Freedom at last... but I will miss life under lockdown

IT was definitely a good news day. We’ve had so many bad new days during this crisis – so many fearful, fretful, upsetting days – that we clutch at the thinnest of straws, we reach for slivers of silver linings, we read firm signs of hope into the flimsiest evidence.

But Friday was good. Much earlier than anyone expected, the Taoiseach’s speech, just after lunch, and much earlier than anyone expected, room to roam across your county and the prospect of the whole country effectively opening up at the end of the month. Freedom. For two full minutes, it felt joyous. So why, in the third minute, did so many of our hearts sink just a little?

Initially, I thought it was just me. But I’ve spoken to so many friends and family since Friday who also, after the initial elation of Leo’s Good News, felt a definite sense of sadness, regret and – I believe – loss.

There’s the hair thing, obviously. If we have learnt anything from lockdown, it’s that Irish women’s immediate reaction to coming through a global pandemic and being viewed in public for the first time in three months is ‘s***, my hair’. In my own case, I didn’t go rogue on the black market and I resisted the temptation to home colour, with the result that my hair right now is remarkable, and not in a good way.

I managed to disguise the grey with strategically placed headscarves for the telly, but if you were to see me in real life, you would witness an unsettling mix of teenage brain, middle-aged face and mad old cat lady hair. And Leo expects me to go on my holidays looking like this?

The second ‘oh s***’ has to do with those Covid kilos. I gained half a stone in lockdown – which I know is not an obscene number, but I do seem to have spent the last three months gaining weight for a week, losing it for two, then gaining it back again, losing it again – but always finishing back on that half stone heavier plateau. By my reckoning, in four weeks I’ll have gone around in another full circle and I won’t just be the mad old cat lady, I’ll be the mad old cat lady who loves cake (even though not a crumb has passed my lips; sadly, shamefully, almost every ounce of those extra pounds is down to lazily drinking my way through sunny evenings outdoors).

And I’m going to miss that. I know (or at least I hope) there will be other sunny evenings, and there will be friends and extended family – but I will miss the near siege mentality that brought my tribe of five together on those evenings, simply because we had nowhere else to go and nobody else we were allowed to see.

I never expected to spend so much time with my adult children at this exciting time of their lives and I am the better for it. Already close, it feels like we’ve now had a shared experience that nobody else in the world can replicate. I’m sure lots of families feel the same – and while we are looking forward to seeing a lot less of each other, I have a palpable sense of loss right now.

ON Monday evening, for the first time in three months, there were only two people in my house. As it happens, I wasn’t one of them – but coming home to a quiet house is something I hadn’t experienced for a very long time and I missed the tangle of talk and music and laughter that had become our soundtrack.

When the traffic gets louder, I will miss the birdsong that I have come to love. I will miss the quietness of life, the sense of pause, the appreciation of the small stuff. I don’t particularly want to wear make-up again, or think about what to wear. I can’t remember the last time I set my alarm.

And if we’re honest, most of us are a little nervous about the opening road ahead, and a little frightened of where it might take us. And I think that’s fine too. I’m not one of those shiny clappy people who wants the world to stay like this – the supposed ‘new normal’ is far from normal and only barely tolerable – but I think it’s fine to look back with sadness for all the lives lost, but also with an amount of gratitude for this extraordinary time we have lived through. And to take the road back to the old normal every bit as slowly and as carefully as we choose.