(with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez, of course)

Well, how are you all doing? I hope everyone is keeping safe and well, and the worst thing facing you is lockdown ennui.

I’m lucky when it comes to our new way of living. On the whole, my life has changed relatively little since the UK went into belated lockdown. We’re being quite rigorous about the social distancing thing (any bets on this being the Oxford Dictionary’s top entry for new words this year?) because my almost-90-year-old mother lives with us and is in frail health. We have to protect her. But apart from feeling the constraint on going out just for the sheer hell of it, not much else has changed. I’ve worked from home for the last decade or so—for a definition of ‘worked’ that equals ‘trying to make a go of this author stuff’—so my working pattern hasn’t much changed. I’m not feeling the frustration and pent-up cabin fever that many of you must be experiencing right now, so that’s one huge thing to be thankful for. We live deep in the country, too, so it’s easy to get out each day with the dogs for a long walk using field paths where you don’t see another human with whom to even practice being distant. I’m not trapped in my old house in London, where the sheer press of people around would drive me quite batty.

That isn’t to say I’m not affected. I’m not writing much, for a start. Despite there being no huge change to the way I live, there’s a change to the way I think and feel. That this plague isn’t a surprise (or shouldn’t be, given the history of respiratory illnesses over the last twenty years) hasn’t helped dull the shock and helplessness that everyone must feel when they suddenly can’t live their lives the way they want to. Constraints are hard. Trammelling. A killer to the imagination.

Everything seems harder, you know? A trip to the supermarket is like planning a military campaign, what with timing our arrival to get the least waiting time in the queue outside and splitting our shopping list between us so we can both pretend for a few minutes that we’re still part of a wider society where shopping is a normal human activity. It’s come to something when a trip to Tesco to buy milk takes on the dreamy attraction of a visit to Shangri La! I can’t remember when I last wandered around the shops for the sheer hell of it, but boy! do I miss it.

There’s no energy and—for me, no emotion—left over to write. I dutifully turn the PC on and open up Scrivener, and ten minutes later I’m watching GoT clips on YouTube, or videos of my favourite glassblower recreating exquisite Venetian goblets. If I get a paragraph done, I count it as a productive day. Other authors are probably doing well with the extra time to write. I can only wish I were one of them.

It’s a peculiar paradox. I suspect a lot of us are feeling the n^th degree of restlessness after looking at the same four walls and (much as we love them!) the same faces all day and every day. And feeling the same lassitude and lack of energy and motivation when it comes to dealing with it.

So what are you all doing right now, to cope? Here’s my list of de-stressing activities that do help a little. I’m …

• working my way through my TBR pile. I don’t have to feel guilty about taking time away from writing because I’m not doing much of that anyway.
• learning how to decoupage glass. Coughs and points upwards to post header, where you can see I’ve decoupaged every interesting-shaped bottle in the house (the wonderful plate in the background isn’t my work, sadly). Tomorrow I start on a big project in our guest room, decoupaging the glass doors of a built-in wardrobe. In some things, people, my ambition is awesome.
  
• laughing at recipes online that say brightly “Here’s something to make from your store cupboard staples!” where they expect ordinary people to have things like dark tahini, carob syrup and miso in their larders as a matter of course. As if it hasn’t been the culinary equivalent of climbing Everest just to find dried pasta on the supermarket shelves! I dread to think what the staff there would say if I asked for coconut milk, fatty pancetta and kaffir lime leaves.
• binge-watching Bill Gudenrath on YouTube. The playlist you want for this is Techniques of Renaissance Venetian-Style Glassworking. Honest, this is legit author research for me, as my (very slow!) work in progress is about a glassblower, but even if it wasn’t, just seeing this man’s skill and creativity is a remarkable stress reliever. Soooo restful.

So, what have you all been up to? Care to share? I’m always looking for a new distraction! What are you doing to fill the time and take your mind off things?

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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