Lockdown offers no escape from the tyranny of socialising

It’s hard to tell what day of the lockdown we’re on, but it’s clear that society is in a fascinating moment right now, due to the torrent of Houseparty invites, Zoom notifications and people calling without warning on FaceTime. It’s interesting that millennials – a generation so weaned on text-based communication that about 60% of them have a full panic attack every time they have to phone in a takeaway – have so fully embraced face-to-face video platforms, the “kissing with your eyes open” of communicative mediums, but here we are. The reality is that, between virtual pub quizzes and digital group hangouts, my social calendar is now busier than it was before The Fall of Society, and I don’t actually like it. I want more time to myself.

From this, though, we can clearly recognise personality types that barely existed three weeks ago. And everyone in the UK currently falls into one of these four camps:

1 The Early Adopter
I felt that everyone who got on to Zoom during the first week of isolation was perhaps taking it a bit too seriously. I did not need to see the faces of my friends, jagged by streaming bandwidths and the unflattering angles of laptop cameras, in the first week of lockdown. It had only been a few days since I’d seen them last. How often do you need to see your friends? Come on. Grow up.

But those early Zoom adopters now look like lightning-foresighted pioneers of the brave new world, because the rest of us – only a few days behind the curve, but in a moment like this that may as well be years – are dragging ourselves on to a platform they are now kings of, while I’m still trying to find a spot in the flat that offers flattering lighting and an interesting-but-not-too-aesthetically-busy backdrop. Early adopters are out there offering kitchen cook-alongs and collaborative boardgame nights. I’m still trying to figure out how much of my body the laptop camera can see and whether or not I need to wear trousers.

2 The Conscientious Objector
The refusal to use Zoom or video-calling platforms now comes with the same energy as that thing people used to do, in previous lifetimes, where they would declare in a slightly-too-loud voice that they “actually don’t own a TV”. Just like pretending to not know who Kim Kardashian is doesn’t make you a fascinating intellectual recluse, refusing to participate in the overriding communication method of the day isn’t in any way important or interesting.

3 Confused By Buttons
If you’ve ever had to demonstrate to an older family member how to play Scrabble on the iPad you will recognise in yourself the blunt terror of not quite knowing your way around the hip new app, the fear that comes with trying to navigate yourself out of one Houseparty room and into another without having to call your grandson for help. It’s a slippery downward slope from here, so the sooner you figure this one out, the better. That last sentence was almost solely for the benefit of me, I’ll admit that: I’m the old person who doesn’t know their way around the apps.

4 Screenshot Snarker
Quite a snarky format of tweet doing the rounds at the moment is: “You know it’s possible to have a groupchat with your friends without screenshotting it for Instagram, right?” Which for me really undermines the rush people are getting out of embracing a new technology and feeling reinvigorated by human connection again. Did Alexander Graham Bell have to deal with this back when he invented the telephone? “We get it, mate, you can talk to people in other rooms. Oh but only if they own a telephone? A thing you made and manufactured? No thank you lol.” I feel like the people who are going to spend their pandemic berating others for enjoying things might have to wait a while for their nationwide round of applause, but we’ll see how long this lasts.

Midlands mindset hits its peak

I grew up fairly near to the Derbyshire village of Eyam, so every year or so we’d get a school assembly about Eyam and the noble sacrifices they made there in 1665. During the bubonic plague, the village chose to self-isolate, preventing the spread of the disease to nearby towns, yes, but also very much letting the majority of the population of the place die first (you might recognise this as our current government’s strategy circa mid-March 2020). To trade food and goods with other towns, so the assembly went, the population of Eyam left coins soaked in vinegar for passing traders to scoop up and leave medicine and bread behind in exchange. I can’t really remember what the moral of the story was, though. Don’t catch the plague?

I’ve been thinking about Eyam a lot recently, because Derbyshire has become an unlikely locus point for erratic coronavirus behaviour, in a way that makes me warmly proud. This weekend, Derbyshire police had to break up a 25-person karaoke party, with the crime scene photograph showing a beige-and-pink buffet spread of various hams, egg mayonnaise and a plate featuring nothing but two pieces of fried chicken and three peach halves. In a time of pandemic it would be irresponsible of me to suggest that this is actually “extremely funny”, but … contracting coronavirus because you could not resist a meat platter and some pub car park speaker-level karaoke is both 1) extremely good and 2) an urge my own body has had to fight in recent weeks.

Meanwhile Derbyshire police have been shaming walkers in the Peak District, publishing drone videos of ramblers as if they were murderers. “Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the #PeakDistrict despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through,” Derbyshire police tweeted. I personally think this is relatively sinister and a massive waste of police time, but what do I know? There is some ancient magick in the Derbyshire soil that makes the people there act up in a plague situation. I can’t wait to see what they get up to next week.