Things I have learned during this global pandemic. It may appear it’s lasted forever but other things feel longer.
The time it takes to find your keys when you’re loaded up with shopping and it’s raining. Speeches at a family wedding. Monday morning meetings. Chats with your boss about how ‘things are going’. Friday afternoon meetings. The list of emails needing answered. Train journeys without headphones. Learning to speak French. Unskippable adverts on new games on your phone. The moment in the Lion King where Simba tries to waken Mufasa. To name but a few.
Absolutely nobody needs that much toilet paper or banana bread. I miss hugs but at the same time I don’t.
The reasons I never became a teacher. Patience, tolerance and the ability to respond politely to repeated rounds of ‘but why’ questions were found to be absent from my skill set.
The impossible task of combining a full time job with home schooling children requiring the equivalent of an 120 cover restaurant, plus snacks, per day and while retaining any scant resemblance of sanity. Total fail.
Children are fantastically resilient in the face of life changing turmoil. I believe we could learn a lot from them.
The novelty of Zoom calls wore off VERY quickly. Time spent on Zoom in no way correlated with my ability to curtail eye rolls or utilise the mute button.
According to himself, it IS possible to ‘finish’ Facebook. Once he’s finished a daily scroll, it is ‘done’. God bless the early 1990s for a lack of tinder and his perpetual beer goggles. I’d have been swiped left in an instant.
I will never take freezing my bits off to take the dogs on long walks for granted again. Ditto any activity or interaction allowing me face to face contact with persons other than those I birthed.
No more avoiding eye contact in the post office queue. You look at me, be prepared to have an over excited, lengthy chat, you’ve been warned.
I had no trouble getting all those jobs started…
Lack of free time didn’t stop me getting ‘all those jobs’ done. In fact, during lock down I’ve managed to start most of them. It’s getting them finished that seems to be the issue. I am distracted by everything.
Even things that don’t concern me, my brain apparently has eleventy billion tabs open in its browser just in case I need to ‘refer back’.
You might have been able to clean your house every day BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO CLEAN YOUR HOUSE EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
I really miss live gigs – but
I really miss gigs. To be at a live performance, immersed in the music with others you know feel the same. OR to be at a comedy show belly laughing until tears run down my cheeks. Only please could there now be no big crowds to jostle through? Intimate gigs only. Twenty persons tops. And I get choose the other attendees.
Receiving mystery packages has become the equivalent level of excitement I used to experience for a banging Saturday night out in the 90s. Remember nights out? No, me either and to be honest when this is all over, I’ll probably treat myself to a quiet night in with a scented candle.
This is not the pain Olympics
The kindness, consideration and coming together of people has been truly humbling. The generosity of the human spirit knows almost no bounds. Okay, maybe a tiny minority of people won’t let something like a global pandemic stand in the way of their ability to be utter gits. Such is life. I wish they’d realise grief and loss is not a competition, this is not the pain Olympics.
Our health is infinitely precious, with mental health as important as physical wellbeing. I now realise I write so I have space to think. And I am a proud collector of people. You lose a lot of ‘friends’ after a life altering diagnosis, but I am a lot stronger and luckier than I ever knew.
The NHS is incredible and all involved are the ones that kept our world turning. I won’t write out all the jobs due to the ‘what about’ brigade, but to the brilliant front line and key workers: you know who you are and thank you. The world keeps turning and in the grand scheme of it all we are almost insignificant. There is something strangely reassuring about that.
- For more on Mary-Jane Duncan see: Unexpectedly back in the hospital clinic, but I’m not new to this
