My guests (who included an 11-year-old and a recipient of some fairly major surgery) arrived promptly at 5.30pm and left again at 9pm. Thirty minutes later, the dishwasher was humming and there was no trace of their presence.
It was the perfect night. I definitely had time to watch an episode.
This week, I went out for dinner with a friend who booked us into a Ponsonby restaurant achingly popular with influencer-adjacent women in their 20s. At 6pm, it was completely empty.
My friend regaled me with an anecdote about a dinner party where she took two lots of psychedelics. When the room started closing in, she felt compelled to stand up from the table, remove all her clothes and step into the swimming pool. (“Do you want to leave your underwear on?” inquired her husband, gently).
At the restaurant, we were encouraged to order the signature burrata. “I’m sick of burrata,” replied my friend with the brutal confidence of someone spectacularly comfortable in her non-underweared skin.
We loved everything we did order (especially the tteokbokki) and when we left the restaurant two hours later, it was absolutely heaving. It had been the perfect night. I still had time to watch an episode.
Saturday (August 17) marks three years since the start of the country’s longest Covid lockdown – the one that kept so many of us at home for almost four months.
Much was written about how the pandemic would change us psychologically. Experts suggested we’d need to retrain ourselves to be near people, that isolation would shrink our social skills, that when lockdown ended, we should remember all the things we missed and make the effort to do them again and often.
I was too busy watching television to listen. As a clinical psychologist recently told me (for a story on how to break up with a friend): The more you stay at home, the more you stay at home, the more you stay at home. And the more you stay at home, the more you stay at home and …
Anyway, I’m trying.
But five consecutive days in the office is the new Everest. A post-7pm restaurant booking requires the kind of body clock adjustment I once reserved for international travel. Recently, I was lucky enough to visit a dream international destination with a group of 14 strangers and I spent quite a bit of the trip wondering when I could go back to my hotel room to see what television channels were available.
By day, I am a loud and social person who is quite interested in the world. By night, I just want to be bra-less and quiet. I lack the bandwidth for sustained small talk and the energy to present myself as society requires. I’m not alone. My wild, night-swimming friend finds equivalent bliss silently folding laundry in front of Bridgerton.
I vaguely recall a version of me who partied until 2am and still went to work the next day. A 30-something who thought the sofa was something for friends to sleep on when they couldn’t drive home. Suddenly, in my 50s, I require an hour of mindless television to complete me. I enjoy a post-dinner continuum of couch-body-remote control and I have never been happier.
Is this middle-class middle age or a Covid hangover? Did it take a global health emergency to highlight that what many of us want in our lives is, well, less of us?
Lockdowns were hard and horrible but there was also a freedom in the nothingness. Obligation-free weekends are now a distant Utopia. Mascara, lipstick and six-weekly trips to the hairdresser are, once again, compulsory. There is renewed expectation that we meet expectations.
I’m trying.
I go out to live theatre, comedy and music because I want to live in a world in which the people who choose to work in these spheres can pay their rent. I accept (and sometimes even organise) invitations to bars and restaurants. I think there are more people who believe they are introverts than there are people who are actual introverts but I’d be lying if I didn’t confess the two words I most want you to text me at 4pm on the Wednesday I’ve arranged to meet you for after work drinks are: “Rain check?”
Earlier this year, a friend brought champagne and white bread to my house for a Friday night fish and chip dinner. We fried kayak-caught snapper and folded it into sandwiches. We squirted tomato sauce on hot scoops of Tipene’s Takeaway’s finest and toasted the late summer evening. The weekend loomed. At 8.30pm, we put the empty bottle in the recycling bin and my friend whose job spans multiple time zones went home to make an international call.
It was the perfect night. I definitely had time to watch an episode.
