the heroic delivery drivers, supermarket workers, NHS staff, military, posties, teachers and other key workers) officially started working from home too. Now of course, this has been our new normal for ages, so here’s a few things I’ve learned in the twelve hundred and ninety-two weeks we’ve spent largely indoors so far:
1) The volume your partner’s slack alerts are set to will irritate the shit out of you.
So will the fact that they’re hammering through the Azera tin, even though they’re INCAPABLE OF FINISHING A CUP OF COFFEE. Is there a greater test to a relationship than a lockdown? No, no there is not. But if you can move past the biscuit hogging, noisy farting, steam-releasing shoot ‘em up gaming, toe nail picking, you’ll also realise that you talk more, check in with each other more, do little-big things like make each other cups of tea, remember to buy biscuits and bring home daffodils more, and curl up and sombrely share in the head-shaking ghastliness of it all, while finding ways to let in laughter and play like long fingers of warm, yellow sun, a whole lot more.
2) There’s no “right” way to do this.
I thought my type A personality would cling slavishly to a tight routine. Preferably written in a beautiful, sloping cursive. On a twee little blackboard. But my job, while giving me many awesome things (like the ability to wear joggers to work, a well-stocked bar fridge and a punchy office Spotify playlist) doesn’t really give me consistency. In fact, anyone in advertising will know that days can suddenly veer from arsing around with finding the perfect GIF on Slack to having to crack a campaign concept, execute said concept and prepare a presentation which makes the concept look really fucking good so you can convince people who almost always don’t understand or even see the point of “creativity”, in a shatteringly short period of time. So, some days I might be quiet ish. Other days I’ll be screamingly busy. This rather blasts the chalk-written routine out of the water. I know that people bang on about giving children routine, but I believe the current climate allows for a little give in this regard. We’ve had some (rare) days where the TV is loudly ignored, the house isn’t destroyed and Edie plays sweetly with her toys; making us coffee from her kitchen, playing happily in her little house in the garden or hunting for dinosaur eggs in the grass. Then there have been days when I strongly consider selling her on eBay and the only thing to stop us going mad and actually get some work done is to sit her down in front of back-to-back movies. (THANK YOU, DISNEY PLUS.) Some days will feel triumphant and glowy – revel in those little wins – and others will feel like you just clung on tight and survived them. Dust yourself off. Don’t dwell on them. (Better yet, have a large gin if you can.) Do what you need to do to make it through to bedtime – NO ONE is judging you. And know that tomorrow might not necessarily be better, but it will be different, and it is a chance to wipe the slate and reset.
3) You don’t have to be productive.
There are now a million virtual gym classes, language courses and art exchanges you could be both learning and parading online. You could watch a new highbrow play every night from the National Theatre. Perhaps you could cook a swanky Michelin starred meal or Marie Kondo your wardrobe. Maybe you could take a photography course. Ivy League universities like Harvard and Stanford have even clambered in on the action and are offering various free online courses, from Psychology to Digital Marketing to Negotiation Strategy (one for parents with toddlers, perhaps…). The whole of Facebook is seemingly claiming myriad new skills while under lockdown. So yeah, you could learn to code, take up cross stitch or dig yourself a veggie patch in the back garden. But if you’d rather just sulk a little bit in your holey joggers and binge Tiger King, while eating your fourth bag of chocolate buttons, that’s okay too.
4) You’ll have none and also masses of time.
I feel like this might be particularly appropriate for parents of small humans. Case in point, this took me about an hour to plan and vaguely mull over, and then about a fortnight to actually write in maddeningly teeny tiny chunks; in between fending off a sticky-fingered toddler intent on bashing my laptop keyboard, playing with my lipsalve, fannying about with my cup of water and trying on my glasses, keeping my neat control freakishness in check and house vaguely clean ish (why is everything so dirty now ALL THE DAMN TIME) and getting my work done in an orderly, timely, not crappy manner. The hours will feel like they drag; counting the minutes to their snack time where you can kill a good half hour or wait for the moment when it’s acceptable to shove them in front of the TV, but you’ll also look up one minute and realise the day has galloped terrifyingly away from you and it’s somehow, staggeringly, 5 o’clock. And having prided myself on being someone who can typically squeeze five days of work into four - nearly always getting my jobs done by the time I need to sprint out the agency at 10 to 5 and head to the station – in lockdown, despite all being downstairs by half seven every day, I can count the amount of days I finished everything by 5pm on one hand.
[Side note: I finally finished this on maternity leave. Quelle surprise.]
5) You’ll almost definitely become a panic baker.
Anxiety seems to have turned great swathes of the nation into 50s housewives. As far as reactions to horrible global news go, it’s quite a nice one, and there’s something just so terribly British about the wartime-y, jolly urge to bake sourdough loaves and loaf cakes, while sharing your ultimate yeast-free cheat recipes for pizza dough. Lockdown baking has also collided spectacularly with my feverish nesting instincts, so along with a catastrophic attempt at baking a wholemeal loaf (it was so heavy it could have doubled as a macabre, Roald Dahl-esque murder weapon) and a very good banana bread, I batch cooked Bolognese for all three of us and whacked it in the freezer along with about 8000 meatballs.
6) You’ll have the TV on more than you thought, but you’ll become okay with it.
As my workload eased off, Edie’s television time reduced. On my first official day of maternity leave, it stayed off completely. Funny that. Because if you are screamingly busy and have an 8-hour workday ahead of you, there is no way you can also squeeze in cooking for/tidying up after and entertaining a small person at the same time. We’re not working from home. We’re at home during freakish world events, trying to keep a child or children amused, our bosses happy and our relationships intact. It’s very almost impossible. There’s a reason why a parent who both stays at home and goes to work doesn’t exist. Find what works for you, on that one day, and roll with it.
7) You’ll oscillate between painful gratitude and terror in a single morning.
I’m a planner. I’m a teensy weensy control freak. And lists? Ooh I love a good list. The thing is, when Coronavirus is raging outside and the 5pm briefings from the government change on a daily basis, planning, well - anything, ain’t gonna work. I’ve realised you have to take things day by day, to stop being so absurdly overwhelmed by how much 2020 is resembling a badly written disaster movie. (It even has the right, catchy title, “2020” and cliché sounding baddie, “Coronavirus”.) The first week of staying at home was an utter shit show. The second was even worse. The third and fourth felt slightly less odd, the fifth was pretty nice, for the most part, and this week has been almost lovely. Small mouthfuls of the madness, in a faintly head-in-the-sand approach to life, has made things manageable. That and the silver linings of what we’re getting in return for all this: a slower, gentler pace of life that makes me pleasantly nostalgic for a past I didn’t even know. And then of course there’s focusing on the good things that we, for now, still have: a roof over our heads, a salary, a garden, the money to buy bits off Amazon to keep our child distracted and learning and happy – Christ, our health. To complain about anything while we still have all of that feels churlish at best and deeply insulting at worst. But all of us, even those whose lives are infinitely easier than others or who haven’t, yet, been robbed of someone they love by this disease, are grieving a little bit. We’re grieving for cancelled weddings and family holidays, for weekend plans with old friends and exciting new projects at work, for that Friday treat flat white from the café around the corner and the park you’d visit every Sunday on your walk with your family. We’re grieving for yawningly boring routine and normality. I genuinely can’t wait to be stood on a train platform again, moaning about my Southern train being late for the third time this week. Oh for train delays and frantic zig zag running through stations to far away platforms! And those feelings and hurts might be very small – might in fact be tiny in the grand scheme of all this madness – but they’re still valid. So, feeling heart-burstingly grateful for the slither of sunlight slanting across your face, while you drink your morning coffee in blissful silence, and then crashingly low that you’re wearing the same tracksuit bottoms for the ninth day in a row – is very normal and very okay.
8) You’ll have eight thousand different apps for connecting with colleagues, friends and family.
Zoom for yoga sessions, Houseparty for boozy girls nights or family catch ups (we introduced my Grandpa to Houseparty and had a very productive call with his moustache), Slack for myriad different project threads, Teams for work meetings, Facebook Live for babyballet class, email for the usual, Instagram for the shinier sides of lockdown and Insta stories for the uglier, messier reality, Whatsapp for daily memes – IT’S A LOT. We’re straddling a particularly odd time where enormous amounts of people have been slowly and deliberately retreating from social media for the last year or so, and now find ourselves stuck since it’s the only way we can socialise. Which means I now have a heaving social media folder on my phone and a screen time usage report that makes me shudder. And speaking of memes (don’t get me wrong, I love a good meme), it gets a little wearying when you’re sent the same one by your friend, work colleague and mother-in-law in the same 24-our period. Same goes for funny videos. After a certain period of time, you’ll just delete them. This is to be actively encouraged.
9) Stuff that seemed really, really necessary a few months ago suddenly, well, isn’t.
Remember handbags? And foundation? And real shoes?! My makeup routine has gone out the window. I haven’t worn my watch in a month. The holes in my ears have probably closed over. When you can’t remember what day it is anymore and you start seriously considering investing in furry Birks, things that you did religiously every day fall away alarmingly quickly. Bras? Meh. Pencilling in your eyebrows? Please. My nails are bare, my bikini line resembles the Amazon (though in fairness I’m enormously pregnant and have the added benefit of being unable to see it) and my roots would make Ru Paul faint. I also haven’t given my ‘outfits’ a second thought, other than – is this waistband forgiving enough to sit in for 9 hours? In fact I was so devastated that my beautiful new H&M dress, brought to wear in my last month of pregnancy so I could feel all spring-y and chic (with its floral pattern, boxy, puffy sleeves and floaty yet structured poplin shape) was sitting ignored in my wardrobe, that I wore it at home on my last day “at work”, swishing ridiculously around the house and beaming from every pore. I’d love to say that lockdown has given me a new perspective on beauty; that I’ll have a capsule wardrobe from now on and shun eyeliner and expensive trips to the hairdressers, but the truth is as soon as lockdown lifts I’m putting my reddest lipstick on, every single piece of jewellery I own and spindliest, patent ankle boots and hitting my local for a bucket of rose.
10) Your child/children will regularly drive you up the pole.
I’ve lost count of the amount of plates and bowls of handmade food I’ve made my child that she’s smooshed, hurled, picked at, fingered and finally declared – “I don’t want it.” I made her homemade butternut and stilton ravioli (leftovers of our supper, I hasten to add, I’m not that dedicated) in a tomato and mozzarella sauce the other night. I may be massively tooting my own horn here, but I could have genuinely charged money for it, it was so nice. Did she eat it? Did she hell. In a bid to repeat some nursery patterns, I’ve also been trying to make the occasional pudding for lunch or tea. After spending time that I should have spent wrestling headlines into submission, faffing around instead with healthy options like painstakingly baking apples, I gave up and resorted to the old, ready-made, fuss-free classics. This child has now shunned jelly, custard and Angel Delight. (All the flavours.) What self-respecting toddler doesn’t like chocolate Angel Delight? IT’S LIKE CRACK FOR CHILDREN. And since I grew up in a household which frowns very firmly on chucking food away, my would-be snacks of peanut butter on apples, raw nuts and sourdough toast have morphed into mangled processed puddings and other soggy rejects. Which might explain why this baby’s tummy is measuring in the 95th percentile… I’m literally going to lose the plot. But, in the same breath, it’s also sort of amazing and isolation is a thousand times more bright, lively and rewarding because of them. There are so many things I’ll miss when normalcy returns: mid-week, middle of the day walks to the country park to climb “the mountain” before collapsing in a little sunny heap, as she pats the grass next to her for me; slower mornings where we lie in bed and she holds my cheeks and presses her hot little breathy face up to mine, earnestly stroking the baby or jabbering about what she wants to do today; her face when she discovers new things (trying out headphones almost blew her mind); her shrieks of glee as Carlo chases her round the kitchen and garden; getting morning coffee from her kitchen; eating breakfast as a family so that the start of each day feels a bit special like a weekend – these weeks have gently smoothed over an angry bruise of guilt I was unknowingly carrying from spending so much time apart from her. And that makes all the head-bashing, hand-wringing, eye-rolling, “WHAT DID I JUST SAY, EDIE?!” worth it.