Over the course of the past year, our social media streams began to change. The endless photos of trips to far-flung places like Japan and Australia, and influencer favourites like Bali and Santorini slowly gave way to quarantine home scenes. Quiet lockdown moments of living room cocktails and freshly baked loaves of Dutch oven bread, solitary sofa scenes of open laptops and Netflix streams ...
VERY MUCH out of necessity, 2020 has been a year of hobbies. All across social media, our feeds were filled with knitting and crochet projects, cross stitching and needlepoint, freshly baked banana bread and other such homely things that have kept people who are endlessly housebound from going mad.
WE'RE AT THE START of Lockdown 2.0 and it seems our Instagram feed is becoming filled with shots from the outside looking in, photos of exteriors of buildings with people at home, experiencing the same things we are, and it's comforting, these voyeuristic and intimate shots ...
Seems like a lifetime ago, the social lifestyle we used to have when we were able to go to cafés and terraces, just sit in the sun for a while or enjoy the beautiful habit of people watching ...
On Easter Sunday, while on her afternoon stroll, the Irish novelist Denise Deegan realized she still had not yet called her mother. “Hello,” she said cheerily into her phone. “Hello,” a man on the street replied.
Looking at the man’s face, she realized the voice belonged to the actor Matt Damon.
There is a constant feeling in Paris that the city is living a lazy Sunday morning on repeat, where everyone stays home with their families, enjoying the sun on their balconies, going out just to buy croissants, bread and a few groceries, embracing this slow living quietly, listening to classical music with juliet balcony doors flung widely open, or reading in front of the windows.
One of the few mercies during this crisis is that, by their nature, individual coronaviruses are easily destroyed. Each virus particle consists of a small set of genes, enclosed by a sphere of fatty lipid molecules, and because lipid shells are easily torn apart by soap, 20 seconds of thorough hand-washing can take one down.
All of France has been staying home since Monday. I know people who have not taken holidays or a day off in four or five years now, to keep their businesses afloat. Who knows how this crisis will affect them.
