WHAT LOCKDOWN HAS TAUGHT US: THREE TOP WRITERS REFLECT
The delights of home schooling, online shopping disasters and not being able to hug your grandchildren ... three Belfast Telegraph writers reflect on the lockdown, and discover they’ve much to be thankful for
What follows is a light-hearted wander through a lockdown diary, but the tone could be misinterpreted as downplaying the misery in so many homes in Northern Ireland and throughout the world.
Please believe that is not so. I start from a stance of respect and compassion and a wish to ease our collective situation.
Human beings are resilient and have used the capacity for humour to lift burdens and thereby to make everything more tolerable, more survivable.
I love cartoons and have my cartoon heroes, whose work I can access on my mobile. That’s it — the mobile. That small machine has made such a massive difference to how so many of us are coping. In lockdown, its use has expanded exponentially.
For example, we’ve found out it makes an excellent isolation doorbell. I have not hitherto linked my phone to fruit and vegetables, but I have now, because there has been a small revolution in how high street traders are operating.
Newspapers have been chronicling for years how Amazon and the other big online boys have been squashing the local high streets. At long last, many small traders have taken a deep breath and embraced online.
The result? Clive, my local greengrocer within walking distance, has a small but competent website selling his wares. The prices are higher than at the online supermarkets, but the local produce is fresher.
More important, the delivery slots are within a couple of days, not like supermarkets whose time-scales allow for the planting of the tomatoes when you order.
Oh yes, the doorbell. When the van arrives, Clive’s man calls the mobile to say the stuff is plonked outside. Now we’ve discovered a local garden centre doing the same thing, but only after making a bad online mistake.
We ordered a packet of wild flower seeds online (the garden doesn’t know what’s hit it). Only when they emailed the delivery date as the end of May did we realise that the small item was being dispatched from China.
But we must adapt. We will dig up some dandelions, daisies and maybe a young gorse from a roadside.
We’re not alone. My son in
IT makes no mistakes, but my daughter now has enough ginger for a decade.
My brother-in-law rang to say that he, too, had had keyboard finger trouble. Fourteen large parsnips and six jars of tartare sauce landed with him. He had made soup, more soup and yet more soup.
Did we have any further suggestions as what to do with a parsnip, perhaps dipped in tartare? I bit my tongue.
The phone has just dinged. Friend keeping in touch. Says he saw a news item about husbands in isolation being so disconnected from their wives they don’t even know their favourite flower. He said to his wife beside him, “It’s self-raising, isn’t it?”
Up until now, my wife and I have regarded video-calling a bit of a faff. You need to have your hair combed and make-up (not me). A simple phone call can be taken in the bath. However, the new state of affairs has elevated the video call from frivolity to “for heaven’s sake, get with it”.
I had somehow collected two selfie sticks, hitherto unused because I’d rather stand in the hallway reciting, “Mirror, mirror on the wall...”
Now, the sticks emerge as valuable, preventing a worrying reduction in motor function from holding up the mobile to keep us in frame for an hour.
Friends and family seem to manage better. We do know that seeing them during a prolonged absence is a tonic.
I have been taking lessons from all these home video inserts on TV and borrowed books on philosophy, art, comparative religion, space-time continuum, Keynesian economics and horse-breeding to lodge behind us as a backdrop. Anything else new? I think many lockdown people are treading new paths. I’ve taken up sketching and am quite surprised to discover I can actually do it — not competently yet, but well enough to absorb for hours.
Again, the mobile, with its excellent camera, assists. I click and collect reference images when I cannot draw in fresh air. Sketching has taught me to look, really look.
No, where we are is not a joke, but smiling does help.
The precious mobile has lit up with a cartoon of a distressed man at home amid heaped empties, lamenting: “If they don’t open the pubs soon, I’ll end up an alcoholic.”
And so to bed.
‘No, where we are with Covid-19 is not a joke, but smiling does help’