Five things I will actually miss from lockdown
WHILE we’re all enjoying having a bit more freedom following the pandemic and all the restrictions it brought, there are certain things I miss from lockdown.
I haven’t missed anything from the second lockdown, or the third, or however many we’ve actually had now, but I do look back on elements of the first lockdown with some fond memories.
I didn’t catch the lurgy, and neither did my friends and family. I didn’t lose my job, and I was lucky enough to have a wife and two dogs to spend it with. We also have a garden, which allowed us to capitalise on all that nice weather.
But here’s five specific things I’ll miss about “lockdown one”...
1. EMPTY ROADS: When I pop to the shops I have to cross a busy road. The other day it took me five minutes to find a gap in the traffic. Before the pandemic that was nothing unusual, but during the lockdown I could stand for five minutes just waiting for a car to come past.
And during the spring of 2020, on the odd occasion I had to drive out somewhere to report on something, every journey was blissful. I realised last month I’d actually forgotten what it was like to hear my sat-nav ping up a report of a jam somewhere, or what the traffic news sounded like on BBC Radio Derby.
2. CATCHING UP WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY:
Yes, it sounds absurd, but although we couldn’t see them in person, my wife and I actually communicated with our nearest and dearest more during the lockdowns than we ever have. My wife’s parents, for example, quickly got to grips with Zoom, so we virtually met up with my mother-inlaw at least two or three times a week. But there were also people I was happy to catch up with. Aunties and uncles, cousins and former neighbours, friends from overseas. People we wouldn’t normally have connected with for years on end suddenly started inviting us to Zoom calls and Houseparty sessions. I grant you, it’s not the same as seeing them in person, but it certainly beat the annual roundrobin letter in a Christmas card.
3. ONE HOUR OF EXERCISE:
There’s something about having a liberty forcefully restricted that just makes you all the more determined to savour every last minute of it. During the first lockdown we were allowed to go out of our homes for one hour each day for some exercise and we made the most of it. My wife and I soon realised that, if we got a bit of a stomp on, we could dust off a three-mile circular in that time. And once we’d subscribed to the Ordnance Survey’s great online map system, we started to find all sorts of hidden corners of our local area that we’d never normally have discovered.
Properly exploring and getting to know the place we live for the first time is something we’ll never do again, but we relished it in the lockdown. Some of our favourite, tucked-away spots are now on our regular dog-walks. That’s a lockdown legacy we cherish.
4. GETTING THINGS DONE:
My job became quite full-on during the early stages of the pandemic, but my wife was instantly furloughed. And, with the pubs shut and many meetings cancelled, it meant I had evenings free to join her on a series of projects we’ve been meaning to tackle for years. Everything from sorting a pile of rubbish in the spare room, organising bookcases, weeding the garden, even painting most of the rooms in the house, got done. Having said that, it’s remarkable how quickly a long list of things we need to get done has mounted up again since her ladyship went back to work and life became busy again. And there’s now a new pile of rubbish in the spare room. It’ll probably be there until the next pandemic.
5. AN EMPTY DIARY: Every year, every season, every month, our diary was busy. We lived by our joint calendar apps and, usually, if someone asked us when we were next free to meet up, we’d only be able to find a slot for them four or five months down the line.
In some ways, this was a nice problem to have. I love being busy and I have an irrational fear of boredom. But when the world ground to a halt we had to basically wipe all our events out and clear the calendar, month by month. It was quite cathartic not having to constantly tick dates off.
Since the restrictions started to ease, it hasn’t taken long to fill up the calendar again. My mother-inlaw has just asked when she can next come and visit and we had to inform her our next free weekend was at the start of August.
Oh, well. Every cloud and all that.