Lockdown guilt? Well, every front line needs a back line

SO here we are, only days away from the lifting of lockdown, and not a child in the house washed. Not only that, but I’ll bet I’m not the only one who didn’t get around to learning a new language during the last four months. I honestly intended spending some time brushing up on my Irish, but in the end, I read just six more pages of Fiche Bliain Ag Fás, which I bought in the Blasket Interpretative Centre last summer and, in a great burst of enthusiasm, read just a single page of.

I didn’t build any flatpack furniture either. I find trips to Ikea when there isn’t a global pandemic afoot a bit apocalyptic, so I didn’t particularly fancy rocking up there in the past couple of weeks. Still, I suppose I could have considered putting up a shelf.

I did sand and oil my garden shed and all my patio furniture, but that was absolutely ages ago and if I’m honest, I didn’t do the legs of the table because I was saving them for I’m not sure what now.

I didn’t bake. Not once. Not as much as a crumb of banana bread was created or consumed in my house.

And now, suddenly, it feels like there’s no time left to do all the things I didn’t do when I had the chance.

I didn’t think Fear Of Missing Out could possibly exist at a time when there was nothing to miss out on, but here I am, FOMO-ing at the mouth for all the opportunities I’ve wasted over the past four months. And it’s not just me: up and down the country, there is a sense of a mad scramble now to have something to show for all this time when most of us, if we’re totally honest, achieved nothing.

To be fair, I did watch all the television. My friend Robbie tells me he read the whole internet. My youngest daughter, instead of doing her Leaving Cert, curated a list of all the films she watched in lockdown and to my dismay, I realise I watched almost all of them with her – along with several Netflix series and most of whatever was on the real telly as well.

And I read a lot of books. But I didn’t attempt a triathlon in a bathtub in my back garden. I didn’t do a single Joe Wicks workout or a yoga class, and apart from two Scratch gigs that my son press-ganged me into, I didn’t watch any live streamed music or drama performances.

Awed though I am of their remarkable work, I didn’t stand outside my house and applaud frontline workers once. I didn’t play bingo on my road or do a Tik Tok dance.

My best friend is beating herself up because she never cleared out her wardrobes and next week, she’s going to her mobile home in Wexford so now there probably isn’t time.

I’ve had a few conversations like those over the past few days: people (well, women) feeling suddenly guilty about not making more productive use of an extraordinary time and an extraordinary amount of time.

Asked what we could do for our country, it seems a lot of us – myself included – decided the answer was not very much at all.

BUT I think that’s OK. Because in the end, that was all we were asked to do. Stay home, take it handy, mind your family and mind your head. If you did all of that, then that’s probably heroism enough for now. Not frontline heroism; not the sort of stuff that creates headlines, but quiet stoicism at a time when that was what was called for. Ultimately, doing nothing probably saved more lives than all the people who work on the frontline did. You can’t have a front line without a back line and even if it didn’t feel particularly worthy, being in the back line, quietly following protocols was probably as important a job as any other. Cast your mind back to the very start of this – to those terrifying, sleep-deprived uncertain early days – and you’ll recall that nobody suggested that we spend our time sharpening our DIY skills or refining banana bread recipes.

All we were asked to do was stay home and stay safe.

And we did. As we re-emerge blinking from our cocoons and our lockdowns in the coming days, back to transformed nervous communities, we should give ourselves a clap on the back for that. We survived.

Tragically, many didn’t. And honestly, even if you only did it in one language, that is more than enough.