RACHEL JOHNSON
Why I’m sick of men milking the lockdown!
We’re nine-and-ahalf weeks into lockdown. Nineand-a-half weeks of rural isolation in a remote river valley in torn tracksuit bottoms with my husband, 26-year-old daughter and dog, talking about what we are going to eat for all the endless, greedy meals.
And drink. (I can’t get into the larder for the boxes of empties.)
The fact we were already staying at the family farm on exmoor and, therefore, had to stay put (save for essential journeys to London to present my radio show because I can’t do it from here) was serendipitous. But still, I mourn the ghost entries in my diary — the lost lunch parties, seeing family members new and old.
Summer has been cancelled. everything I was looking forward to has been replaced with the most unlovely, unnatural thing. I refer to Zoom quizzes, Sunday family FaceTime and enforced social distancing.
A life unlived, two metres apart if at all, which goes against my human instincts. Joyless. I miss the smells, the hugs (I so want to hug my mother), the gossip.
Lockdown hasn’t been easy for anyone, but multiple polls show it’s hardest for women. Six out of ten of us are ‘struggling to stay positive’, while 77 per cent of women say the idea of seeing friends and family fills them with hope compared to 68 per cent of men.
I love nothing more than going to a party and am in terrible cold turkey now. Meanwhile, my husband regards it all as a lovely surprise, an unwonted Golden Age. He has taken to lockdown like the proverbial duck to water.
He says 2020 has been ‘the happiest year of his life’. He has become a newbie gardener and born-again twitcher (he has erected a hideous structure I call ‘birdseed village’, a sort of Bicester for our feathered friends). He may never go out again.
I can’t count the numbers of tanned, newly-bearded, well-fed middle-aged men who announce, to my irritation: ‘I love lockdown and never want it to end.’ Then proceed to expound on the deep, animal pleasures they’ve taken from the Stay At Home order.
I put this division of the sexes down to one reason. Almost all private social events are instigated and enforced by women. We are the producers; men the consumers. As a result, men often feel they only go to things because we want them to.
NoW the nanny state is telling them they don’t have to, they can legitimately refuse till the cows come home. No wonder men are milking lockdown. At the start, I admit I mistook l’affaire Cummings as a bat-signal that lockdown was basically over and the country must get back to work to fill rishi’s coffers, and that (Allelujah!) we could begin to see people again.
As things stand, with foreign travel off, the main thing I am looking forward to over the staycation summer is limited ‘bubbling’ with friends and family.
But men (top of the blacklist: my husband) don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to do that either. Lockdown has turned blokes into Uncle Matthews — the crusty in the Nancy Mitford novels, who refused to go out on the grounds he had a perfectly good house of his own.
Until things go back to normal — and they won’t, as life can’t be made 100 per cent safe — our menfolk can continue to shield behind ‘the science’ when it comes to future socialising. They can even say they could ‘kill people’ if they do go out, which sounds deeply mad. It’s clear that those men, addicted to lockdown, must be encouraged out into the world again.
Last week, I drove to the moor with my daughter to swim. I got chatting to a woman with three small children, at a safe distance, on the grassy riverbank.
‘I feel as if I’ve been incarcerated, I just had to get out,’ she said. ‘even though I’m shielded.’ I asked her why. ‘I’ve got cancer,’ she told me, as her children splashed happily in the Barle. ‘But I don’t want to stay indoors in a flat. That is not life. I want to my life.’
That’s the attitude we need right now.
Women of Britain say Go!