Covid Creates 3

I sit on the stair case of a local church, whilst two steps down, a mother helps her young son read a storybook. Three primary school age girls run up the stairs to the church, then tiptoe inside, whispering and quietly giggling. Their mother calls them, and threatens with: ‘come down or I’ll start counting!’ On the pavement below, two boys and a girl run up the side of the church, whilst some 9 mothers mull around chatting. I check my watch, it’s nearly time, then notice the little boy is looking back at me: ‘he says his friend has the same watch as yours’, the mother says by means of an explanation. I smile: ‘it’s my son’s watch.’ I collect my things and get up to join the other mothers, who ask if my daughter is starting reception this year. Then one by one, mini ballerinas in baby pink ensembles appear at a side door, hopefully searching for their connection. As each name is called out by the assistant teacher, there’s a brief excited reunion, a reconnection. Mine appears in her new ballet outfit her grandfather bought her last week. Her old one grew too small in lockdown. A lot seems to have grown too small since lockdown. Life seems to have shrunk, become more localised and tight knit. Human-to-human classes, the congregation of locals, sprawling into the outdoors, kids allowed to play, run, be noisy, on the streets… the sheer physicality of it all. The fact that we needed to bid farewell to our children outside, rather than all cram inside (a la pre-lockdown), awkwardly and silently, glued to personalised screens, meant that we took the space to be alongside one another outside. I felt catapulted in time to an imagined moment in London’s past, with kids playing on the streets, life pulsing out in the open. It’s as if lockdown has sharpened an appetite for human connections, for the local and neighbourly, and for a sense of ‘normality’. Whilst so much is happening in the world, and when much switched off not long ago, the ordinary has become precious.