Suzanne Harrington: Doing the small things during lockdown can be a big deal
Everyone is doing lists of the small things that are keeping them sane at the moment, unless of course, you are attempting to home educate your five children, in which case you might as well just bulk order horse tranquilliser off the Dark Web (for yourself, I mean – I would never suggest drugging your children unless you could actually get away with it).
For the rest of us, it’s the small things.
Former Happy Mondays hellraiser Shaun Ryder says there’s no time for boredom when you’ve got four birds on the go – he’s talking about his pet chickens – while the Red Dwarf actor Craig Charles says the best way to get through lockdown is in a hot tub in the garden.
Maybe he missed the word ‘small’. The nearest most of us can get to a hot tub at the moment is locking ourselves in the bathroom with earplugs and some of that veterinary tranquilliser we are not allowed to give our kids.
Because things have become very small indeed. Hoovering mouse poo out of the spice cupboard and attacking the fungus at the back of the fridge, while thinking longingly of the cleaner you can no longer afford, you might find yourself mentally reframing the looming hideousness of having to bath the dog. The huge, arthritic, long-haired dog who is caked solid in mud, hates shower nozzles and likes to shake like a spin dryer afterwards so that all the watery mud and insanely expensive dog shampoo gets Jackson Pollocked onto the bathroom ceiling.
It'll be something to do, you tell yourself. An activity. An aerobic one, given how much you and the dog will be wrestling each other, and how much energy you’ll expend scraping crud off the walls and ceiling as the dripping dog gallops outside to roll in the garden. It’s become your own special ritual. Like a spa day. A spa day in hell.
You might like to follow this by getting trashed at chess by a sarcastic teen who is simultaneously Snapchatting his girlfriend, supposedly participating in an online Zoom school lesson, and rewatching The Wire as he effortlessly puts you in checkmate in six moves. Every time. It’s not early-onset dementia, he says, eye-rolling. You’re just shit at chess.
Luckily, by redirecting funds formerly used to pay the cleaner, you can take your mind off your inability to strategize beyond moving a pawn one square forward by subscribing to all the football channels. Fat direct debits to fat corporations allow you to repeatedly watch your team limp nil-nil to full time, a millimeter above the drop zone, in an empty stadium.
If we were to meet in the pub, we could speak with some authority about how Shaun Ryder’s chickens would be better at getting goals, and how your elderly dog would make a better manager. But going to the pub still remains as remote as chickens winning the Premiership. Meanwhile, we do the small things.
