A clusterpocalypse is heading our way – so stock up on good times (not loo roll)
Exciting news, everyone: this winter will be terrible! This is palpably and collectively beginning to sink in, with conversations transitioning from, “It seems like we’ve flattened the curve now, right?” to “Oh, the apocalypse is coming. Well, something to put in the diary at last, I guess.” In case anyone was daring to nurture a flicker of optimism, a recent article by the Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth, dampened that spark: “This winter the government could be dealing with flu, Covid-19, flooding, mass unemployment and all the issues arising from the end of the Brexit transition period. The cabinet is assessing how ready the state is to handle multiple crises at once.” Haha – Brexit! Oh my God, remember that? Brexit feels like the annoying boyfriend you’d forgotten about because your house burned down. And as you clear the ashes from what was your life, you realise he’s still there, holding a boombox.
I’m going to take a casual punt here and say the state will probably be not that ready to deal with this incoming clusterpocalypse, judging by the past and current state of affairs. But we can be more prepared than we were for lockdown which, I would wager, took most of us by surprise. Not all of us, of course: my father was sending me emails about the coronavirus from late January, which I merrily ignored. For many of us who grew up in the 1990s – an era so comparatively drama-free it birthed a genre of films in which the protagonists had to make up fictional villains (Fight Club, The Game) because even Hollywood admitted there weren’t really any threats any more – it took a while to realise how bad things were. And now, they are going to get worse.
We can’t control life’s circumstances, but this time we can brace for them and learn from the mistakes of lockdown part one. So can everyone please chill on the toilet paper obsession this time? There was the inevitable guff last spring about Britain’s famed “blitz spirit”. But unless people spent the blitz sniping on Twitter about who has a cleaner, I didn’t see much evidence of that mythical characteristic. My personal low point was when I wasted far too much time on what was otherwise a lovely birthday arguing online about whether parenting during lockdown is as spirit-crushing as so many parents were saying (allow me to take advantage of my privileged platform here to get the last word in: yes, it bloody is.) So please, everyone, myself very much included, let us find ways to deal with anxiety that don’t involve being an absolute dick online.
Now, a word about Deliveroo which, last time round, seemed the solution to two problems I faced: my urgent desire to support local independent restaurants, and my eternal inability to cook. Well, not so much, it turns out. After I mentioned to the proprietor of one beloved place how often I was getting Deliveroo from him, he glumly told me the delivery service was taking an absurd 35% commission. Basta. I may not be able to cook, but I can walk round the corner.
We need to make like squirrels and gather nuts for winter, and by nuts I mean movies that spark conversations that have nothing to do with the current depressing situation. For instance, Back To The Future is, obviously, the most amazing movie made, from its script to its casting to the way it makes near incest seem not entirely creepy, which is a lot harder than making the mafia relatable in The Godfather. Hell, Goodfellas and The Sopranos did that – what else but BTTF has waved the flag for some hot mum-on-son flirtation? And yet… Now, nitpicking about logic in a movie about a time-travelling DeLorean might seem a stretch even for me, but if Marty McFly’s parents, George and Lorraine, met him when they were teenagers, how did they explain it to themselves when one of their children grows up to look identical to this friend they once had? Wouldn’t George think Lorraine had been having a secret affair with his former best friend, especially as she insisted on naming their child after him? You’d be amazed how often I think about this (actually, maybe you wouldn’t). Anyway, this puzzler will get you through many a gloomy winter evening.
“Comfort read”, as some people call it, or, as I call it, “read”. Not synthetically cheerful books, but depressing ones probably aren’t ideal: a book about Kristallnacht turned out not to be quite the escapist read I needed during lockdown, surprisingly. Instead, I loved Darren Coffield’s melancholic Tales From The Colony Room, because it made me feel as if I was out drinking in Soho, and grateful that I wasn’t.
Finally, stock up on the good times. I went to Prague with friends the last weekend of February, and I hugged the memory close during lockdown. So go for pub garden meet-ups with friends, socially distanced walks with your parents, birthday parties in the park. Because we may not know what the weather will bring, but we do know that summer fades, and clouds are gathering.
