Farewell, blissfully empty diary. My social life is back on

Iwent to the post office last week and, as I was standing in the queue wondering whether I’d make it home before Christmas or should ring mum and tell her to get the turkey on, I noticed a large pile of 2020 wall calendars on the till. “Please take for free,” said a small sign in wobbly handwriting beside them. There it was, 2020 in a nutshell: calendars have become so redundant they can’t even be given away. I grimaced to myself while the woman at the head of the queue continued to deliberate over the packaging and postage of a single golf club she was sending to her son in the North.

From the end of March until the end of June, my own diary was as lacklustre as Miss Havisham’s. I stopped looking at it and, in truth, relished the lack of social pressure.

What was I doing this Saturday? Nothing! What was I doing the Saturday after that? The same! Any sense of FOMO I had evaporated, since I knew everyone else was also caged indoors, wondering what to watch on telly. I could have a bath at 9pm and go to bed safe in the knowledge that nobody was out having a better time than me. Marvellous.

Alas, in the past few weeks, this has all changed. If I open up Instagram, I note with dismay that competitive socialising is back: someone I vaguely know has just eaten crab for lunch in a Cornish pub, another is sunbathing in Puglia and an old school friend has just thrown a socially distanced barbecue. It looks extremely tiring, all this activity, but because I don’t want to become the sort of misanthrope whose sole outing each week is to spend several hours queuing for stamps, I decided I had to start making plans again.

How? I’ve forgotten. Like a small child with a Rubik’s cube, I frowned down at my empty diary, unsure how to proceed. “Shall we do… something this Saturday?” I texted my friend Lils, almost as nervous as if I’d asked her out on a date. What should this something be? The situation is doubly confusing because I’m unsure what’s