Brendan O’Connor

Cooped up in our homes, what does a day off even mean any more?

SUNDAY Sunday night is party night in our house. This means a takeaway and half a bottle of wine. It works for about an hour. Last week we got Thai food from Nightmarket, and it was a refined kind of Thai with lots of different elements and condiments, so for a while we felt quite civilised, like monkeys wearing tuxedos.

This week we just get chicken wings from Tribeca and tear into them, barely speaking. We are reverting back to naked apes.

With my half a bottle of wine in me I get out the clippers and start shaving my head.

I’ll have an unmanageable bush within days if I don’t act, and it suddenly seems urgent. My wife panics and steps in to do the honours. We don’t seem to have any blade between a too-long and a too-short so we go too-short. It is a work in progress.

Monday

“Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had a savor only of regret… Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forced to live behind prison bars.”

Today is technically my day off, whatever that means anymore. I had stopped reading

The Plague by Camus because I thought it was depressing me. But in fact it’s quite comforting. Firstly because the town with the plague is in a much worse situation than us, and secondly because it makes you realise that there is nothing unique in what we are going through.

Tuesday

“Tranquility so casual and thoughtless seemed almost effortlessly to give the lie to those old pictures of the plague.”

The silence is freaking me out. You’d think it would be a good thing. But in a bizarre way it is unnatural. You expect the collapse of the world order, or any crisis, to be loud and chaotic. It’s not. It is silent and eerie. It doesn’t help that the days have become a bit greyer. While the good weather had seemed to mock us, we realise now that a blue sky is a hopeful-looking thing, whereas a grey sky adds to the bleakness.

“A burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world, while rainy days gave a dark cast to their faces and their mood.”

Wednesday

I have found a new show I can watch between newses and Prime Times. Island Life is on a channel called HGTV and involves people in America who want to move to an island, so they meet a local realtor who is “very excited” to help them.

It turns out there are many lovely islands around America, some quaint and historic like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and some full of natural beauty, like the San Juan Islands. When this is all over I’m going to take a trip of a lifetime around the islands of America. That’s a briefly pleasant thought, but the future mocks me, as the past does.

Thursday

I am still pursuing the Couch to 5K programme. Except I am leaving out all the rest days. When every day is a rest day, then no day feels like a rest day. How can I rest at a time like this? So I do a walk/run every day, which gives me 25 minutes of peace. My knees are complaining slightly, but they’ll just have to deal with it. At this rate I will have done a six- or eight-week programme in three or four weeks. Though I may not be able to walk. But who cares anymore?

“No longer were there individual destinies, only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.”

I eat with impunity now, grazing on biscuits and crisps and bread. What does it matter in the grand scheme of things if I’m getting fat? Amn’t I lucky to be able to?

Friday

I’m getting tired of the people who keep telling us how this will be good for us, how it is getting things done we would never have done otherwise, how it is forcing us all to turn our backs on our materialism, how it is changing our priorities. While it is true that many things, like a person driving around in a 201D car, can seem absurd at the moment, it seems tasteless to look for the benefits in this right now, and furthermore, I believe our priorities will spring back, albeit possibly in a changed world. We are all craving consumption.

“However, you think, like Paneloux [the learned priest], that the plague has its good side; it opens men’s eyes and forces them to take thought?...Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth, with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.”

Saturday

Another week down, one day at a time. I remind myself I am one of the lucky ones, with my health and my work, and my ability to go for a walk. But, depending on the mood, even the vast beach with big sky we are lucky enough to have near us doesn’t offer the same comfort these days.

“Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.”