The last time I

The one-year anniversary of the last time I met a friend in a café is coming up. I’m glad it was such a good one. I met the marvellous Francis Spufford, occasionally of this parish, for a coffee in the British Library. I had a flat white and a kind of cake/biscuit hybrid that came in a plastic wrapper, and was energetically reassured by the person at the till that there was no mistake in my bill of almost eight pounds. (A café scene in Fleabag comes to mind, when Phoebe Waller Bridge charges twenty-five pounds for a plain tomato sandwich and the exasperated customer just says “London!”) Astonishing to think of now, but we sat at a table in the atrium – inside, no less – surrounded by other tables of people, near the main entrance, with people walking past, breathing, every moment. We talked about the pandemic from China then ravaging Italy, and how people in the UK and elsewhere didn’t seem to believe it was coming for us. There was a stillness and strangeness in having our eyes turned, horrified, to the east in that weeks-long moment when so many, and all the UK’s leaders, put their fingers in their ears and sang ‘la la la’ to the storm that irresistibly propelled them into a future to which their backs were turned. (My apologies to the angel of history.) But even then we knew the fascinated horror was all for naught. We agreed that a lifetime of reading science fiction, especially my favourite sub-genre, post-apocalypse, gave us at most a two-week head start on everyone else in understanding the gravity of what was about to happen.

Denialists always overcompensate. A month later, I started a blog post about increased troop movements in London and the government’s denial that the army would be deployed to enforce a blockade which it also denied it was planning to impose (as Westminster-adjacent Whatsapp groups fizzed with warnings to leave the city by midnight or be trapped in the capital of disease for months). My post was to be about the actually quite strict rules of engagement, and how the army would likely be just in the empty city centre to prevent looting and take the strain off the police. I never finished the post as I came down with covid myself.

I see from my planner that a week before the café expedition I’d already had my last cinema outing. Another good one – the very upmarket Victoria Curzon to see Parasite. We went with another couple and, oddly enough for February, sat huddling outside for a drink because one of the party was a smoker.

My last restaurant was in early February. I didn’t eat but had a couple of glasses of wine with activist friends at a pub quiz. Thinking about it now feels a little overwhelming. We were packed into a narrow downstairs room, talking, laughing, moving around, and – shudder – touching each other’s hands.

Half of the engagements I had in February I didn’t go to anyway, for the usual boring health reasons. A book launch, a pub gathering of friends over from Ireland for a football match, a reading by an American feminist in Brighton. (Surprising / not-surprising to see how utterly blue-stocking my social calendar was when I had one.) In early March I have a calendar entry “Oxford?” for something policy-related. By then, it seemed weird and wrong to unnecessarily take a train. (Although in the parallel universe much of the country seemed still to inhabit, skiing holidays were taken, race meetings went ahead, dad-rock bands played at what we soon came to know as super-spreader events.)

The week before lockdown was finally announced, I went to see a friend at his NGO office in Farringdon. We were the only people in the building. There were few on the street, even fewer on the Tube. London locked down many days before the government finally pulled the pin. That was my last in-person work-related meeting. Again, a really good one. We were fizzing with ideas, none of which came to pass. We said goodbye on an empty street and wished each other and each other’s families luck, like it was the eve of war.

Then March, covid itself for a couple of weeks. It seems histrionic now, but back when there were no tests and few good numbers on how many people ended up in ICU, we only knew the disease lingered, withdrew, and then in the second or third week might return quickly and overwhelmingly. That was into April, when sirens were going 24/7 and the newspapers reported people dying, choking for breath on their kitchen floors, seven or eight hours after they’d called an ambulance. Not great times, to be honest. A few days into the virus, worrying about the two-week dip and feeling quite well one morning, I went down to my computer and put the most recent copy of my will and a file with all my logins onto the desktop, then wrote the passwords out in hard copy and left them on my desk.

Time got weird at that point. The whole past and future self thing, and the way when a major event intervenes, or just the passage of enough time, we don’t remotely seem to be the same person, before and after. How the ghosts of our alternate lives move alongside, almost close enough to touch. How thinking ‘I feel weirdly, horribly unwell but by no means dangerously so, but in a week I could be dead, or locked into a vast un-nursed dying room at the Excel Centre’.

Weird how non-contiguous any of this seems. I can’t believe I ever talked to people in cafes. But I can’t believe that I, personally, will ever die, either.

In April I started a piece about why we just can’t believe our future selves:

For weeks stretching almost into months the letters from our future arrived. From Wuhan, Busan, Taipei. We dismissed the first ones. Strange things happen in China. More came, from Venice, Bologna and Bergamo. The closer the source of the letter, the later the hour, and the more directly and urgently it addressed us. ‘We are your future’, people wrote from tiny apartments overlooking canals and historic fountains, from hospitals spilling over into morgues; Heed our warning. Don’t do as we did. And hurry, for God’s sake, hurry.

“We’re Italy, in a month’s time,” we said as we joked about whether to shake hands before business meetings, “That’s us in two weeks.” As late as last week, the Italian novelist Francesca Melandri wrote a letter to the UK, describing in pitch perfect detail what our lives will soon be like and how it will feel a month into lockdown. We sit quietly waiting for the peak, bracing ourselves for the worst, but secretly we believe the killer will pass by our own marked door. It isn’t real, not until it happens to us.

Never finished that one, either. Didn’t work for a couple of months post-covid, couldn’t read long form adult fiction till September.

In late April when I went out again, Sainsburys was bare. Aisle after aisle emptied of food. Nowhere to buy fresh vegetables. I’ve not been alright about food since then, to be honest. Having been all-but-vegan for a year or more pre-covid, I now eat all the meat, all the time, all the dairy, all the sweets. Anything I can squeeze my fists around. And there’s no need, really. The two-week head start my science fiction reading self gave in January meant we had enough in the store cupboard to last until May. But it’s quite a deep and seemingly long-reverberating shock, to awaken after weeks inside and walk in a weakened state through an apocalyptically empty city, unable to find food. Mustn’t exaggerate, though. Our lovely cornershop guys kept us going, often sleeping in their store room to avoid the long journey home. I’m weaning myself off the fear of insufficient food, now. And to be fair, I don’t want to pathologise too much the general feeling of eating whatever, whenever. Food is the most reliable pleasure.

Now, my life is right-sized, it feels. I don’t RSVP to 50% more events than I’m able to attend. I’m in Ireland, designated shopper and my parents’ link to the wider world. We came over in August and I’ve done three full two-week quarantines since, for various reasons. What was unimaginable is now normal. I see my parents and one sister, and otherwise talk in person only to the shop assistant when I go into town once a week to buy food. We have good walks within our 5k permitted zone, which is richness beyond measure. Ed’s back in London on the other side of a de facto travel ban, but we’ve been apart for longer and with much less ability to communicate.

My ideas of time and novelty (more intertwined than I’d realised) are now synced up with those of the nineteenth century English novel. Journeys are exceptional and risky. Family members go years without seeing each other. Weddings and funerals are attended by no more than a dozen. Visits, when permitted, are counted in weeks, not hours. Every snippet of news into our tiny social bubble is dissected repeatedly like a letter from Jane Fairfax, and previous snippets gone back to and nibbled on weeks later when they seem fresh again. We eke out TV dramas like serialised novels so we’ll have something to look forward to, and now pause the programme to discuss the motivations of the characters, and a special meal is the highlight of the week. The only thing I’ll say Jane Austen / George Eliot etc. got wrong, and very wrong, is how much time we spend talking about the dogs. Their sex lives, habits, socialising and the many ups and downs of their health make up about half of our total conversation.

The last time I ironed was late July. The last time I wore make-up was… today, for a zoom thing, and after looking through the contents of the make-up bag, genuinely unsure if it was mine or its unfamiliar products had been left behind by someone else. The last time I wore a dress was Christmas day, and I took it off after the presents because it’s too tight.

I mostly don’t think about what I miss. My mind makes those thoughts into cul de sacs almost instantly. Occasionally, I’ll hear something on the radio and my eyes prick as I remember what it was like to sit up close to a string quartet. I crave food made by someone I don’t know constantly, but I’ve more or less learnt nothing satisfies that craving, so best not try. I have so much. I have my parents so I have human touch. I have my parents, unlike the four different people I’ve written condolence notes to just in the past month, and several more last year. One friend went through the torture of knowing his dementia-suffering father was locked in a care home that sick hospital patients were sent back into, late last spring, infecting his father who died with no palliative treatment and no family. I don’t know how you make peace with that, or if you should.

The last time I was in a pub was, I don’t actually know. Probably late 2019. The last time I was in a library was possibly July but probably last February.

There’s so much I don’t miss but suspect it’s because I can’t afford to. Apart from a vicious little squall of depression over mid-winter, I am remarkably content. A walk is at least an hour and often over two. I’m working again. Finishing one vast years-long project and getting into the concluding part of another. I don’t have to do all the professional and social things that tired me out, so am making steadier progress than I ever have. Even so, it’s been striking how energy levels are a bit like the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. Turns out I did net just a bit more energy from going out and seeing people, and wonder how much of our thinking and working through ideas comes from the buzz between us, not out of the heads of each single one.

It’s going on so long, now, that we’ve pulled too far away from the people we were before – both by sheer volume of time and the discontinuity of major events. I know I’ll look back on this winter as one long moment, like the monotony of school days with little to distinguish one day from the next. When Ed was in Afghanistan I wished for as few remarkable days as possible, because a long blob of near identical ones feels shorter in retrospect. But these past six substitutable months I’ve never been more aware of the seasons, of the length of sunlight and disposition of the tides. I was glad to be closer to spring 2022 but couldn’t join in the general delight that January was over, that 2020 was done. I’ve lived the many monotonous days of a much smaller life before, when I was ill, and there is more in them than you’d expect. I also don’t ever want to deny any of the days I have lived. This time may not evoke nostalgia in some busy, novel future, but it feels deeply lived-in and amply sufficient. Those disconcerting days of a year ago, when we were suspended between a past already accelerating away and a frightening future that turned out even stranger and longer than imagined – I’m glad I’m no longer in-between, wind-milling my legs before the freefall. I live in a long, slow now, now. It’s quiet here. I like it.