Another Covid Easter

Covid is waning, we all thought a few months ago. It feels like the media has celebrated ‘freedom day’ several times in the last years, keen to turn the page. Yet here we still are. Every second person I speak to has Covid or has recently had it. Several still seem to be recovering. There appears to be no rhyme or reason as to why some people get it badly and others don’t.

I took only son for his vaccine last week. He hasn’t had Covid since 2020, which is a minor miracle, but he was not at all impressed by the enthusiasm of the health worker who greeted him when he went. Only son is very much pre-teen. He is way too cool for adults going into hyperdrive because he is under 12. The woman made the mistake of telling him there were toys available and presented him with a sticker. Only son could barely contain his contempt. Did she think he was three?

Meanwhile, plans to get away, for those who can, have become major strategic campaigns, particularly given current fuel shortages. We are supposed to be heading to Dover in the next few days and there seems to be no way of predicting how long it will take. At the moment we are thinking of leaving around seven hours early in the dead of night. I fear others will be thinking similarly and we will all end up in an exhausted heap somewhere on the M2.

In the old days the kids would have thought this wildly exciting. We would have crept out in our pjs with duvets, teddy bears and supplies and whacked on a One Direction CD and played a few 100 rounds of I spy. Now, the kids seem somewhat less enthusiastic. Only son is worried about the lack of wifi, daughters two and three are concerned about sleep deprivation and everyone will be plugged into their own music, meaning the adults in the front will have long  conversations in which they impart shining pearls of wisdom which no-one in the back will even deign to listen into. Are the travel problems down to Covid; is it P&O; is it Brexit? Who knows. It just seems that any attempt to claw our way back to pre-Covid life is doomed. The best thing is to just give into it.

Everyone is exhausted, permanently. Even the cats. They’ve started turning their noses up at all supermarket-brand cat foods. Putting the food in sachets and charging more for it doesn’t seem to impress them much. Cats are not fools.

No-one seems to want to go out much generally. People ask what we are doing, but every attempt to suggest something exciting is greeted with a groan. The cinema is packed with superhero fantasy stuff that no-one really likes because we’ve seen it all a million times over. The only sport anyone likes is swimming and half the team are worried about people seeing their arms. The mere mention of the words ‘go for a walk’ are a conversation killer. Bike rides are off because only one of the bikes works and it is for 10 year olds. Instead people seem to want to stay in, watch Netflix, make stuff, do yoga, entertain themselves and wait until everything gets onto some kind of steady footing. If that ever happens.

Only son had a friend over for a sleepover the other day and he brought a VR headset. I took part in a game where things fly at you and you swipe them. I have to say that it is not my forte and I emerged feeling more stressed than when I started, but the kids love it. The girls have been watching BTS. “Jimin looked straight at me,” said daughter three. Only son’s friend says people are already using VR headsets to work so they feel they are in an office, but they are actually at home. It’s hybrid plus plus plus. But what will that mean for the jobs that can’t be done from home and for how we relate to people in the physical world?

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