LESSONS FROM LOCKDOWN:
Forced to self-isolate early, Samantha Trenoweth learns patience and pilates, and that it’s a small world after all.
embracing baking, pilates and slow living in these unprecedented times
It was Monday February 3, around 10pm. The Q+A bush re special was on ABCTV. It seems like an age ago.
Toby, my partner of 27 years, took a phone call. He froze in the doorway, his face white, his eyes like
shbowls. He’d been grappling with heart failure for a decade but he’d only been on the transplant list a few weeks. Now a heart had come up that matched him above every other candidate in Australia. He had until midnight to pack a bag and get to Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital cardiac ward.
For a fortnight, all our lives – Toby’s, mine, our daughter’s – revolved around the hospital. And when we emerged, the world had shifted radically on its axis. On the day of his transplant, there were four con rmed cases of COVID-19 in NSW. On the day he came home, that number had risen to 22. Three weeks later there were 1918 cases, and Australia was heading for lockdown.
Scientists became superheroes. The ABC’s Dr Norman Swan had more kudos than Chris Hemsworth. He could get a front row ticket to any show in town – if there were any shows in town. He said bunker down, so we bunkered down, perhaps a little earlier than most and with a little more urgency. On Toby’s hefty dose of immunosuppressants, he couldn’t afford to catch a snif e, let alone this new strain of fast-track pneumonia. And gradually I learnt, as we’ve all learnt, to take life at a different pace – a slower pace – and to rearrange priorities. I learnt to bake bread and meditate the Oprah Winfrey way. I learnt that no amount of power walking and yoga had prepared me for sitting in on an online pilates class with my 21-year-old kid. And once The Weekly started working remotely, I learnt what my cats do in the daytime (sleep on my computer and launch aerial raids on my shoes mostly). There were other lessons, too – some lightweight life hacks and some that feel a little more meaningful. In case they’re of use in the weeks and months ahead, here are a few that I’ve decided are keepers.
Lesson 1:
It’s worth getting up an hour early to walk to work through deserted streets and dewy grass and a misty, pink sunrise. If I’m honest, I learnt this a fortnight before the lockdown. My rst concession to the virus was to stop catching the train. And when the lockdown’s over and the daily commute begins again, I hope this lesson sticks because time slowed with every footfall and I arrived at the of ce with rosy cheeks and a lighter heart.
Lesson 2:
Nurses are the bee’s knees. I think we’ve all learnt that. In the rst few months, there’s some adjusting to do to this transplant thing and there was always a nurse
or a doctor on the end of the line, 24/7, to reassure us, to answer questions, to check blood test results. Now, all over the world, they’re risking their lives in Intensive Care units and fever clinics. They should be paid like kings.
Lesson 3:
Do more with less. Stockpiling is not my thing. Even if I thought it was a good idea, I’m just not suf ciently organised, and we have no storage. So when there was no rice or pasta left on supermarket shelves, when even the potatoes had vanished – and who on earth was stockpiling my favourite spelt bread? – it was time to improvise.
My daughter, Alice, and I dusted off our dog-eared collection of Women’s Weekly cookbooks and got creative with whatever ingredients were on hand. We made a fruit loaf with semolina left over from the Christmas cake. (It wasn’t bad.) She made the best biscuits I’ve ever eaten from dark chocolate, hazelnuts and unidenti ed our that we found at the back of the cupboard. There was a very impressive salad tossed together with oranges, chickpeas, coriander, feta and seeds (no-one was stockpiling pepitas). Instead of a chore, making dinner became a highlight of the day. We’d all pitch in, we’d laugh a lot and we’d appreciate (if not always thoroughly enjoy) every mouthful.
Lesson 4:
Make it from scratch. Around week three, I felt the need to phone an expert. I called up Barbara Butchart, who was a homemaking writer at The Weekly in the 1960s, and is a woman who has never been bored.
“What can I turn my hand to with most craft shops closed, and limited talent and resources?” I asked. She had a craftbox full of tips.
“Take up knitting,” she suggested. A bold move for a seriously uncoordinated novice, but she promised all I’d need was a generous-sized ball of wool and
a pair of large (she recommended 20.00mm wood) needles, and I could make myself a beautiful little winter scarf in a day or two. “Cast on 14 stitches,” she said, “knit garter stitch until you’re out of wool.” I had to Google garter stitch but I’m happy to report it worked!
She also suggested making greeting cards. “You can collage them from scraps of paper and fabric, make potato prints, draw or paint with whatever you have to hand.” Then post them to distant or isolated family and friends.
Lesson 5:
Be kind to yourself and others. Week four wasn’t easy. There’s only so long three adults can spend all day and night in a two-bedroom, inner-city cottage before something gives. It was time to consult another expert, psychologist Julie Catt.
“Humans need to be in contact with other humans,” she explained. “We’re very social animals. Even people who
think of themselves as introverts still need to be part of a community. We’re hardwired for that.”
There are people who are suffering from the isolation and people who are suffering from what she calls “the opposite of isolation. They’re with their family or their housemates day in and day out. There’s no respite. It’s hard to get private time. If those relationships have any cracks in them, those become very apparent.”
Whether they’re having relationship problems or isolation problems, whether they’re anxious about their health or their loved ones or they’ve lost employment and “the scaffolding has fallen away form their lives,” Julie says that this virus has thrown almost 80 per cent of her patients into crisis.
Her message is be kind to yourself, look out for your friends and family and the vulnerable people around you, and don’t be too swift to judge. “There’s no pass or fail at this. We’re just all getting through.” Which leads us to lesson six…
Lesson 6:
Stay connected. My little family might have bunkered down in a tiny cottage, but human ingenuity was creating a million new ways to reach out. As gyms and yoga studios closed, a cornucopia of physical exercise options sprang up online, either free or at a price that allowed for experimentation.
I tried pilates, emerged an aching, dizzy wreck and had to lie down for the rest of the night, but I might go back, you never know. I took an online beginners class with the Sydney Dance Company, which was massive fun, and I would never have had the courage to turn up in real life. Plus I kept up my walking and a bit of yoga. By the second week of lockdown I’d found muscles that I swear I’d never felt before.
“Join a choir” had been languishing unexplored on my New Year’s resolutions list since 2011. By the third week of lockdown, I’d signed up to two.
The Aussie women behind the phenomenally successful Pub Choir launched Couch Choir. They choose a song, send out the parts, you select the right one for you and record it on your phone or computer. Then they pull everyone’s recordings together and upload the
nal mix to YouTube. The rst one, The Carpenters’ Close To You, made me cry.
I’ve been quick to tears lately. I think we all have, and that’s not a bad thing. Italians singing on their balconies made me cry. The 10pm rounds of applause for healthcare workers made me cry. And the sweetest rendition of When I Grow Up from Matilda the Musical by a little girl called Hope, age eight, from Cambridge in the UK, made me cry as well.
That was in the Open Mic session that followed my rst singalong with James Sills’ Sofa Singers. In this choir, hundreds of people sing at once, and the night I joined there were singers from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Canada, the United States, the UK, New Zealand, Mexico and Kenya. James, who is choirmaster, picks a song and the group rehearses it on the Zoom app. Then the whole thing is broadcast live on YouTube. Annette from Nottingham had been separated by the virus from her husband working in Japan. Nuria from Madrid has been cooped up indoors with her dog, Ruffa, for weeks. The mingling of voices around the globe helped us, for 45 minutes, to remember that we’re all connected, that we really are one humanity.
It would be funny if our isolation was the very thing that united us. If we suddenly realised that we’re all in this together, with the potential not just to
ght a particularly virulent virus but to create a safer, kinder, more beautiful, bountiful, diverse world.
Could the virus teach us that or am I pushing my luck?
Professor Ian Hickie, co-director of the
Brain and Mind
Centre at The University of Sydney, doesn’t think it’s such a far-fetched idea.
“I do believe that Australia has a strong social fabric,” he says. “When we get physically isolated, we can draw closer together.”
It’s been a hell of a year for Australia, lurching from drought to re, and now this. I think we coast dwellers have emerged a little less cocky and sure of ourselves, a little less secure, more vulnerable. I wouldn’t ask for any of this again but I’m grateful at least for some of the lessons I’ve learnt in lockdown. I just hope I can hold onto them. I hope we all can. AWW