The sun is out and I’ve lost 2lb. So why do I feel so gloomy?
THE day that tennis courts, golf courses and garden centres were joyously reopened, I hit a personal low. Having been unusually bullish and upbeat for most of this lockdown, last Wednesday I was swamped by unspecified despair. There was no obvious reason why that should be. It was a sunny morning, I’d had some good news on the work front, the bathrooms scales showed a 2lb drop, and, most importantly, no one I knew was ill.
On any rational level there was more progress that day, on the possibility of life resuming some form of normality, than we had seen in weeks.
Yet I suddenly felt hopeless, trapped in a potentially neverending split-screen existence – one half showing a perfectly pleasant and not wildly changed life; the other featuring the consequences of a global pandemic where tens of thousands of people are suffering and dying.
Also depressing for someone like me – who enjoys being able to plan ahead and feel that, to some degree, I can achieve those plans – was the total inability to have any certainty over the future. Absolutely nothing was in my control.
SO I removed my gloomy self from the others, watched a bit of TV (the BBC’s Nordic drama Twin) and went to bed. The next morning, optimism returned.
I write this not because this pattern is any way uncommon, but because it isn’t. As we have had to adjust to a different reality, most of us have had our own mood swings – and those of others around us – to deal with. One person’s up is another person’s down. Some days our prowess in making soda bread or managing to descale the bathroom taps gives us a sense of purpose and satisfaction; on others they provide neither.
There are moments when many of us would admit to actually enjoying the freedom from conventional life and time out from normality, while simultaneously we speak to a friend or member of our family who is felled by apprehension. Of course, in normal times we all have our bleak days and bad moods, but in lockdown they are more pervasive and more obvious to those around us. It’s harder to dodge and deflect them.
Work is often a great way to jolt us out of gloom but is a less reliable panacea while working from home, which demands a degree of selfdiscipline with none of the collateral energy that comes from colleagues. Isolation unhelpfully feeds introspection. And anyway, whatever way we spin it, there is something really worrying going on. There’s no escaping it.
Today though, the sun is out again. I plan a trip to the garden centre. I have a new thriller to read. Nobody I know or have heard of has contracted even a mild case of the virus for well over a month.
Undoubtedly the lows will come knocking again for me and all of us. But they will pass.
A RECENT survey states that book-buying has increased (though by rather more in the digital and audio market than in print) because people currently have more spare time. I’m intrigued by what is meant by spare time. I feel busier than ever. Is that because I’m involved in an unusual amount of housework alongside other work? If so, is that happening in my spare time? Does chatting on the phone qualify as taking place in spare time? Is sending an email to a friend a spare time activity, and one to the car insurers not? What’s the opposite of spare time anyway? Just curious…