Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 6 [25 March 2020]

Published: 25 March 2020

Day 5 of self-isolation and I am as happy as a pig in …. What is the expression? Ahh, straw. Of course, it is early days and there is a slight difference between five days and, how long has it been suggested in the media, 18 months? But I am confident that come what may I can do my time.

The hypocrisy inherent in that statement compels me to admit, however, that people like myself who have been working from home for years do have a distinct advantage. For us it is a way of life: self-isolating, social distancing, cuh, it is as easy as mugging somebody and blaming it on a deprived background. Over a period of time ‘working from homers’ cannot help but develop all of the essential skills isolators need to survive. We end up being Robinson Crusoes of our time, man; Friday or any other day, it is all the same to us.

Previous article: Diary of a Self-isolator (Day 1)

Self-isolating & Lockdown

I appreciate that the situation is somewhat different, somewhat more irksome should you by nature be a get-up-and-go, over-energised, gung-ho, physical-expending type or by vocation a manly man or manly woman doing heave-ho type of work. Self-lock-up, like voluntarily chastity, cannot be easy (they say it can be fun?) if you spend much of your life running marathons, getting sweaty down the gym, chopping down trees, digging holes or mountain climbing, but you do not need to run around your house with your chopper in your hand, tunnel your way out as if you are in Colditz or find yourselves climbing the walls, and the same applies to keeping fit and making your trainers pong. These things can be just as effectively transacted at home as in a posy, rip-you-off sports centre. OK, nobody is going to see you in the ridiculously expensive gear you bought to show off in, but if that worries your ego, why not just take a ubiquitous ‘selfie’ and post it up on Facebook.

I reverted to home workouts years ago during an eight-year spell when I was working a 70-hour week, when it was just not feasible, and when I certainly did not have the inclination, after rolling home late on an evening to look out my gym gear, pack it (forgetting your towel, naturally), travel to the sports centre, jump around, shower, pack up your kecks in your old kit bag and trundle all the way home. Home exercise saved an awful lot of time and made even more sense ~ it was a good way of saving money, too.

Admittedly, as on many occasions I elected to workout before I travelled to work, which meant dragging my sad and sorry arse out of bed at 5am (always difficult if you have had five pints of glorious ale the night before), it was difficult, but very good for self-discipline ~ Ouch! ~ although the combination of hard exercise, sleep deprivation and, if you are foolish enough to imbibe the night before, shock detoxification can produce an effect that is almost out-of-body. But there is really no need to follow my masochistic lead. Just choose a time of day when exercise suits you best ~ that is the beauty of working from home, indeed just being at home!

Keeping occupied whilst incarcerating yourself, or being locked down by the State, is another matter and depends on what you are used to and how adaptable you are.

“Be an opener of doors” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This blog, my diary, a biography that I am editing and a couple of other projects keeps me very busy. I have a Lada-load of books that I want to read and, when all of this becomes too wearing on the eyes and as Poirot was fond of saying, the little grey cells, I can always put my pinny on and pretend I am a housewife before the days of the gender wars.

To say that there is nothing to do and that ‘I’m bored’ is an alien concept to me. As my late friend Victor Rybinin the artist and historian said, “I can only imagine what boredom is!”. This is the internet age, dammit.

Self-isolating & Lockdown

We might live in the misinformation/disinformation age, but when you cut through the crap on the internet there is really quite a lot of good stuff out there. If you look hard enough, you can learn all sorts of new things. My ex-SAS friend, who is currently on lockdown in London (why not, he has been locked up everywhere else), is biding his time between unarmed combat training, learning how to make soufflés , and another chap I know, who once registered his employment as a professional burglar, has started a new business on eBay selling all sorts of home appliances, jewellery and things that he has collected over the years.

You meet a lot of interesting people when pub-crawling is your hobby, er although possibly not at the moment!

If the truth be known, that is the only thing that I am missing in this new isolation age ~ my weekly trip to the boozer. Somehow, it is just not the same, drinking with friends whilst on Skype.

However, being optimistic (very by the look of the news), come summer at least we can invite some friends around for a drink. My new social-distancing socialising plan is called relative socialising. How it works is that having disinfected ourselves and made sure that the wind is blowing in the right direction, we, my wife and I, sit on the terrace and drink ~ the terrace is on the first floor ~ whilst they, the guests, sit outside in the garden. We can hold conversations by shouting to each other over the railings and/or use our mobile phones if and when the mood should take us. This is also an excellent way of keeping your mind occupied and stopping you from reading Google News. If you do not have a terrace set-up like us but have two rooms, you could always knock a hole in the wall, fill the gaps with facemasks or, if you have been farsighted, bog paper, and with you in one room and they in the other converse through this homemade filtration system.

There is really no end to the things you can get up to whilst you are self-isolating or in government lockdown.

Yesterday, for example, I read on the Kaliningrad news website that there had been a substantial increase in the number of condoms sold in Russia since the outbreak and spread of coronavirus. It really is quite amazing what people will store in a time of crisis. I suppose with all this time on their hands, and elsewhere, some enterprising couples are making their own rubber gloves.

Tomorrow, Day 6 of Self-isolating, we brave the great outdoors!

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