This week I have mostly been in zoom.
Otherwise, I have been evolving through the stages of lockdown like a basic middle-class London gay, it seems.
The stages as I understand them:
Stage 1: bring it on ✅
- Start baking bread (technically this happened in January so ner)
- Take pictures of empty local streets on lockdown walk
- Hunt toilet roll like a sport
- Set work level to 150%
- Zoom quizzes with friends seem like a great idea
- What will I achieve will all this extra lockdown time?
- Watch the peak with fascination
Stage 2: this is fine… ✅
- Photos of bread good enough to share on instagram stories for cheap likes
- Sorry, your zoom call can’t be longer than 40 minutes
- Drink more cider than usual, talk about this with everyone
- Hunt flour and gardening materials only to find everyone else did this already
Stage 3: oh. ✅
- Feel pangs of guilt about photos of bread due to medium thinkpiece bread outrage and lack of originality
- Fight to stay in any kind of Duolingo league
- Sorry, your zoom calls can’t total more than 100 hours in one week
- Stop calling friends in the evenings
- Argue with people on nextdoor saying people walking dogs in parks should be arrested for doing so too much
Stage 4: oh no. ✅
- Weight panic
- Track and post exercise activities for cheap likes
- Zoom pilates, inexplicably
- Rationing crisps to every other day
- Wishing the house clearout had really finished before all this.
Stage 5: oh dear. ⬅
- Feel guilty about photos of exercise
- Really discovering the nuance and detail and depth in the neighbourhood
- Hair in eyes
- Talking to the neighbours for the first time in over ten years – properly
- All kinds of culinary inventions, cravings and soothings: risottos, bakes, roasts, all with a little more time and chance to repeat
- Fume about dishwasher breaking
- Humble and thankful that fuming about the dishwasher breaking is the worst thing happening
- Chug through some more Netflix to escape a bit (Unorthodox: good; Better Call Saul: I Can’t Believe This Isn’t The End; Tiger King: how are these people not AI creations)
- How did we live before and why?
- No longer watching the virus peak but wondering about the complexity of it all
- Need break from work
- Make a meta blogpost about the stages of lockdown to procrastinate from the mechanics of having a break