Caroline O'Donoghue: My month-by-month recap of Covid-19 and lockdown
Banana bread, yoga with Adriene, exhausting Zoom parties that come in and out of fashion as infection rates soar and retreat.
This week marks the one-year anniversary of lockdown in the UK. Everyone on my social media is sharing photos of themselves from this time a year ago, in cafes and clubs and bars, not a mask in sight. I have my own, of course: my mum and I drinking champagne in the crowded cafe of the V&A, me and Gavin kissing at a day rave, cocktails at a bar that opened for precisely three weeks and was then forced to close again. It’s funny, and sort of dazzlingly predictable, that despite a year of global upheaval and widespread tragedy, it always comes back to the same thing. Namely, yourself. What was I doing?
What has been taken away from me, specifically? What phases and fads have I gone through, and how is my behaviour a microcosm of the larger mood?
Banana bread, yoga with Adriene, exhausting Zoom parties that come in and out of fashion as infection rates soar and retreat. Never have everyday domestic activities felt so universal, and so with that in mind, here is my month-by-month recap.
An excited, dangerous, sexy feeling pervades the air. I have finally trapped my boyfriend at home, there’s a disease, and everyone is asking if we’re allowed to have ‘small gatherings’. Two people over is fine, surely? Three even? There are social distancing 'recommendations’ but so far it all seems to be scout’s honour. We invite people over for dinner and when they arrive they hug the dog but not us. Dog delighted.
Boris Johnson announces the lockdown while I’m cutting vegetables. The laptop is propped on some books on the stove. The kitchen knife goes through my middle finger on my left hand. It bleeds so much that I’m afraid I’ll have to get stitches, and I am too frightened of the hospital to go to A&E.
Gavin and I start having terse, relieved conversations about all the people who are getting their weddings and holidays cancelled. We always feel guilty for never planning anything. We just sit around talking shite instead of planning holidays, weddings and children. Holy hell, are we glad we sit around talking shite now.
Sunday night is ‘face mask night’.
I turn thirty and Gavin arranges a wall-sized mural of art from my friends and family. I cry and we go for a bike ride. The bike becomes a saving grace. I cycle. My body looks, frankly, incredible.
The mural will stay up until November and makes us look like psychopaths, but we don’t know that yet.
My dad is forwarding me roughly forty comedy videos a day on Whatsapp.
They are mostly about Boris Johnson. There’s a general sense that Ireland has handled the pandemic better than England has, and Irish people are being unbearable about it. “We’ve really knocked it on the head,” is the common, and unbearably smug, refrain.
Irish friends and family stop saying “England has messed this up” and instead say “you guy have messed this up”. Pots and kettles are scolding each other for their dirty arses. “Is anyone wearing masks back home?” I ask. “Oh, no,” comes the response. “But you know, we keep a distance. We’re aware.”
I start re-watching Sex and the City again. I realise that the only TV shows I’m able to watch are ones that I’ve seen a million times. The concept of taking in new information, new storylines, new characters becomes impossible to comprehend. I’m also averaging about six hours a night on the Nintendo Switch, skulling cans of Brewdog. Gavin is having rowdy parties on Zoom. We are getting through beers at an unbelievable rate, and reaching that odd lockdown faux pas of having so much recycling that it looks like we’re having parties.
Things seem relaxed enough that we’re able to have a picnic party in the park to celebrate my book launch. Everyone is beautiful, magnetic, and grateful to be out. There are songs in the streets and it doesn’t get cold until 2am. I accidentally throw my phone in a bin.
Everyone in my industry is trying to figure out how to sell a book to people who can’t go to the bookshop and don’t have the patience to read. I have waited three years to release this book and it seems to have disappeared into the ether by its third week. I hold a funeral for it in my heart. People tell me it’s ok to complain, but there is an unsaid rule that we’re not allowed to complain about petty things like this too much, because of the people who, y’know, are still dying.
There’s a line!! On my forehead!! A new line!!!!!! Have a small breakdown about my vanishing youth and the scar on my finger from the night Boris announced the first lockdown. Google ‘preventative Botox’ a lot. Shyly talk to friends about it. “You don’t want that,” a friend tells me. “What you want is preventative filler.”
Two friends have babies. The lockdown babies, the ones everyone has been wondering about and waiting for. For one couple, it is their first, and no one is allowed to hold him. We stand in the doorway with gifts like a nativity scene, the shepherds pushed to the edge. The other couple are on their third and are too tired, so they push their baby into our arms and make us come inside.
Christmas is cancelled! Everyone pulls together, Blitz spirit style.
The heroism of Christmas now forgotten, we are back to grey thankless hellscape. Try to walk the dog at a cemetery and am stopped by the gates.
“Who are you visiting?” He says, like a bouncer. “I can only let you in if you’re visiting.” I realise that he means headstones. I have to know a dead person to be here.
Making too big a deal about Valentine’s Day. Have become obsessed with markers of time: daffodils, hallmark holidays, the reappearance of Creme Eggs.
I go for a walk with a friend and he says: “Remember last summer, that weekend we went to Dublin together!” We pause and realise that he means summer 2019. His memory has skipped out a whole year. We wonder if it’s better that way. But it’s not that easy. Everytime I look down, I still have the scar on my finger. I suppose now I always will.
