Side effects are notoriously hard to predict, but there’s already been an unexpected casualty of this pandemic.
Our relationships.
The C Word is shining a light on who people really are, and the revelations are hard to ignore. There are just so many new things to disagree about, and so much more time in which to disagree about them.
Stockpiling was a bit of a joke, until the empty supermarket shelves – despite normal deliveries – made it less funny. Then that email from the head of one of the big stores went round, saying if you only buy what you need then we’ll all be OK... in other words, STOP BEING SELFISH.
And suddenly strangers are eyeing each other suspiciously in Sainsbury’s.
Fragile bonds with friends and family, barely recovered from Brexit, began to be tested all over again.
The new debate: how seriously you should take this. Are you a keep-calm-and-carry-on-er or a panic-and-stop-everything-er?
Do facemasks work enough to make the eye rolls worth it? Should you take your kids out of school even though they’re still open? Are you really going to be the kind of person who bangs elbows (the new handshake) non-ironically?
I’m now at the stage where I genuinely judge someone on whether they call it coronavirus or Covid-19, and I know I’m far from alone in this.
The news that the divorce rate in China has leapt up since couples started to be quarantined also seemed like a punchline at first. But that was before this weekend, when my husband and I decided we should stay home as much as possible.
To clarify – before you throw this page down in horror, setting it alight and running as fast as possible in the opposite direction, screaming “Unclean! Unclean!” – none of us have come into contact with the virus, that we are aware of.
We’re attempting a mostly measured response – we just wanted to give being sensible a try, for sheer novelty if nothing else. Spoiler: we didn’t even last one full day.
First up, an apology. I’ve moaned – in person and in print, at some length – but I now see I was being unfair. Turns out that far from being a tedious enemy, football was the only thing holding my marriage together.
Now it’s all cancelled, my husband is bereft, purposeless and bored. Normally he goes to matches, which he then reads about endlessly online (despite knowing what happened because he was there) before watching them all over again on Match Of The Day.
He also listens to hundreds of football podcasts, just in case he missed something, even though there’s literally no way on earth that could have happened. But now everything is gone.
He spent Saturday morning moping and sighing. At one point he announced, in the manner of someone considering scaling Everest, that he might read a book. Instead he entertained himself by googling symptoms.
For the rest of the day he had two topics of conversation, “I’ve definitely got Covid-19” and “I definitely had Covid-19 three weeks ago and just powered through”.
Yes, of course he’s a Covid-19-er rather than a Coronavirus-er. He would be, wouldn’t he? And if that doesn’t count as an irreconcilable difference, I’m not sure what does.
