It is not just loved ones I miss, but the joy of hanging out with casual friends
Mr Z and I spent the first couple of hours of a lockdown morning exactly as our enemies would imagine, with him making me guess George Orwell’s measure of a perfect pub.
“Fags. People smoking fags,” I responded immediately. “It should sell tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirin and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone,” he corrected. I started moaning, because that is four criteria, not one, and these are not terms on which any decent person would run a quiz. I had another go – “Does the woman behind the bar know your name?” – only to be shot down again. Yes, she knows your name, in Orwell pubtopia, but she also has her hair dyed in a surprising shade and calls you “dear”, not “duckie”. “This sucks,” I said. “You’re bad at quizzing.” “You just miss pubs.”
Actually, I was missing a particular friend. She hates Orwell because she thinks he was a centrist melt. You could never live with a person that uncompromising – I am not even sure she would be a brilliant social mixer – and that is why it is so important to be able to see her whenever I like. (Her critique of Orwell is a bit more complicated than that; it is that the poor, in his telling, are always sad and never angry, which disempowers them and, crucially, makes Orwell’s anger the force through which their predicament has to be alleviated. But sure, that is “centrist melt” in today’s money – and you will agree, I think, that you could never live with this person.)
The great fallacy of the phased end to lockdown is that we miss activities: golf, fishing, tennis, shopping, drinking coffee, eating ice-cream, visiting frivolous shops that are open even if our frivolity has been satisfied for the day. I swear, all these activities are just excuses for interactions and other people are the only reason we do them. That is the magnificent insult of golf courses being opened first – not that they are for rich people (although they are), nor for men (although that is true), but that people who play golf are those who crave human warmth the least.
They should have been accommodated last.
I want to moan about not seeing someone without having to justify how important or isolated they are. It is a given that we want to see our nearest and dearest; I also want to see my nearish and dearish. I miss the people I had steadily become quite close to, over years and years of the same conversations at the school gates, about greenenergy municipal bonds, or about my fringe. We never had that gear-change conversation where we said: “I know we met through school/work/hair, but I think we’re actually friends now.”
I went back to the quiz. “I bet he liked a bit of stained glass, Orwell.” “I can’t give you that, I’m afraid,” said Mr Z, in an excellent impersonation of cruelly insincere quizmaster sympathy. “There’s no stained glass, just Victoriana: ‘The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece.’” “Orwell doesn’t understand anything. He is a centrist melt.”
“Would it help if we went to a garden centre?” Let me think … if there were people I knew there and we could walk up and down the plant aisles, chatting through the sides of our mouths, like John le Carré meets Alan Titchmarsh, although we wouldn’t be talking about plants, then yes, I would consider it. “That’s not a garden centre, that’s a garden party,” said monsieur.
I would consider joining a tennis club if the club house were open and I didn’t have to play tennis. “That’s more like a dry pub.” I would think about taking unlimited exercise if it were formation ice-skating and I could have a different partner every day and we didn’t have to do any actual skating; I could just stand there, holding hands in a criss-cross pattern. “I don’t know what that is,” he replied.
“I’m not saying I’m tired of you,” I said. “I’m just saying, if this gets any worse, I’ll have to wake up a child and talk to them instead.”
They get up at 11 now, which – with a bit of fluctuation, depending on the brightness of the sun and the new found assertiveness of the birdsong – means we have already lived six hours of the day without them. Looked at that way, for practical purposes, they are back at school. The one in year six also potentially has to go back in June. She reacted with ear-splitting rage to the news that she would probably be three months ahead of the others. I said it would be great. She said: “Name one great thing about school.” After I had named about 35, she said witheringly: “But those are all people.” “That’s the point! People are the whole point of education!” “I don’t think that’s right,” she said. “No wonder you’re so bad at quizzes,” said Mr Z, “if you think people are the point of education.” “At least I don’t think a stuffed bull’s head is the point of a pub.”