What To Do In Lockdown

 

What To Do During Lockdown

This seems to have become the most common conversational topic recently, along with how your morale is doing. So this is a personal take on the questions.

Most of my time has been spent in front of my PC. You can find everything from the sublime to the ridiculous on the Internet and I have been wandering through the offerings, mostly via YouTube. Once I’ve woken up, drunk a coffee, done my wake-up-brain sudoku, looked at emails and perused the news via the news aggregator site I use, newsnow, I go to YouTube; hence my newly found interest in mankind’s early development. That apart I can’t say I have found any new interests. I bounce around between cooking, football, music, some science and linguistics, archaeology/anthropolgy of course, and watching steam trains. I can’t say I have found anything earth-shattering but I have, for instance, got some good new ideas on recipes and also been amazed at the singing abilities of some kids of tender age, 10-14.

What about TV and films, obvious possibilities? I’m not used to watching much on TV other than football and Channel 4 news and, for some reason, that hasn’t changed. French TV, the Arte channel apart, is more trivial even than British TV. Because of football crowd restrictions in the UK, more matches are televised which means I make less use of the dodgy Russian Internet site which tries to sell me Indian brides on which I watch matches I can’t get on TV. I suspect the site is run by the Russian mafia, so they do have their uses, and who cares if the commentary is in Serbo-Croat? I’ve got a second-hand subscription to Netflix but don’t seem to be driven to explore that very much. I haven’t got many DVDs I haven’t already watched but I do have loads that I’d quite like to watch again. But, mostly, I don’t watch them again. And for some reason I can’t get down to reading.

What about the world outside, the bit we are permitted to visit? My exercise has been more limited than it probably should be. Gardening is on hold. I walk frequently to the baker’s to get bread, since I love fresh bread, but the weekly or twice-weekly excursions for shopping don’t really count. And the weather hasn’t yet been conducive to long walks. My excuse is that there are 36 stairs in my house and that helps a bit. I can still invite friends to come to eat and I get invited usually a couple of times a week. That’s about it.

The news is generally depressing so I don’t spend a lot of time on it although I can get hooked on the evolving Brexit situation in Britain and its Teflon government. Whatever happens there with COVID the government can’t be blamed, as a recent survey showed; a quite large majority blame other people rather than the government for any failings. It’s people lacking common sense who are to blame. And neither can the government be blamed for any adverse effects of Brexit; people (lacking common sense?) voted for it. So who determines events, what happens next; who is in charge? It has to be the people lacking common sense. No wonder the country is f*****d.

So how is my morale? I’m not depressed but hardly full of the joys of life either. I feel I’m getting along OK, putting life on hold a bit but looking forward to the spring and, hopefully, less risk to life and fewer restrictions. What puzzles me slightly is that I seem to be feeling some kind of restlessness that shortens my attention span. Is that because life is on hold, lockdown or just advancing age? Maybe I’ll find out later on.