Going Viral

So BoJo has tested CoPo, and if that isn’t a glaring signifier of our nation’s downward spiral to decrepitude, I don’t know what is. In a strange way, however, the news came as some sort of relief; I was beginning to wonder whether the Prime Minister’s increasingly dishevelled appearance was instead something to do with his pregnant fiancée back at No. 10 (My father, having been caught in my mother’s firing line 22 years ago and three times since, takes pleasure in reminding me that my future significant other can too look forward to the delights of my raging hormones one day).

Next to sleek Mr Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s podium posture and bedraggled blonde mop make him look victim to some sort of congenital disease, although I was somewhat impressed to see that, even now working from home, Boris’s video to the nation saw him still don full suit-and-tie – an agile working policy that my sister, on the other hand, seems to have categorically chosen not to adopt; for the fifth day in a row, she emerged from her lair at 11:45 this morning in just tracksuit bottoms and a dressing gown: apparently a ‘look a la moda’ back at Birmingham University.

Indeed, the longer this lockdown lifestyle continues, the more I fear that the UK will emerge from the other side caring even less about our appearance than we did before. Rest assured, however, that vanity remains the last sin some of us will lose; in a conscious effort to do our bit for the ‘vulnerable’ this week, we facetimed our 79-year-old grandmother, only to have her immediately put the phone down on us because we caught her in her curlers. Some things never change.

My greatest worry as a student, however, is that our sudden enforced introduction to real-life Big Brother might actually take away the need for the word ‘functioning’ in the expression ‘functioning alcoholic’; adapting once again to family life is a challenge to say the least, and ‘keeping the spirits up’ may fast assume a new double meaning. My friends and I have already discovered a wine delivery app which drops a bottle on your doorstep within half an hour, and a virtual drinks evening via ‘Houseparty’ is quickly being twisted as the perfect excuse for downing it in one. The app can apparently also answer all your loo roll desires ... Although the economic situation looks dire, I haven’t stooped to the low of applying for ‘wineapp’ graduate promotion roles just yet, but referral benefits do exist, and, in this current climate, aside from alcohol and Andrex, what more could you possibly need?

Today marks a week since I finally admitted to my parents that the exodus of pasta from Durham’s supermarket shelves may have been straining the bounds of my student culinary repertoire, and I caught an emergency train down to Birmingham, where my father picked both my sister and me up. Sat in the car disinfecting my hands in fear, not of Covid-19, but of the general toxic state of my sister’s student house, I watched as two parents across the street refused to touch their 19-year-old son with a barge-pole. The temptation to strap the radioactive reprobate to the roof rack was one his father was evidently struggling to resist. March 28th also coincides with my uncle’s long-awaited bail from self-isolation; when my little cousins told me he had been imprisoned in the top room for two weeks, showing no sign of symptoms, I couldn’t quite help but think that perhaps this was my aunty’s final resort in an ongoing marital tiff. BoJo did compare the Coronavirus crackdown to a ‘wartime’ situation, after all.

My mother is calling for us to don our welly boots for our daily family expedition across the Chiltern hills, and so I think this signals the end to my first blog post. As an ode to the recent closure of all UK McDonald’s doors, my teenage brothers are exploiting this everyday exercise opportunity to practise what’s clearly the latest manoeuvre that’s down with the kids: aptly named the ‘Big Mac’, it involves them (the burger buns) running up from behind and rugby tackling me (the unsuspecting burger) from both sides. Social distancing at its finest. The scholastic pressures of Remote Learning (or, rather, not remotely learning) are evidently taking their toll.

There’s a limit to how many times I can use a blog as an excuse to procrastinate from my looming dissertation in the next week, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, stay home and stay safe.

Charlotte x