COVID and the subsequent lockdowns have forced us all to reevaluate our lives in ways that most of us could never anticipate and it has brought about changes to certain elements of our lives that aren't entirely unwelcome.
It's made us appreciate how comfortable we all became with 'luxuries' that the pandemic put a size 12 Doctor Marten right through (like being able to visit the Doctor Marten store to pick up a new pair of boots, for example). It's also made me quite wistful about there being genuine long-term change in some aspects of life that have needed a shake-up for decades, but sadly will inevitably return to exactly how they were before the COVID had its wicked way with us all.
Work is one of the first things that has changed, and working from home should ideally be 'the new normal' and not something that your co-workers assume you do to skive off for the day. As a technical team involved with a cloud service, our job does not require us to be in the office for 36.5 hours a week, staring at a screen that we can comfortably stare at in the relative comfort of our own home while remote working.
Inevitably, senior management who have 'bravely' soldiered on, working on-site in a largely deserted set of offices will demand that their minions come back to the office and do as they're damned well told "because reasons" and I'm sure a year from now, once normality has enveloped us in its blanket of mundanity, it will be as if the pandemic never happened. Yet the technology exists to allow us to work from home and interact with our colleagues (and I do mean work - if you have a strong work ethic like I do, you fecking well WORK when you're working from home!) It's now proven, but watch this space
Driving. I really haven't missed driving at all. Most weekdays we'd drive to work on the daily commute, wasting at least an hour or more each way, stuck in traffic, sucking up pollution and fumes, and generally arriving at work / at home far more stressed. "Commuting" during Lockdown has consisted of moving from one room to another, in the same house, freeing up a lot of time which can be used for more useful things, meaning we don't have to get up at 6.30 AM, a far more relaxed experience that's going to end as soon as lockdown does, both from a 'going back to school' perspective and going back to work.
Shopping. I usually hate supermarket shopping anyway, and the times where we've been faced with no choice but to go into a real actual live bricks and mortar supermarket have been strange during lockdown, yet a million times more relaxing than our normal Saturday night forays to Waitrose to rub shoulders with annoying twerps who have no idea what social distancing means, blithely dancing over the helpful stickers all over the floor that tell them to get their arses 2m away from yours. We've been lucky in lockdown that we've been able to do most of our shopping online, and get it collected by our (quite frankly amazing) in-laws, but it can't go on forever.
Going out. Every weekend we used to make a point of visiting local National Trust places of interest. We are lucky enough to have a lot near us, and though we got really fed up with going to the same places again and again, we will definitely return as soon as we're able to, and as soon as the initial rush of folk all dashing out to these places dies down. First pouring wet rainy weekend will likely do the trick! We also miss places like The New Forest / the seaside, but you can imagine what these places will be like as soon as restrictions begin to ease. Hell is other people. No truer statement has ever been written. At the moment we venture out to local walks and I think if we're all really honest, we're so sick of our locale. My teenage daughter did point out that she hates going out / going on walks, so I'm sure she'll be equally mortified once we do start doing so again.
The thing I've missed the most is being able to see our extended family. I miss my nieces and nephews so much, we have not seen them for nearly 2 years now and they are almost unrecognisable. At an age where kids grow before our very eyes, I'm hoping that we get to see them sooner rather than later, so that's a positive to outweigh the negative points above. We've also forged a far stronger bond with our extended family via Zoom and other means since lockdown, and though it'll be weird to see them 'in the flesh' once again, we have a shared experience we've all lived through that's made us all appreciate each other a lot more.
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