Time passes slowly in lockdown’s dreary January

DREARY dry lockdown January. Discuss. Or not. I say not because there really isn’t very much to say. The sameness of the days is, umm, samey – and the sort of weekends that I used to love – those when you had absolutely nothing to do, could lie in bed, and watch TV for hours – are now distinctly less appealing. People I have been talking to – remotely of course – seem to fall into two camps. The first are still loving it. The barricades are up, food and drink is delivered remotely, they’ve barely been outside the house. Their worry is going back to normal, having to get up an hour earlier, iron a shirt, put on on make-up, or heels, and commute. “I’m not sure I could face that again,” one colleague said to me this week. The other camp are more restless, or to be more accurate, just plain bored.

Boredom is a tricky state of mind, because if it really takes hold, you are so bored you are even bored by the things that normally interest you. Even Mrs Martin, normally in her element sorting out things at home, is beginning to feel it. Bear in mind that if ‘pottering’ was a profession, she would be a chief exec and we’d have a second home in the Bahamas. But after months and months of doing stuff round the house this week she started to feel like climbing the walls. She’s all pottered out. Mum’s sage-like advice of “Well, go outside and do something then,” is redundant because we are not allowed. So sleep, exercise, telly, it is. The Boy’s T-shirt emblazoned with the legend: “Sleep, Game, Repeat” has never seemed so appropriate (apart from in his world of course where it has been lore for years).

With so little to distract from the mundanity of lockdown life, little things have become big, and we are saving up former chores to use as things to do. “How’s your Wednesday looking,” Mrs Martin inquired this week. “I’m excited,” I replied. “I am going to have a shave.” We talk a lot about what to eat and who’s going to cook it, and are getting increasingly competitive about who gets to walk the dogs, or, even better, who’s going to put out the bins. At work I’ve actually started looking at those awful e-mails I get from PR people who don’t know me but pretend they do (Hi Bill, I hope you had a great weekend, I thought you’d be interested.. etc) just because clap-trap like “Seven ways to make your home office more like an office,” and “Half of UK adults would like to eat more plant-based breakfasts” is a break from anything to do with you know what.

Increasingly the days are merging into one, making anything we are still allowed to do crucial. Due to a sleep-related reason I missed a morning workout this week – and for an hour or so I thought my world had collapsed. Thank goodness I’ve got work to keep me occupied. Without

that the weekends would be just like Wednesdays, and night just like day. That’s already happened in the next door bedroom where The Boy lives with his gadgets. I was up extra early just before six this morning to catch a little bit of the cricket in Sri Lanka. The tell-tale blue light was seeping out from under his bedroom door and I could hear the frenetic clicking of the keyboard. I knocked and went in and there he was having pulled an all-nighter and fully plugged in to some sort of battle with gamer friends from Sweden.

“It’s quarter to six in the morning,” I said in an astonished fatherly manner. “And?” was the teenagerly reply. Good point, I thought, and went back to bed.

There’s an awful lot of time to fill at the moment.