IT HAS BEEN a long while since I posted a new blog, perhaps five months. I think that’s because - like everyone else - I’ve been coming to terms with the ‘new normal’.
We are creatures of habit, aren’t we? We like our routines. Even after selling my shares in the company I co-founded and slipping into the hazy, pre-retirement life of a consultant, I managed to get into London three, sometimes four times a week as a kind of ‘ghost commuter’.
All of those journeys were discretionary. I’d go to my gym a couple of times a week for sessions with my long-term personal trainer and goddaughter, Gigi. Sometimes, I’d go up to see a client or an old friend. Often my wife and daughter would join me and we’d go to a gallery, or for a meal and occasionally to a show.
And then in March it all came to a cliff-edge halt.
It was a lovely spring, do you remember? And we are lucky enough to live in a beautiful part of the world, so - even before we were allowed to drive to a place of exercise - we would walk from our front door up onto the High Weald or into Pembury forest. Later, I would go birding with new friends - separate cars and socially distanced, naturally - but we’d get out as far as Dungeness or Rye Harbour on the south coast.
And then we had that ridiculously hot spell in the summer. There was one night, I confess, I slept in the car in our basement garage because it was the coolest place in the house. I slept well too. It isn’t the first time I’ve slept in a car.
By September, we would have normally been contemplating our third holiday of the year. But in the months of lockdown and the lockdown-lite that followed, we haven’t travelled more than a few hours from home. And that has been sort of okay.
When we were younger, people would ask: “Are you going anywhere on holiday?” And - often quite broke - we would sometimes answer: “No, we’re going out for days.” In 2020, we’ve been going out for days.
I’ve been to London twice since March 12. The first time was ostensibly to get a haircut, although the truth is that the journalist in me needed to take a look at London on the edge of lockdown. It was like the end of a bad science fiction movie - empty and with warning signs everywhere.
The second time, I went in to see real people in three dimensions. Gigi and I arranged to have coffee in the open, airy courtyard of the Lansdowne Club, where she works and where I’ve been a member for 14 or so years.
It was a meeting born out of the long, slow realisation that there were important, invisible things that had vanished from my life during lockdown.
Gigi has been training me online. I bring my desktop computer downstairs and put it on the coffee table, and then I turn our living room into a gym with free weights, kettlebells, ankle weights, steppers, a yoga mat and a Swiss ball, and Gigi looms large on the screen and tells me what to do. It’s like being trained by someone shouting at you through a letterbox, or a window.
Surprisingly, it works quite well in terms of exercise, but online video isn’t great for some of the invisible, intuitive, instinctual things that make up a lot of human communication - voice tone, skin tone, pupil dilation, breathing rate and body language. Normally, we read these things without noticing that we’re reading them, but they do contain an awful lot of information that can’t be transmitted via Zoom, FaceTime or GoogleMeets. I missed that element of human contact.
“It was a meeting born out of the long, slow realisation that there were important, invisible things that had vanished from my life during lockdown”
The other thing I was missing was touch - not the man-hugs some friends have lately adopted, nor their back slaps and robust handshakes, if pushed I can do without them - but the tiny little touches on a shoulder or on an arm. Touches between friends of either sex. We don’t even notice that they’re happening half the time. You know, putting your hand on a mate’s shoulder while you whisper something jokey in his ear … that sort of thing.
Meeting lovely Gigi, my great friend chef Neil Ramsey and, accidentally, my former client Nigel Hughes - a genuinely good man - gave me the people fix I really needed in the days when the R rate was still below one. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated it.
Having said all of that, being a writer is surprisingly good training for a pandemic lockdown. I’ve had desk space at home for the past 45 years, and a proper office for the past 20 - so working from home isn’t that much of a challenge. And - even though I am a gregarious sort of chap - writing is an inherently solitary pursuit, and I can get by without seeing people for a little while.
So, I’m not complaining - merely observing that while the new normal has its compensations (I’m saving a fortune, and I’ve had some splendid days in the country close to home), it is not, in the end, normal.
Not being in London means that there are people I like who I no longer see - not merely the young staff at the Lansdowne, many of whom I’m very fond of, but the peripheral friends … you know, the ones you see two, maybe three or four times a year: the friends you arrange to meet because, unusually, they’re in London with time on their hands.
I’ve been lucky enough to make a few new friends in my home town of Tunbridge Wells, so the absences are less obvious than they might have been - but the new normal is not like the old normal. And I doubt if that is going to change anytime soon.
To coin a phrase: Winter is coming.