The people who view this lockdown as an unmissable opportunity to acquire new skills are a) insufferable and b) doing it all wrong, anyway. This is not a time for turning profit from your “side-hustle”, becoming a better version of yourself or even optimising a healthy and grounded self-care routine. This is a time to survive, ideally with a fully operational set of lungs.
That said, there is a widespread re-evaluation under way in our society. Binmen, bus drivers, shelf-stackers and even Piers Morgan, are having their usefulness reassessed by a previously indifferent public, then being accorded the respect — if not the pay rise — they deserved all along. Could the same changed lens be applied to our character traits as individuals? Might our flaws from the Before Time become newly useful skillsets in the In-Between Time?
So, for instance, having no real social life to speak of in the most thrilling city on Earth would have been embarrassing once. But that was when London had packed pubs, sweaty dance floors and round-the-block queues at buzzy new restaurant openings. Remember those? If “no”, you may be the overtired parent of young children, someone who lives in zone 5, or one of those thirtysomething curmudgeons who feels they’ve aged out of getting wasted, but hasn’t yet worked out what to do with their weekends instead. Either way, you’ll have entered lockdown match fit and raring to go nowhere.
This is also a time for scruffs to shine. Not literally; to achieve that kind of luminous complexion you have to exfoliate regularly and invest in an expensive moisturiser — but people who take little-to-no pride in their personal appearance have found themselves at an unexpected advantage. Under the pressure of lockdown, it’s the well-groomed who’ll crack first. Every Zoom call confronts them with their own un-botoxed frown lines or untrimmed fringes. They’ll soon be furtively seeking out black-market beauticians, while the scruffs can go on like this indefinitely.
Or maybe you’re the type who has always found their own relatively minor life struggles so all-consuming, so fascinating they can talk of little else. In the past, perhaps friends have advised you to “get some perspective” or, less politely, to “get your head out your arse”. Now, with the world’s big-picture problems so overwhelming, that’s clearly the safest place for anyone’s head to be.
But if you’re aiming to come out of this as a self-crowned Queen of Quarantine or Lord of the Lockdown, there is one good-bad quality that’s essential: You must be competitive beyond reason. It’s irritating for everyone around you, sure, but a pointless passion to overtake all your friends’ 5k times, or bake the best banana bread on the internet, will keep you keeping on.
What sort of person turns even this sorry state of affairs into a competition? A winner, that’s who.
Never Have I Ever
It’s surely a sign of progress that both the big teen shows of the moment — Normal People on BBC iPlayer and Never Have I Ever on Netflix — are about horny nerds. The former is clearly the soulful intellectual’s choice, but the latter is also worthy of your time, mostly because of its effortlessly charming star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who plays Devi —and also as a reminder that the underserved “horny nerd” demographic is not just one thing. We contain multitudes.
