A bit of me will miss lockdown. It has been difficult, for sure, but it also simplified matters somewhat. Oddly, it has reminded me of the times I have worked on international football tournaments. In successive World Cups I was based in Berlin, Johannesburg and Rio. Stressfully high profile as the work was, life was simple. For about 32 days on the bounce I would present a football match, then go out with a load of nice people until three in the morning, go to bed, get up and do it all over again. Life back home, what with children, parents, friends, lots of work and a busy social life, felt very complex in comparison.
This has felt a bit like that, just without the money, the fame, the frenzy of international football, the unparalleled craic and the hangovers. Every day I have got up, written a bit, broadcast a bit, exercised a bit, read, listened and watched stuff, drunk a bit, eaten a bit, gardened a bit, gone to bed and got up and done it all over again. I have realised that in normal times, running around, meeting people, broadcasting, travelling, working and playing, I was always somewhat over-stimulated. Exhilarating as my life was, a feeling of peace was nigh on impossible to achieve. But I have felt a strange sensation of peace lately; there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
I am keenly aware I’m one of the lucky ones. I have not lost anyone close to me, yet. And I know what the Oxford epidemiologist Prof Sunetra Gupta is getting at, when she says lockdown is a middle-class luxury: I’ve had enough space to live in, and no immediate danger of being unable to put food on the table.
But I am also aware that not one of us will escape being seriously affected, somehow, somewhere. I shudder when I recall something my inspirational English teacher told us about Arthur Miller. Mr Ralph said Miller related how, as a kid, he thought he had beaten the Wall Street crash by taking his money out of the bank and buying a bicycle. He was pleased with himself. But the following morning someone stole his bike. There’s a lesson there, too.
