Things To Do During Coronavirus Lockdown: The Esquire Edit

So, for the foreseeable future we'll be on a coronavirus-enforced lockdown. Brilliant. Thanks, everyone who queued all the way up Snowdon. Thanks a lot. But weird and frightening as it is, the lockdown doesn't have to be entirely rubbish. Think of it as an expedition to the great indoors.

Health and fitness permitting, you probably want to do something useful and meditative with your self-isolation time. You've probably made some promises to yourself about learning Italian or writing a sitcom pilot. We're not saying they're not going to happen, but there are a lot of less overoptimistic things you can do to make yourself feel more relaxed, more cultured, more normal. Or you can just not do anything. That's fine too.

This is what the Esquire editorial team's been doing – and not doing – so far. We'll update this every week for as long as this goes on for.

People-watching

Leon Neal//Getty Images

I used to cross paths with a man walking his greyhound when I walked home from work. When my commute became walking from my kitchen to my bedroom I forgot about him in the same way I might soon forget how to use my office pass or which side of the escalator we all get very angry about people not standing on. The other day I spotted him through my window, still very much alive and still walking his dog who seems to be taking the whole thing very well.

Even as the amount we are allowed to leave the house narrows down to supermarket trips or the fastest run we can fit in, realising the world carries on despite the conveyer belt of dread circling our screens feels like proof life is still out there. I've now positioned myself near the window and keep looking – really looking – at the parents scooting with their children or the elderly couples trudging hand in hand with empty carrier bags and cautious smiles. Even as the streets are now thinning out you can see people smoking on their balconies or tentatively taking out the bins.

As we are locked up inside with group video calls and online yoga tutorials to keep us busy, the biggest distraction from worrying the world is going to end is seeing for yourself that it just keeps going.

Olivia Ovenden, senior digital writer

Listening to old stand-up comedy on Spotify

Michael Campanella//Getty Images

I won’t be alone in seeking out comedy as an antidote, but I’m specifically finding solace in ‘old’ American stand-up from a bygone era (well, pre-2010) when the word quarantine was something you did before pet passports, and lockdown only happened in sci-fi films. There’s something about the long out-of-date talking points and hot topics – like Chris Rock on OJ Simpson – that’s oddly soothing. I’ve found a surprising amount of good albums on Spotify, so Aziz Ansari, John Mulaney, Amy Schumer and Mike Birbiglia have become a constant soundtrack to the insane amount of chores that seem to stack up when you never leave the house.

Will Hersey, content director

Properly sorting out all my clothes

As predictable as it sounds – especially as a Fashion Director – I am stock-taking my wardrobe. While the intention is still to build a walk-in wardrobe, a space of individual shoe racks, colour coordinated rails and cedar wood hangars, the cold reality is a two bedroom East London apartment with serious space issues. My stock-take involves choosing a sartorial theme – my bomber jackets, for example, or my ‘unlikely to wear this summer’ dresses – photographing each piece individually, compiling a digital file and then packing each theme into a case that won’t be used until well after self-isolation is a distant memory. I haven’t started on shoes yet. I may be a while.

Catherine Hayward, fashion director

Backyard snaps

I like to take photos. Five years ago my father handed down a Nikon FM3, a 35mm film camera that he bought in New York in the late Seventies, when he was a young man. It is a prized possession of mine, accompanying me around the world. Now, with all of… this going on, I’m using it in slightly more local circumstances.

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As 5pm addresses, lockdowns and pasta shortages loomed, I made a pact to document my day-to-day, one photo in the morning and one in the late afternoon. The desk where I’m now working from in my bedroom. A cat, appearing like a gift on the pavement, the flowers in other people’s gardens; my local pub, shuttered against the storm. An empty Waterloo station and the pastel-coloured shirts of the city boys who live next door to me, fluttering on the washing line. It’s all on film, but I’ve made a mental register of the photos that I think will look good once they’re developed. I – like you I’m sure – miss the banality and predictability of the day-to-day. Hopefully once this is all over these photos will hold the memory of a strange time. Or, at least, get me some Instagram likes.

Finlay Renwick, deputy style editor

Start a book club with your grandparents

"I'm getting a bit bored," my grandma sighed down the phone. Recovering from a hip replacement at the grand old age of 84, the looming pandemic has been a real double whammy. Lady Luck is quite the comic. So, with an Amazon reading list to hand (and a deeper search on eBay), we're starting a book club. The old girl is hooked up to Houseparty. And yes, it took a lot of trial-and-error. But Persian Brides, a novel centred upon two Jewish-Persian girls at the turn of the century, is to be our launchpad, and we'll read our way onwards. Do it with your own grandparents. They've seen quite a lot.

Murray Clark, style editor

Driver's-eye-view train trips

Whenever things have got a bit intense lately, I've dug into my favourite YouTube subgenre: videos shot looking out of the driver's cab of cross-country trains. So far I've been out of King's Cross and up to Doncaster, down the Tyne Valley line that runs across the craggy wilds between Newcastle and Carlisle, weaved through the Pennines on the Scarborough to Liverpool Airport run, and out along the North Wales coast from Chester to Holyhead.

You might think it's boring, but give it a go. Go on. It's like being on an entirely lateral rollercoaster.

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Yes, you were right about it being boring. That's the whole point. The feeling of being whisked along the rails by an expert who's assiduously observing the network's rules and regulations is weirdly comforting, hypnotic even. Forgotten halts and snoozing hamlets slide past you. The countryside morphs slowly and subtly, never insisting on itself. It's always a hazy, heat-struck afternoon in late summer. Everything's alright.

Tom Nicholson, digital writer