On the 11th of January 2020 I visited China for the first time. I had a nineteen-hour connection in Beijing en route to Sydney from London. A lady I met on the first flight with a similar layover invited me to join her in a hotel room she had booked close to Beijing airport, an offer I took up without hesitation.
Unfortunately, the prurience of that sentence is as salacious and steamy as the story gets. Gill is sixty-one years old. After our brief chat on the plane I imagine she found my stilted awkwardness endearing enough to determine my company agreeable, but simultaneously the prospect of me spending nineteen hours in an airport alone worried her (‘I wouldn’t want my daughter in an airport by herself’). So I went with Gill to her hotel room, where we slept separately in plush, freshly-made king-sized beds for the better part of five hours. When I awoke Gill was sitting upright in her bed. Seeing I was up, she turned to look at me:
‘Do you fancy climbing the Great Wall?’ she asked, the way you might ask a housemate what time they’re having dinner or if they want anything from the shops.
Now, I’m not saying the coronavirus pandemic began because I climbed up (and tobogganed down) the Great Wall of China with Gill from Winchester. However, it is mildly amusing that this is how I kick-started my 2020. Even more amusing, in hindsight, was a comment made by Gill as we vacated our respective toboggans at the bottom of the Wall:
‘If your trip is going this well and it’s only Day 1, you’re in for a great year.’
She wasn’t wrong: it was a great start. The issue is that that year still happening, and the twelve weeks I spent in Australia and New Zealand – neatly mentally compartmentalised as Uninhibited Tanned Sexy Fun Time – are forming a smaller and smaller proportion of it. UTSFT came to an abrupt halt at the end of March, when COVID-19 went from a funny joke to a serious threat. I mean, it’s still pretty funny. You’ve got to find the humour in these things, even when the apocalypse is happening and you’re stranded tens of thousands of miles away from home.
On the 29th of March, I landed back in the UK. This was about ten months sooner than I had expected to return, and about a grand more costly. As the protagonist of my own life, I have mediated a lot on corona’s interruption of it (lockdown affords much time to mediate). Could this global health emergency perhaps have been timed better? Only last month, whilst gazing upon New Zealand’s inexhaustibly beautiful landscape through the window of a bus, was I smugly musing about how fortunate I am to have the time and the money and the freedom to cultivate such experiences.
‘God, I love being young and single’ I think self-contentedly.
Today, I look through the window of my childhood bedroom. The view is occupied more or less entirely by the upstairs extension on the house opposite.
‘God, I wish I was old and married’ I think self-pityingly.
‘What are you talking about?’ my mother says. I may have been thinking out loud.
‘It’s fine for you‘, I snap, ‘You’ve lived. You’ve done it. You spend all your time hunkered down in this house with Dad working from home anyway.’
‘It still affects us. It’s definitely affected our work.’
‘I know, but… but…’
I don’t know what it is about living under my parents’ roof that triggers my instantaneous regression to a sixteen-year-old.
‘…but what about me? I am in the prime of my life and I’m having to spend it locked away in my room like bloody Rapunzel.’ If the hairdressers’ are shut long enough that’s not an exaggeration.
At the beginning, there was something oddly comforting about the sheer scale of the crisis. It swiftly and deftly eclipsed every other problem in the entire world. How can you lament not getting a text back when people are dying by the thousands? Even the B-word, the bane of all our lives since the 2016 referendum, faded into the background.
For a time, anyway.
Of course, the resounding effect of the coronavirus is that it has paved the way for a whole new set of problems. I haven’t read the news for a couple of weeks now, having effectively stuck my fingers in my ears and covered my eyes ever since I realised it would be a long, long time before there was any good news, so I won’t attempt to discuss the virus’s grievous death toll, societal repercussions or its devastating impact on the economy.
Instead, here are the problems the virus has posed for me, a British white middle-class university graduate on a gap year:
- My gap year is now a gap ????? On the plus side, I’ve got a legitimate excuse for the great, hulking gap in my CV.
- In lieu of real-life social interaction, there is even more pressure to communicate online. So much so, it’s begun to permeate my subconscious: instead of dreams about nights out I have dreams about Zoom nights in. Worse, sex dreams have been replaced by sexting dreams.
- All this talk of ‘hobbies’. ‘Have you taken up any hobbies?’ ‘What hobby are you keeping busy with?’ ‘Five hobbies to hone during lockdown.’ I have not entertained anything resembling a hobby since before my introduction to alcohol, sex and drugs in sixth form.
- Without clubs, concerts or festivals, the only time I enjoy music is on my once-a-day run. This has led to the unfortunate discovery that techno is actually pretty bad when my serotonin isn’t being rapidly depleted.
- Touching strangers, my favourite university pastime, is now a criminal offence.
- In the same vein: enforced and indefinite celibacy.
Most significantly, I’ve had to return to my old job. That’s not a complaint by any means; I’m more than thankful I’ve got a job, and one where I get to leave the house at that. Through no extra effort I have also been promoted to the aggrandizing ‘frontline essential worker’. This has generated a whole new subclass of customer service nightmares. I’ll spare you the details, but one incident in particular left me not knowing whether to laugh or cry. After making idle chit-chat with a customer as I helped him bag his shopping, he turns to the floor and gathers everyone’s attention.
‘Honestly guys,’ he announces, ‘I really appreciate you all working so hard in such unprecedented circumstances.’
He squishes £100 into my hand.
‘Buy yourselves some drinks on me.’
...where?
Smoking Hot Mess 