Locked down in my sock drawer

I KNOW I’m not old – in the grand scheme of things anyway – but more and more often these days I catch myself thinking and saying things which a younger me would have scoffed at.

“When did everyone start speaking funny?” was my latest one.

It occurred to me while I was listening to the radio the other day, and I pondered for a good five minutes before realising just how dull my thoughts had become, and hurriedly tried to find something more interesting to focus on.

In my defence, it was weird when the person on the radio was pronouncing the first part of Covid as if he was saying “corrblimey” – corrvid.

There’s also no excuse to say the first part of the word as if you’re saying Coventry – coffid.

I don’t think a younger me would have cared a jot about how people pronounced it.

Yet there I was in my kitchen, mumbling to myself as though I was a crazy old bloke propping up a bus shelter, complaining about how the young people were speaking on the wireless.

But I’m not sure it’s an age-specific thing, because I don’t think the pre-lockdown me would have given it much thought either.

I think it’s the never-ending house arrest, the perpetual Groundhog Day and the gradual exhaustion of stimuli that’s making my thoughts so tedious.

A few weekends ago, I rearranged my sock drawer, and it brought me a disproportionate amount of pleasure. This proved the spur for a range of other rearrangement-based activities. Before I knew I’d filled almost an entire afternoon.

After the socks came the T-shirts. Then the jumpers. I’m boring myself even thinking about it now, but at the time it was the most thrilling thing I’d done in ages. Of course I want lockdown to end – once it’s safe – but I do fear for what shape everyone’s going to be in when it does.

I have an image of myself emerging like some hermit from a bunker, pale and squinting from a lack of sunlight and muttering indecipherably about sock drawers and pronunciation.

There’s no way I’ll have remembered how to go to a pub like a normal person. I’ll probably catch myself in the corner rearranging their beer mats in solitary silence.

As for returning to offices, there’s going to be a legion of people who have forgotten what it’s like to sit at a desk while not wearing a pair of slippers.

For all the talk about “building back better” and a “brave new world” post-covid, I’ll be pleased if I can just manage a face-to-face conversation with a stranger without wanting to turn off my camera and put them on mute.