Remember the good old days when you could get on a train or go to a party without wondering if it was worth the risk? It’s time for a revival
In a series of deft manoeuvres that remain fascinating to me, my 16-year-old son managed to barter me down from a four-day trip to Devon to 13 hours in Broadstairs on the Kent coast, during which every train, meeting and arrangement was a white-knuckle ride, as to miss one would render the entire thing, plus the weeks either side of it, some variation of pointless. But we caught every train, we made every meeting, and he watched Match of the Day with his friend while I went to an Afrobeats club night with mine. In the morning he ate vegan bacon in record time, while I studiously didn’t mention how incredibly tired I was, and then he had the brass neck to complain about sleep deprivation all the way home. But by then I wasn’t tired any more, because I’d had a huge, adrenalised revelation: this whole escapade had a pre-pandemic feel.
Long Covid aside, the coronavirus hangover has been subtle, in a bad way. In summer 2020, it looked as if it might bring about big changes: maybe we would come out of it recognising which jobs really mattered and stop equating people’s pay with their value to society, the last would be first and society would cohere again. Maybe we would come to understand what we preferred, between getting on a plane and hearing birdsong, between going to the office and making sourdough (I prefer the office, which is annoying, as I do not have an office job), and there would be no “back to normal”, but instead, a thoughtful rebuilding of life along different lines. All of that was bollocks.
