- Get up
- Eat breakfast
- Do office stuff
- Do chores
- Eat lunch
- Take dog out
- Watch an episode of Borgen
- Phone people
- Do yoga/practise Spanish
- Watch briefing/news (with small alcoholic drink)
- Make dinner
- Eat dinner
- TV
- Bed
- Repeat (similar for Paul minus foreign languages and add cycling)
Our lockdown routine isn’t bad; we have sunrises, birdsong, open spaces and so on but – except for a weekly trip to Tesco or a Zoom session – it is monotonous.
But as my sister said – what do we want to do? What did we do before? Well for us a few guests would be nice and like everyone to see our family and friends. We would like to be spontaneous e.g. let’s go for a walk and call at a pub without booking or having to check local rules or remember a mask. Pop to the shops, try on a dress without worrying if I’m breaking the law. Conversely it would also be nice to plan something with certainty that it will happen, have something in the diary.
But what we are really suffering from is what the Germans have a great word for – Fernweh: We long to go somewhere away from here. I would like to get on a train, sit in the Taps on York station waiting for a connection, disembark at Kings Cross in the heat and the crowds of London. I would like to sit in departures at a regional airport and jump on a low cost plane to a package destination. Take a taxi, check in to a hotel, have a beer and salted almonds in a dusty square, wear sunglasses. I want to pack a bag, psych up for a long haul, emerge bleary eyed and be amazed by humming birds hovering inches from your breakfast table or eavesdrop on a Big Sur drifter recounting his picaresque life story on a mobile during his cigarette break or hundreds of Cape Towners standing in the street to applaud returning fire crews after another tough night on Table Mountain or a huge live electric cable snaking across a rainy street in India as local boys laugh and jump over it or a NYC taxi driver calling out across a busy street (to a super fit one legged black cyclist in a lycra onesie) ‘Yo Dexter how ya doin?’
That’s it. That’s all.
