A whole new world when you’re in a corner

IT’S amazing how much one can do when backed into a corner. And never has there be a time in living memory when as individuals and as a collective have we been in a tighter corner.

This last week or so I’ve discovered a game on my phone. You start with a grid of 100 hundred squares, 10 by 10, and then you have to fit in randomly generated shapes, say, 2x2 or 3x3 squares, horizontal and vertical bars, and L-shapes on to the grid. Make a full-length vertical or horizontal line and those squares disappear while boosting your score. The catch is that eventually you will run out of space to slot in the next shape and ‘Game Over’. It’s called Woody and it would do your head in. Still, it passes a few minutes - or an hour - of the day and no one pulls a hamstring.

Of course, it didn’t need a ‘lockdown’ to send us into the games and puzzles department of the Google App Store, but by the time we’re allowed to venture further than two kilometres of the house we’ll probably never want to see the bloody App Store again.

Smart phones are great, and in the absence of real contact with real people right now, they are actually coming more into their own these days, for, like, y’know, making actual phone calls. It struck me quite some time ago that when the good people at Apple or Samsung or Huawei are marketing their phones the last thing that’s mentioned - if it is at all - is that actual phone thing. It’s all camera this and pixels that, and gorilla glass this and Amoled that.

Even the names of the Android operating systems would blow your mind. From Android Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean operating systems, you’d nearly want to eat the bloody phone before you’d make a call on it.

That’s all changed now, though. As the Coronavirus crisis has sent us all scurrying back indoors and away from family, friend and foe, it’s now more than ever I find myself bringing up the keypad and punching in a phone number. As the old BT ad years ago reminded us, ‘It’s good to talk’.

It’s also good to play, and in the absence of outdoor sport, the football and hurling and lepping and jumping, there’s always the indoor pursuits. In recent weeks I’ve discovered - or rediscovered - the delights of draughts, Snakes and Ladders, and Ludo. It comes with the joy of being billeted with a six-year-old who is happy enough to be missing a chunk of school but takes great delight in seeing her dad roll a four and slide all the way down from 82 to 27 on the back of a red python.

I even had a go at teaching her the basics of chess, which is about all I know myself, and while she has mastered the movement of each piece, we’ve yet to move on to the Ruy López

Opening or the Sicilian Defence.

With the clocks going forward the hour last weekend I was wondering if the longer evenings of daylight would make this whole lockdown business earlier or harder to bear. Is it better to have longer stretch to the days even if we can only venture that couple of thousand metres from the house, or who it be more bearable if darkness descended at five in the evening and we could pull the curtains on Covid-19 outside?

When the shutdown started across the country about three weeks ago I was thanking my lucky stars that I was piggy-backing on the back of our other daughter’s Netflix account, and grateful that eir had, just before Christmas, given us a 12-month free subscription to Amazon Prime. Truth is, I’ve watched hardly anything on either streaming network in the last few weeks. Some of that is down to watching far too many ‘serious’ programmes about the unfolding Covid-19 crisis, but also because there are other things to be done.

Vinyls have been dusted down, unread books taken from shelves.

Lawns are being cut and cut and cut; fences repaired and painted.

Walks are being had; bicycles are being pumped and oiled and ridden.

Online fitness classes are being followed; Pilates is being discovered, hamstrings are being stretched to the limit.

Draughts are being jumped, kings are being check-mated, Ludo is driving us all around the bend.

Woody - or Tetris for the 21st century - is still being played, in what is the ultimate get-yourself-out-of-this-tightcorner-before-the-walls-close-in game, but there’s a world of other great stuff to do within the home or just outside it.

These are tough and dangerous and worrying times, but it’s amazing what can be done and achieved when you’re backed into that corner.