Time to shape up: my post-lockdown resolutions

I’m a formless blob,” laments a friend. “The only thing I want to do is eat and sleep,” says another. I feel the same. My non-work time is spent… actually I don’t know. I stare listlessly at the wall for a bit on Friday and suddenly it’s Tuesday. Despite this, I find myself forensically checking friends’, acquaintances’ and nemeses’ pictures and analysing offhand comments for any sign they may, in fact, be working on a novel or starting a new business on the sly.

Because I have developed a new paranoia: that people who say they haven’t achieved anything in lockdown are lying. I fear they are the adult equivalent of those kids who, having loudly proclaimed they hadn’t revised at all for the test, quietly ace it. I will be lulled into believing everyone is watching Grand Designs all day coated in Dorito dust, but they will emerge with a six-pack, a moving trilogy that redefines contemporary literature or the next Airblade (intellectual property lawyers are reporting a steep increase in patent applications).

I know it’s irrational, but the sense we should be achieving creates an insidious thrum of unease on top of our real worries. Internet gentlemen explaining that if we haven’t acquired 100,000 YouTube subscribers, learned Mandarin or deadlifted 200kg, we “didn’t lack time, we lacked discipline”, don’t help either. Surely one of the few advantages of 2020 is that it’s OK to lack discipline. This is an age of self-acceptance: as prominent contemporary philosopher RuPaul Charles puts it: “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else (can I get an amen)”. It’s good we no longer cleave to buttoned-up self-denial, suffering nobly or wastefully like the characters in Brief Encounter or that Ian McEwan novel about premature ejaculation. Right now, there is much to be said for accepting that we want a little nap, four post-dinner crumpets, or to spend the day weeping in a tepid bath and giving in.

The only asana I have mastered post-corona is what I’m calling 'modified corpse pose'

The problem is that self-flagellation is all I know – it’s got me this far. So I’ve decided to shake my torpor and try a little self-improvement. The only thing I have mastered recently is clear insight into my character flaws, so I’m trying to address them with some post-lockdown resolutions…

Direct my limited energies better: I have spent approximately 496 hours this month trying to buy discontinued oversized mugs (ah yes, that’s where all my time went). I already have three, but recent scarcity madness infected me and I am irrationally fixated on giant tea receptacles. As I write, my husband has come in holding two newly acquired specimens and asked how many mugs I have bought (I don’t like his tone). The answer is: “Not enough!” I don’t know what use this mug reserve will be in the end times: maybe they’ll be the new shell money when global capitalism collapses. It’s a long shot. Remedy: I’ve relinquished my eBay password to my husband who will presumably use it for his own stockpile (lightbulbs). Mug cold turkey is easy. But not replacing it with something unhelpful (being so furious at the government my head feels as if it will split open like a watermelon, perhaps) may prove harder.

Stop getting high on my own sanctimony: disapproving of park barbecues or crowded beaches is not my thing, but not because I am a compassionate person who accepts others may be fighting battles of which I know nothing. No, it is because I exhaust my judgmental impulses at home. I have become the wastefinder general. Exuding the sourly parsimonious energy of the landlady of a seedy postwar boarding house, I try to catch people eating fresh food then brandish a single clingfilmed Linda McCartney sausage or sliver of cheese hardened to fingernail consistency and exhort them to “be mindful of food waste” and “think of the planet”. Remedy: I must confess to my family I lied about the availability of avocados and ate one alone in secret, thereby losing all credibility as the food tsar.

Lighten up: recent evidence has confirmed I am a controlling fun sponge. I instigated pizza night as an attempt at family entertainment, but within minutes my insistence on everyone doing it exactly my way turned it into the kind of joyless high-stakes cookery show where someone cries over a poorly deboned quail. We ate our – perfectly executed – pizzas in funereal silence. Remedy: I’ve banned myself from supervising group activities (and possibly also taking part in them).

Finally, my grotesque laziness: I used to do yoga. Now I click on links to classes then ignore them. The only asana I have mastered post-corona is what I’m calling “modified corpse pose”. You lie flat on your back holding your phone an inch from your face with one hand and a Twix in the other (it’s very restorative). At least I haven’t used “I fell down a wombat hole” as an excuse, as happened during a friend’s yoga session, but the rot must stop. Remedy: finish writing this, avoid marsupial burrows and finally press play, I suppose.

Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling