Do we really want to go back to normal?

On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ I thought of that again yesterday when a writer friend emailed: ‘Like you, I thought I would be much more productive but I do find it very hard to focus… and I still haven’t filed those boxes of books in the sitting room.’

The days fly by and the sunshine was a real bonus, for it is pleasant and surely good for the soul to sit in it, reading, dreaming, nodding off, and topping up our Vitamin D levels. I said here at the beginning of lockdown that I would finish the book I had already started, plus some short stories, this weekly column and the occasional book review. I would also dig out the information my horrid slave-driver of an accountant has politely, and then progressively less politely, been requesting. I have definitely read many books, but then I always do; and I have also written a couple of chapters, but at any other time I would have written ten by now, never mind during weeks when so many of life’s little interruptions and diversions have gone into quarantine themselves.

Talking of A-levels, I have not yet penned my last essay for the one in classical civilisation I am supposed to be taking, nor have I finished the cushion of a panel from the Bayeux Tapestry, rearranged old photographs in new albums, or culled the duplicates of my collection of Ladybird Books and re-shelved the remainder in alphabetical or subject order. If I were a Catholic I would go to confession with a sin-list not of ‘I haves…’ but ‘I have nots…’.

Do you recognise yourself in all this? ‘If only I had the time…’ Oh come on.