I bloody love a good blether. A chin wag. A catch up. A heart to heart or a haver.
Any time I’m hearing a good pal’s crack or meeting someone new, I’m generally delighted. So lockdown was a real scunner fae my point of view.
As we pass from the brutal winter of social restriction and into a looser mode of life, and as the summer sun stutteringly shines, my social spirit has been raised alongside pints and shared smiles. Braw.
However, there is just a tiny part of me that raises alongside those frothy springtime pints a more sombre dram, in remembrance of the little joys that kept me afloat in lockdown.
The freshest pint and finest fries in Dundee
And whit a view! 😍
-at my brothers new place at the V&A pic.twitter.com/LZ2nm2hpBk
— Alistair Heather (@Historic_Ally) May 27, 2021
I spent winter on my tod in a flat in Coldside. It was a cosy, safe place and I had plenty of work, so I had much to be grateful for. But my Christ I didnae have many folk to chat to.
I’d do my morning exercise in my spare room, endless push-ups like an imprisoned Charles Bronson, before settling in to a silent shift at the laptop. The cold winds blew in the bare streets outside.
The Covid safety officer that lingered outside the local Tesco was often the first, and some days the last guy I’d get to say hello to. He was therefore liable to get the pus talked off him.
A similar fate befell the wifies that work at the butchers round fae me. I’d nip in for some sausages then bask like a snake in the sun in the warm light of their cheery chat.
Looking for love in all the locked places
But the Big Events socially were always the lockdown dates.
It was all done through apps. Tinder, Bumble, and for the more exclusive end of dating, Hinge.
The script is this: laptop closed at the end of the workday, a long lonesome lockdown evening stretches out before you. You nestle on the couch and fire up the phone.
Covid of course skewed things. Some profiles said “shielding”, indicating they were only on there to chat digitally for the moment. Others said things like “dating, but socially distant and with masks”.
I’d sit with a cup of tea and swipe through a bunch of profiles, getting a handful of matches. Then the evening would canter by in a lively series of dialogues with strangers.
We’ve all mourned the separation from our friends and family, but these evening text exchanges filled a social gap that’s been less acknowledged: the joy of chatting to someone entirely new.
Meeting strangers lets you reinvent yourself slightly, its enlivening. Its lack is significant.
I’m too sexy for my egg-stained hoody
From the puckle of chats, you’d organise a date. Cue real excitement.
I’d have spent a few days rotting in front of the computer, unshaven, egg stains on the hoody, feeling a good few furlongs away fae sexy.
But the date would spur me on to get dressed a bit, clean my shoes, chuck some product in my lengthy lockdown locks, and generally jazz myself up.
Then comes the date itself. For me, it was socially distanced and outdoors for date one. That meant a takeaway coffee and a stroll.
No sure if yous mind, but the winter lockdown weather was hilariously poor. This meant that I strutted out to meet a series of lassies in the rain and ice and wind of February.
Thegither we’d stomp and splash our way round some local park. Once we lapped Balgay Cemetery as hail hammered off the headstones.
Another date saw us stomp through a swampy Cowp in the gently pishing rain.
It is hard to be seductive at a distance of two metres, from inside a waterproof jacket, through a fine haze of drizzle
This sounds awful, and in a very real sense it was.
It is hard indeed to be seductive at a distance of two metres, from inside a waterproof jacket, through a fine haze of drizzle, as your teeth chatter with cold. But the honest joy of it will live with me.
We – the couple of lassies I met up with for a coffee and a wander and I – were only there because we were bored and isolated.
We wanted a chat, and wanted to remember that we were actually alive. So we’d talk and talk and talk. And believe it or not, we’d even have a go at flirting too.
Lockdown produced what folk are calling ‘Turbo Relationships’.
This is where the pressures of Covid caused folk to hurry along through the milestones of dating, getting close, moving in together, buying a dog etc way faster than usual.
I could feel that centrifugal force of accelerated intimacy even on casual coffee dates. We’d be one lap of the graves in Balgay and we’d already be sharing stories fae childhood and opening up about hilariously failed relationships like we were intimates. It was great!
I didn’t meet my future wife on these sodden strolls. That’s ok. I feel like we lifted each other’s spirits at a bleak time.
I’ve been back meeting up with piles of pals, traveling the country, and even managed to meet someone in real life and gone on normal dates with her.
It’s good. I like it. I’m glad lockdown’s over.
But a tiny wee part of me will grieve for those irreplaceably odd, friendly and vital lockdown confabs and graveyard meetups. They were a good part of a bad world that’s gone.
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