Variety has hardly been the spice of life lately, has it? Courtesy of the pandemic, many of us have almost regressed to acting like teenagers.
Sleeping late, eating junk food, spending hours on our phones and tablets, clipping our hair into topiary shapes, abstaining from exercise but not from alcohol, and — it goes without saying — we neglect our homework. We even play loud music that no one else in the house likes. (“Dion? Eddie Cochran? Who are they, when they’re at home, grandad?”) Sadly, only Dion is still at home, 83 now, a bit too old to pursue Runaround Sue any longer.
As our lives shrink, we may find our memories rushing in to fill up the void. Mine leads me unerringly towards a petrol station with a lion’s cage on its forecourt in the back streets of Al Ain in the Arab Emirates. There was a lion pacing restlessly around in its worryingly ramshackle dwelling, with that “I wonder what’s for dinner?” look that lions sometimes get, and I found myself feeling anxious and delicious.
Predictably, in retelling that experience over the years, I have tended to come across as a pith-helmeted big game hunter, rather than a man who would hide indoors from a vanishingly small virus. Funny how your mind plays tricks, isn’t it?
In such straitened circumstances, I occasionally even regret having lost touch with old pen pals, some of them from the days when we actually used pens. Nowadays my postal friends are mostly credit card companies and utility providers, who don’t even provide foreign stamps to soften the blow of their final demands. Strange to think that 14-year-old Aliette from Orléans (Dundee’s sister city) will now be 75. Perhaps some memories are best left in the past, like youth and staring lions in the eye.
Certain things became unexpectedly realistic with the arrival of the pandemic age. We have probably all seen and derided posters for holiday destinations with only two people on the beach? I rest my case. (Such idealistic portrayals were careful never to show someone alone on the sand, friendless and dejected.)
There are various places I used to know like the back of my hand — Monte Carlo, Istanbul, Havana, weren’t among them, unfortunately — but enough to dream of during a lockdown. Nowadays my imagination is contained in a few rooms with barely enough space to swing any kind of domestic pet, it’s just me and the goldfish. We try to out-stare each other, and I always blink first. It was only recently I remembered that fish don’t have eyelids. How that goldfish must have been laughing up his sleeve at me.
