The Quirks of Lockdown

I’m back in London, and life as we’ve known it since mid-March is slowly beginning to bear more semblances to normality. Three months of hunkering down either completely alone or with others 24 hours a day. (It doesn’t seem like a middle ground is possible.) I did something I thought I’d never, ever do again – other than the odd week at Christmas or in the summer – and that’s move back to my parents’, together with one of my sisters plus my brother, all of us choosing the comparative space and countryside that comes with Gloucestershire-quarantine over London confinement.

Everyone’s looking forward to some normality – it’s made me appreciate so much more little pleasures I take for granted: jumping on a train, getting fixed up at a brow bar, hugging friends at church… I’m finding I’ve just generally missed people… whether that’s milling around in an office, on a packed out train, or in a Pilates class. I’ve missed real-life, in-person people.

Yet, when I look back at the three months I’ve spent cooped up 24-7 with my family, I know there will be moments we will all look back on with fondness. It’s revealed a layer of humanity to me that I didn’t experience in pre-Covid life. It’s humanity that gets revealed in incessant, day-in-day-out routine. Pre-Covid, I had very little routine in my life. One day rarely looked like the next. The last few months, every weekday has begun in exactly the same way, plodding along much the same way each day, because I found that was the best way to manage lockdown life. My family have found the same, and so we’ve each had our interwoven, WFH, interdependent routines, like a daily dance around each other.

On the one hand, routines are comforting, calming. Returning from my run, every single morning, to find my dad in the same spot in the kitchen, every single morning, with the coffee just made, is a touching start to the day. I will miss some of our regular habits: our daily lunch break in the garden, our weekly scramble over the top of our local hill, the weekly sugar-free tray bake I make (vainly attempting to avoid the Covid calories), the sacrosanct 4pm afternoon tea in the garden at weekends, our Friday night games night, the Sunday livestreamed Mass. Routines make for golden, consoling memories. They also make you more alert to reality: we are noticing birds so much more, observing the changes in the fields we walk through.

They also forge ridiculous idiosyncrasies in us. I know way too much about the details of my family’s particular likes and dislikes. I swear no one was so particular before lockdown. There’s something about repetitive, unabating routine that entrenches your preferences: the weird preference for certain mugs (or even worse, for certain mugs at certain times of the day); the routes of regularly repeated countryside walks that are never swerved from; the well-worn furrows of in-jokes and familiar conversation topics. Occasionally we have to shake things up and do something completely different (Pimm’s instead of gin and tonic this evening anyone?!) for fear that we slip too deeply into our care-home-like regularity.

I’m not gonna lie, I’ll enjoy London life again, with a little bit more spontaneity and pizzazz. Yet there’s something about routine that I’ve found deeply peaceful; I think a part of my heart yearns for it, even when it gives way to boredom. Many of us are making discoveries of layers of our humanity we do not want to lose again. While I’ll miss spending my evenings painting-by-numbers listening to David Copperfield, there’s something about the pace and rhythm of this time I dearly want to hold onto.

Transformed in Christ