Going Viral – The Blogalypse 10 – ‘The New Normal’

It’s been six weeks since my last Covid-19 blog post. What can I say? I’ve been busy. I forgot that people actually read this and might have thought I’d died. Sorry.

A lot has happened since I last posted. Admittedly I’ve still not started pilates, Marie Kondo’d my house or shaved off half my hair (there’s still time). I’ve had to have that necessary cabinet reshuffle of the leaders of the New World Order. I previously complained about Brian Blessed not pulling his weight when, bless that furry beastie, not only did he suddenly put out a couple of motivational mini videos but his dear wife also got very ill. So I’m releasing him from his position of command (Officer in Charge of Bellowing at Stupid People to be less Stupid) on compassionate grounds.

Our future Supreme Leader, Dame Julie Andrews has also been incredibly busy, creating all kinds of fun media activities for children and playing with puppets. In this way, she’s made it clear that she’s absolutely done trying to knock any sense into the adults of the planet and is going to stick with what she’s good at – Vontrapping the Bejeezus out of any kid that wanders within 50 yards of her queenly perfection.

Now, it may be a wild card, but I’ve decided to promote Phoebe Waller-Bridge to be Brian Blessed’s replacement. Partly because I think she’d probably enjoy putting down stupid people and would add some sort of rapturous smutty wit to her bellowing, and partly because I have the most enormous girl crush on her and want her to be my new best friend. Apologies to my existing best friends but you know you’d drop me for her in an instant too. Don’t try to deny it.

I’ve not yet completely settled on a replacement for Julie, because nobody can replace Julie. But perhaps a suitable temporary stand-in might be Dame Maggie Smith who I would place in charge of withering looks and beautifully enunciated swearing, an ancient British art form combo I also pride myself in. My mother will be incredibly proud that all those elocution lessons weren’t wasted when whatever I see on the news during the daily Governmental Covid-19 briefings cause me to loudly exclaim with perfect diction certain words that really only Julie, Maggie and I can get away with. Quentin Tarantino hasn’t got anything on a bunch of middle class, middle aged ladies with a bee in their bonnet, that’s for sure. And if you don’t fucking believe me, you can bloody well ask Maggie.

So what else has been happening? Well, bumbling spam Boris Johnson managed to catch himself a case of Corona Virus and ended up in intensive care just before his mistress (whom he impregnated whilst his wife was recovering from cancer) gave birth to one of his numerous offspring. Half the country (the stupid half) thought he was a hero for this act of….laying in bed being treated by the supposedly (by his reckoning) unskilled foreign nurses he usually liked to charge a fee to for the privilege of working in our NHS. The other half of the country rolled their eyes so hard it made the Earth wobble on its axis.

When I previously wrote about The Stupids, I really hoped not to have to include our own Prime Minister in the mix of stupid people gathering together with other stupid people in tight bunches, and then also stupidly shaking hands with people you know have Corona Virus and cosying up to other people who work on Covid wards just so you can be snapped looking like what you think will be ‘super brave and somehow stiff upper lippish’ but what actually just comes across as your brain having been hollowed out with a spoon by the prefects back at Eton as some sort of initiation ceremony into the Society for Upper Class Morons who think their family name alone will impress and scare off viruses. Men like him disgust me. I’ve never had the misfortune to meet Boris Johnson, but even from a safe distance I’d be willing to bet decent money that his penis smells.

But while our repulsive PM was paying the price of his stupidity, America decided to outdo us once again with a President who suggested bleaching our insides and shining UV light into our bodies was the way to go. Stupid women with UV nail varnish hardening kits couldn’t decide if they were meant to eat the light, stick it up their arseholes or maybe just shine it onto the bleach they were drinking, but suffice to say…somehow, the world’s stupidest leader has still managed to avoid catching the dreaded lurgy. I can only assume this is because the celestial writers of the tele novella that is Earth right now, are saving his death either for the Murder Hornets (yes, readers from the future, they are real, look them up) or possibly something to do with sentient killer robots.

I, myself, have been preparing for such a future already by saying thank you to cash machines when they give me money, and asking Google Assistant to please find me answers to things. When our digital overlords decide to kill us, they may choose to spare me and keep me as a pet, as I always treated them with respect and kindness. Even the dishwasher…whom I actively love.

Speaking of killings, a great many people I know have been confessing to ‘kill lists’ of people they wouldn’t necessarily wish the disease on (bad karma and all that) but if they HAD to pick someone to get it…they all know exactly who that person or people would be and why. We all started out with camaraderie and human kindness in our hearts, but I think that’s possibly wearing a bit thin now. Nobody seems to be singing opera from their balconies any more. Fewer and fewer people say a friendly hello when we walk our dog. The Thursday night clap for the NHS has started to ring very hollow when those same neighbours clapping are having secret garden parties with their friends two days later regardless of the risk to themselves and the frontline workers who will later have to deal with them. The novelty of being at home has well worn off for everyone, including us (and we work from home anyway, so are used to it). Everyone we know has got a bit fat. Everyone has finished the good shows on Netflix. We are literally 3 bottles of wine and an episode of ‘Killing Eve’ away from complete and utter societal breakdown.

And yet, there are small signs of hope and renewal still. My local neighbourhood facebook group has become a hive of generosity, sharing plant cuttings and potted tomatoes and whatnot, helping my own fledgling garden veg patch to start to sprout real signs of life. And there’s something so soothing about watching little green shoots push out of the earth towards the sunshine and anticipating the smugly satisfying crunch of future home grown salads. It may have cost us about 30 quid in compost and seeds and paraphernalia to grow £2.75 worth of vegetables but they will be OUR vegetables and at least we won’t have to worry about someone having Covided them with lurgy fingers down at Aldi.

My mojo and energy levels have been gradually returning…not quite to normal yet, but normal enough for André and I to really get our teeth stuck into our big sculpture project in the garden studio. And when we are beavering away with clay, singing along to cheesy old musicals that probably drive the neighbours nuts, and laughing together, we can easily forget what’s going on out there in the world.

But it’s been five months since we saw our daughter. And three since I saw my parents. And on days when Andre forgets to hug me I feel like I have spiders in my soul crackling their feet all through me to burst out, screaming. I miss….people. And yet most of the people I see when we do our daily outings for exercise or shopping are so ham-headed I want to punch them in the face.

These are not the people I miss. I miss MY people. I ache deep in my belly for MY people. Yet, the only way to survive in the new normal and not go crazy has been (for me at least) to try to forget about those people as much as possible and get on with what I have control of. Or think I have control of.

This includes:-

• Getting on with work as if nothing has changed. (Lucky we had some big projects in as we cannot have any new customers safely until this is all over).
• Gardening. Although if slugs or bugs eat my lovingly reared courgettes there is every possibility I might absolutely lose my shit and run naked into the next herd of Stupids to bathe in the death plague and give up completely.
• How often I make the bed. My old habit of leaving washing it until the duvet made crunchy noises and smelled more of the dog than us, has now been replaced with a much more sanitary and respectable once a week routine. Making the bed makes things feel better. Mother was right. A made bed is a good thing even if people out in the world are injecting their arseholes with UV-charged bleach. Bed is good. Bed goooooood. With the whole of the house as my castle/prison, bed is my favourite place. No monsters can penetrate a duvet as we all know.
• And my final method of asserting control in my life is by punishing people for trying to beat me in Duolingo where I am still ruthlessly and competitively learning French as if the future of the planet somehow depends on my ability to tell a Parisian hotel owner that the Wifi password doesn’t work but that I very much enjoyed the hot croissants at breakfast.

I am starting to dream in French. And even my daydreams are filled with memories of sashaying around Montmartre with a strawberry meringue the size of my head in one hand and a map in the other. But thinking about travel makes me simultaneously so happy and so sad all at once.

Feeling trapped in our homes is accentuated by the feeling of being trapped in our country. Especially when surrounded by so much lemming-like scientific-logic-immune idiocy. Memories of our last trip to Australia – part work event, part holiday – both soothes me and haunts me. I long to swim in the sea, not the shitty British sea but a sea where it is so clear and so blue I really can see the sharks 50 feet away and not just litter, old condoms and a child’s turd floating past. I wonder when it will ever feel safe to get on an aeroplane again. I wonder when it will feel safe to hug someone other than André again. I not only wonder when….I now wonder ‘if’.

IF it will ever feel safe again or is this really the new normal? Do I have to wash my shopping, keep my distance, avoid my relatives and friends, wear a mask and scream at strangers who go to pet my dog for the rest of my life? Or will this pass as quickly as it appeared? Just fizzle away?

We’ve all developed our own new little routines in lockdown. We’ve adjusted well enough to start upping our game slightly in recent weeks by setting ourselves new challenges and tasks. I have given up food that makes me really happy and am now opting for the semi-misery of a low-carb diet to try and combat my Covid-baby. That is, the extra 9 pounds I gained in the first 7 weeks of lockdown from eating too many of Andre’s microwave mug cakes, and pretty much anything else I could funnel into my bleating pie hole to self-soothe in the early days of the crisis.

I look like I’ve got another person hiding under my jumper. And I’m not even wearing a jumper. I’ve just expanded so much that all my clothes look like one big stretched sweater. I was meant to get slim and fit in lockdown and tone my bingo wings like Sarah Connor did in Terminator 2 when they locked her in the mental hospital. Sarah Connor didn’t have Netflix or Andre’s chocolate mug cakes. Sarah Connor didn’t have a corner shop nearby that sold Ben & Jerrys. Sarah Connor was too uptight for masturbation and The Great British Sewing Bee. Sarah Conner had nothing but a fixation on impending doom and her upended metal bed frame for entertainment. THAT’S why she got slim and fit.

She should just try it in this house. She’d have completely ballsed up saving the world and instead have been bingewatching ‘The Good Place’ whilst dunking KitKats in the peanut butter jar.

But the miracle of miracles is that despite being shut in together, getting fat, just the two of us (and the dog) for the last 2.5 months, under a lot of pressure from work, life, health, worry, the universe, the murder hornet threats and so forth…that André still seems to love me. It’s true that we never actually ran out of toilet paper, or food, or network coverage from the wifi…but we have been facing the threat of the total ruination of our business, the scariness of sickness, and the challenges of having to trim our dog’s fringe by ourselves so she stopped walking into furniture. We have managed to calmly make important joint decisions together such as ‘Where shall we plant the radishes?’ and ‘Should we bother re-watching the Capaldi years in Doctor Who or not?’ We have gently fallen into a very natural rhythm together each day where I make the coffee and water the plants in our vegetable garden, we both fanny about online until I nag us out of bed, we walk the dog, I make lunch, he does dinner, and in-between we work. When we get sick of work, he jokes, ‘Do you fancy going to the cinema tonight?’ It never gets old. Oh how we laugh at that one.

It is our new normal. And I think although it’s relatively nice enough, that under the surface I’m still screaming a little inside, having to talk myself out of throwing myself into the local lake to get my swimming fix (it’s full of rat’s piss and rusting supermarket trolleys), having to talk myself into getting on with the grownup stuff each day. Wishing the Government would throw us a bit more of a financial lifeline to tide us through, wishing scientists would hurry up with a vaccine or cure. Wishing some famous publisher would chance upon my blog, split their sides laughing at my comedic use of the word ‘arsehole’ and immediately offer me a huge and lucrative publishing deal. I’m wishing for friends, I’m wishing for wellness, I’m wishing I was a back in the Australian Sea, I’m wishing for a crystal ball. I’m wishing it wasn’t all starting to feel more normal because it’s still scary as all hell. And in between planting vegetables and praying the money doesn’t run out before the vaccine is found, I’m counting ambulances, knowing we’re hitting the beginning of the second wave. Knowing however normal this is starting to feel, we must not let our guards down for a second. Not unless you really want to miss out on the murder hornets.

Until then, stay safe, stay alert (what the hell kind of slogan is that, Tory Government?), avoid the Stupids, and the Ham-faced Tories with smelly crotches, and Aldi’s fondled courgettes if you know what’s good for you. See you all on the Other Side.

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