Why publish a lockdown miscellany?

When all this is over, years into the future, I will reminisce to my grandchildren about what it was like to be locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic. I will tell them about how odd it all felt for the world to shutdown. I will speak of the incessant worrying about family and friends, the daily walk, the endless fear that the government made the wrong call.

But I will only be telling part of the story.

For my life in lockdown, while it is all those things, is also a life spent trying to find distraction. It is a life with endless freedom to obsess, to dream, to fantasise. I’m not talking about the yearnings to go to the pub, to the beach, or simply the everyday mundane stuff that I find myself missing. Rather, I find myself drifting into fuelled reveries in which I find myself desperately trying to sate my interest in all manner of trivialities.

I have been exploring Basque pelota, trying to decide which of its many variants I prefer. I have been revelling in youtube reviews of military rations. I have been turning over and over in my head the advert placed by the Conservatives during the 2005 general election which boasted the question ‘How hard is it to keep a hospital clean?’

I doubt I’m the only one. This time of freedom-that-is-not-freedom must have all kinds of strange consequences. Rightly, media coverage focuses on the big stories — the tragedies and the stories of hope — but I don’t think that this quite captures the strangeness of the experience we are going through. If we want to understand what this experience is like now, and if we are to explain to future generations what it felt like, then there needs to be a place to capture the ephemeralities of a locked down existence.

In this publication, I am going to share some of my obsessions, some of which emerged during the lockdown, others of which I have nurtured for years. In seeking to record them here I am, in part, responding my desire to work on a project that is not ‘about’ the pandemic but that could not happen at another time. This is indulgence, survival and a kind of record of the psychic obsessions produced by this extraordinary experience.

I don’t know how much I will publish here. But I’d like you to join me. What strange obsessions have you been indulging? What rabbit holes have you disappeared into? Where has the freedom to mentally wander taken you?

I am happy for anyone to contribute to this miscellany (while reserving the right to turn down submissions). Contact me if you’d like to join in with this experiment.