Zoe STRIMPEL

Over the past year, we have all learned far more about one aspect of ourselves than we ever hoped to: namely, what we’re like in a pandemic. We have learned that we can pass months toying with sourdough starter and banana bread recipes, glued to graphics explaining how virus particles fly through the air or how a spike protein binds to a cell receptor.

We have learned how productive we are when the chips are down and how well we sleep when there’s nothing on. We have learned how we cope with long periods of isolation and monotony and the sense of being trapped not just in our homes or in a stricken country, but in a shutdown world.

The most precise thing we have learned is what we can live without in peace, and what we crave and need. And with Boris’s roadmap back to normality offering tentative dates for the reopening of different sectors of society, we finally have the chance to plan our triumphant return to the things we love, to hover over the “book” button on the right websites as soon as the starting gun sounds.

But the past year has led me to an interesting realisation. It turns out that the things I assumed I’d be falling over myself to sign up for as soon as they return aren’t actually the things that, truth be told, I feel all that bothered about.

My true cravings over the past year suggest that, at 38, I’m not quite the person I thought I was. Having lived in London my whole adult life, I thought I was a die-hard culture vulture and that the capital’s nightly options for arts and entertainment were a basic requirement for living my best life.

But the pandemic has taught me otherwise. Throughout, I have been waiting for the soulful cravings to hit for outings to the concert hall, the gallery, and above all, the theatre. The truth? I all but forgot about all three. I was only reminded of the existence of theatre – in normal times, my most frequented bit of culture – when a good and generous friend, a theatre critic, offered me a ticket to a play very near my flat, back in November.

It was great, but I didn’t feel a profound sense of a thirst being quenched, and promptly re-forgot about that particular art form when theatres closed again.

Don’t get me wrong. The arts are a flagship London marvel and a symbol of civilisation. But a year of quietude has left me less than keen on the trappings of it all: the schlepping on packed Tubes, hustling up endless escalators in crowded stations, making one’s way through the crowds to a ticket desk, paying £10 for a plastic cup of warm wine, squeezing into too-small seats with unwieldy bags and coats and people trying to get past, repeating it all again at the interval and then at the end, finally arriving home exhausted.

As for museums, of course we have some of the best in the world. But I can’t say I miss all that, either – again, the crowds, the journey, the being too hot, the queues for the cloakroom. Terrible of me, I know. But the pandemic has highlighted the shameful truth of just how damn lazy I really am. So lazy that the effort of booking and then getting to the piece of worldclass culture is enough to put me off the whole thing. I’d never, ever have allowed myself to so much as think this thought in pre-pandemic days, let alone live by it. But that was then.

So if I don’t need theatre and art to live a good life, what do I need? According to the year we’ve just had, the answer to that is embarrassingly simple and rather crude: unfettered physical and consumer freedom in the form of food, drink, somewhere to swim, the liberty to smooch those I want to smooch, and – this is a biggie – to get my nails done.

Travel is key, too, and in the summer lull I did manage to cadge some of that. And the truth is that, come August, I found that two weeks in a tourist-free Denmark was worth a thousand nights at the theatre.

Now, as the end finally hoves into view, I can boil my list down even further to just one word: beers. Above all, I want to be able to meet friends at the pub without having to make a booking in advance, and not just walk eternally around Hampstead Heath with all the thousands of other people unable to go inside.

I also miss my favourite locales for flat whites and a good laptop session. And I miss going out for dinner – nowhere posh, just somewhere familiar that’s lively and indulgent.

Last week, Jill Biden said that the first thing she planned to do when the pandemic was over was not to hit the theatre or the museum or the conference, but to go out for fries and martinis. That just about captures it. As much as I’d hoped I’d be first in line for tickets to Shakespeare at the Globe, the reality is I’m with Jill.

Bring on the drinks, the snacks and – did I mention it? – the nails.

‘Now, the thought of getting to a theatre is enough to put me off the whole thing’