By "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life," Samuel Johnson famously wrote in 1777. Based on the days following the lifting of lockdown restrictions, I would revise that to: "When a man is tired of London, he has spent too much time meeting friends in the park for takeaway pints and talking about what they've been doing during the pandemic."
The world is currently existing in a state of limbo, with many countries at different points between first and potential second waves of Covid-19. In some cities restaurants are getting ready to throw their doors open; in others they are closing having tried to weather the storm.
After months of socialising being forbidden, people in England can now meet up with friends, go inside their houses or spend a day at the shops, all with varying degrees of nervousness at what was once a thoughtless drink or errand.
As such, quarantine fatigue is slowly ceding to socialising fatigue as obligations start back up again. Suddenly we have plans and obligations, those indulgently long and empty weekends once again stacked with belated 30th birthday drinks or engagement parties.
You expect that seeing your friends again will feel like a swan-dive of liberation into the sea. Instead it is more like getting into a bath which you immediately realise is too hot, but the prospect of retreating and starting the process all over again is too much.
Perhaps socialising is so hard because we have all been existing in a kind of suspended animation. Nothing has happened since we last saw each other but we must still go through the awkward dance of trying to catch up: "March was weird. Oh no, May was weird actually. I think March was OK?" Someone asking how you are can throw you into an existential funk where you try to sum up the tangle of emotions you're working through. You can't keep up with the threads of conversations spooling around you. Do you want another drink? Really you want to lie face first on the grass and go to sleep.
Fortunately it's never been easier to bail on social obligations, quite possibly because nobody else really wants to be there either. All of those plans for Thursday drinks with old work colleagues which felt exhausting enough in The Before are now laughable. Blame the weather, blame your local tube station still being shut – though perhaps don't as that's quite easy to verify – but just don't blame yourself. Like restaurants and barbers, we're all in a liminal space between being closed and open, just about functioning in survival mode.
Last week I left drinks at 6pm after telling friends I didn't want to get the tube back so would have to walk. They shooed me off understandingly and I walked around the corner and furtively climbed into an Uber, an evening of silence alone at home novel once again instead of feeling like a prison. I felt bad about bailing early until my friend who cancelled because she wasn't feeling well admitted the next morning that she just couldn't face another picnic in the park.
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