‘Slow down, there’s always tomorrow’

This is my last Lockdown column. Before I go into how much I feel I have changed during the course of lockdown, I want to mention how grateful I am for this opportunity, when I was asked so many weeks and weeks ago now if I would be interested in doing a ‘lockdown column’. Yes, yes, I was interested, and so began my odyssey from my back garden.

As you know, I couldn’t go out the front door, I couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t meet anyone, and yet all the world was at my feet as I wrote about events within the confines of my home and garden.

So, has the lockdown changed me? Yes, it has. Firstly, let me explain. I was always a person who rushed at things, who dashed at things, because there was always so much else to be doing. I never seemed to have the time to talk to everyone I wanted to talk with, to write all I wanted to write.

So I find now that I’ve lost that impetus to dash and rush at everything. Now there is plenty of time to think, plenty of time to reflect, plenty of time to write, plenty of time to telephone people, plenty of time, still at my age, to dream.

I’ve learned that you don’t have to do everything immediately you think of it; you don’t have to even do it that day or week, because there are always going to be more days. In fact, I’ve become a convert to the Spanish maxim of mañana — there’s always going to be a tomorrow.

So many times during the lockdown, I was brought up short by that realisation: it’s all right, there’s going to be tomorrow, you’ll have another full 24 hours to think about it, to plan it, and to dream about it.

During and after the lockdown, I’ve realised how much I dearly love my family. I always knew I did, but somehow this intensified during the lockdown period. I wanted to talk to them all the time, to hear what was going on with my two sons and with their children in turn. I thought about them constantly, and they became so utterly and intimately dear to me.

Little events became huge epochs in my very pedestrian lockdown life. Birdsong in the garden, reading poetry out loud, the invasive seagull, a welcome phone call, and so many ordinary things, which in retrospect seem dull, were at the time of happening of enormous interest and importance to me.

Yes, there may well be a second wave of coronavirus. But I somehow think that this time around, speaking personally, I will be better equipped myself to deal with it and whatever ups and downs and corners I encounter during what I hope may not happen, but yet could.

I have no desire at all to go shopping, but I guess that day will come.