Lockdown is giving Britons a taste for Fifties home bliss
Last weekend I did two extraordinary things: for the first time in eight weeks I got in my car, drove to a field and walked around it. Last time I was there, the primroses and wild anemones were just opening. Now the bluebells are long gone and the meadowsweet is almost over, but from somewhere in the woods a cuckoo was calling. Mid-may is late to be hearing the first cuckoo of spring, but never has the call of that ruthless, slightly sinister but melodious bird been so welcome.
On the way back from my walk I went for coffee with a friend, N. We sat a safe distance apart in her garden, ate home-made buns as the next-door cat stalked and caught an unwary mouse, and compared experiences of lockdown. From the social media posts of other friends, I have the impression that lockdown in the countryside has been in some ways less wearisome than in cities: the police presence less obtrusive, and the sense of missing the loveliest season of the year less grievous than it has been in London.
But N is a young woman at the peak of a busy and glamorous career. She lives alone and I assumed she would be longing for a version of normality to resume. Not at all, she said. Since March, all the rhythms of her old life have been disrupted, and the disruption has been a revelation.
From a diet of restaurant food and ready-meals she has begun cooking for herself, buying fresh ingredients at nearby farm shops and losing weight in the process (unlike the rest of us, grimly battling what the Germans unenticingly call Covidspeck, or Covid lard). Working from home, she can arrange her day to take in a regular run, during which she has met many of her neighbours for the first time. And having undertaken a ruthless sort-out, she now has an immaculate filing cabinet and a lot less clutter.
“It’s like living in the Fifties,” she said of her new, simpler, kinder, tidier and more local life. She added quite vehemently that she had absolutely no intention of going back to the way things were: “I’d rather stay like this and take a salary hit.” N grew up in the Eighties and Nineties: for her the Fifties are the stuff of history textbooks. For those of us who remember our mothers in Fifties housewife mode, even as the Sixties rocked their world, the mores of that era can seem less charming, especially the squandering of women’s talents.
But as the Radio 2 presenter (and former ladette) Zoe Ball observed in Stella magazine: “I used to wish we had a Fifties style of life, and now that’s happened... I’m really hoping we keep this sense of community spirit.” The longing of Gen X-ers and millennials for a different, gentler life balance, of which the recent restrictions have given them a paradoxical glimpse, will surely influence our vision of the future as we emerge from the present crisis.
It has taken until
now for scientists to consider the baleful consequences of talking loudly – but better late than never. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reveals that loud speech leaves a residue of respiratory pathogens lingering in the atmosphere for up to 14 minutes. Which must mean the end for those maddening public phone conversations whose volume was matched only by their banality (“I’m on the train!”). Sad news for the perennially nosy. Quiet bliss for the rest of us.