Polly Vernon has her say
FIRST DAY BACK with my boxing class! The joy, the joy, the unadulterated, unalloyed, unlimited joy! Not just because of the exercise: the ritual of hand wrapping, the warm-up nerves, the punching, the sweating, the sudden delicious onset of endorphin whoosh… But because of them! The group! The bliss of being part of a real life, real live group again! A collective! A wide-ranging, fluctuating dynamic, multiple shades of character, bouncing off each other, twisting and turning and jostling; pulling together, batting away. The dance of it, the in-jokes and ganging-ups against shared nemeses, the crowdsourcing of problems, the splintering and comingback-together of conversation, the mishaps, misunderstandings, the shouting at each other over the class soundtrack of driving, slaggy club tunes.
None of this works on Whatsapp or Zoom. It’s too delicate, too subtle, too dependent on flickering side-eye, timing, the multidimensional, multisensory, organic experience of real frigging life! I’d missed it more than I’d realised, more than I knew was possible. Being deprived of group interactions leads to a particular kind of loneliness, don’t you think?
Class finishes. We go for a coffee so long overdue, it should be a crime. We bask in the specific, tiny society of Us like it’s sunlight; fill up on each other, on one another’s stories, sadnesses, incidental eccentricities, our chat segueing through dark and light and silly and raw. We recount: our experiences of furlough, redundancy, the particular hell of WFH, which we’d first thought so fun, only… Yeah. No. It’s not. The re-emergence of halfforgotten eating disorders; the assorted ‘genius’ business concepts we’d concocted while cosseted away in locked-down states of semi-sanity (among which: the Pedi-lilo™ and the Motley Crewneck™). The people we’ve dumped, or who dumped us. We have an intense debate regarding S&M, which some of us like, some of us don’t, one of us (me) dismisses as too much admin, and which someone else initially misunderstands as a conversation regarding the supermarket, then, the chocolate. We consider the potentially – oh no, hang on, now we come to talk about it, make that distinctly – racist undertones of the phrase ‘Chinese whispers’, a conversation which, had we attempted it online or over Whatsapp, would surely have disintegrated into a snarky, divisive, identity politics-riven row regarding the woke-ification/casual racism of the whole frigging world – only under these circs? It’s a gentle chat, followed by an unrelated unpacking of the hotness or otherwise of Chef Ben from Below Deck.
I leave – eventually, reluctantly – go home, shower off the boxing sweat, then sit on my sofa, dappled by an emotion I’d forgotten I was capable of. A completeness. A… social satiety. Like the hole I hadn’t even realised had sneakily, progressively opened up within me, over the last long, drab, achingly lonely months of restriction, had been suddenly, wonderfully, filled.