ELLIE HARRISON
While online life has been a saviour in lockdown, there’s nothing quite like real experiences
Online calls have been a lockdown saviour, but I’ve missed real interactions. These are the experiences I’m booking in.
As commendable as Zoom calls have been, they are still light years away from the real thing. Without an instructor to correct posture, a therapist to feel the atmosphere of empathy or the ability to read an awkward silence from a friend, online life misses nearly everything. Someone I know has just put in a lots-of-zeros offer on a house they have only seen on a computer, yet I happen to know that it has the noise of an A-road, a railway line and professional dog kennels within earshot of the front door.
TIME TO STRETCH OUR WINGS
Local walks in the real world have mollified us through this dreadful year but, although there are some people for whom lockdown has been an entirely preferable way of life, many of us want to go out way beyond the horizon once more.
It’s physical presence and real encounters that we covet. The list will be unique to everyone, but these are just a handful of the experiences I am booking in for when lockdown eases.
MY POST-LOCKDOWN PLANS
1. Festival life, sitting on the dry grass, drinking and listening to music in the sun. Curiously for me it’s a subconscious benchmark for easy company – would they just sit on the ground with me in the sunshine or do they require a knife and fork and chair? I can tell you, the answer has nothing to do with age.
2. Wondering at the sky stage-set for starling murmurations at dusk on Brighton Pier or the Somerset Levels. It’s a show of simplicity and quiet that will return you peacefully to bed.
3. Finally getting to stay overnight in a treehouse, a plan that has been kicked down the calendar months over and over again. This one is a gem, with a miniature and minimal two-roomed cabin perched up in the canopy, surrounded by a tiny deck and finished off with a bath tub to soak up the birdsong.
4. Swimming in the sea, just about anywhere. Funnily enough, beaches are the places where social distancing (a phrase I hope dies out swiftly) has been inherent in British culture forever.
5. Catching sight of bats against the last light, telling fleeting secrets of their evening’s plans.
6. Hearing skylarks lifting off into the clouds as the weather warms. My best tip for learning their song is to listen to Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness, particularly at 2:55.
7. Going anywhere in rural Scotland.
8. Games of rounders and picnics complete with all-size scotch eggs, flasks of coffee and anything else that was once deemed controversial. I’m especially looking forward to an end to the fear of suspicion that had poisoned us all. From now on, we are all countryside allies who love the natural world. We pass each other with respect and smiles, safe in the knowledge that nobody is trying to harm one another and nobody is about to squeal to a hotline.
9. Paddleboarding wherever they’ll have me. 10. Filming across the whole of these lands, meeting good people who represent our full country life and whose real stories off-camera will never cease to fascinate me. But especially standing side-by-side with contributors and crew members, elbowing each other as we laugh, heads together looking at the monitor and shaking hands in physical recognition of each other, under the sky and in this new moment.