Corona Journal, 21 March: Day 6
8.30am I awake from a dream where I hacked into Prince Harry’s facebook page. His email address was _x_haz_x_@hotmail.com and his password was 123456.
10am Oh thank GOD. The Body Shop have emailed me to give me a COVID-19 update. We can all relax now that they’ve given us the breaking news to wash our hands.
11am Call from boyfriend’s family to do the Telegraph Saturday quiz, and I am introduced to the Houseparty app. The call includes boyfriend’s mum, dad, aunt, uncle, cousin, cousin’s husband, other cousin, brother, him and me. It’s lovely, lovely carnage, with anyone over the age of 45 filming themselves from below and/or not getting their face in the shot at all. We get 18 out of 21 on the quiz, though.
1pm Time for some curtain-twitching. It seems like the Australians downstairs are moving out.
2pm Flatmate needs to leave the house, but he doesn’t want to bump into the Australians for fear of awkward small-talk. I put on a yoga video and the instructor asks us to ‘take a moment to connect and collect ourselves’. Flatmates makes a strangled noise somewhere between mirth and pain. Caught between a rock and a hard place, he chooses the rock and leaves.
4pm Boyfriend gives me a present that he bought to cheer me up when I was made redundant because he knows I have a penchant for t-shirts with obscure pop culture references on them. This t-shirt is particularly great because after we watched every episodes of the Thick of It together, I spent weeks answering the phone with, ‘Coverley, comms’. It’s not that funny if you haven’t seen it but pretty funny if you have.
4.30pm Best friend comes to pick us up and drive us to hers. She cooks a delicious fish pie while I look for a good phone upgrade deal. I spend a long time on Vodafone’s live chat trying to convince ‘Peter’ to give me a better deal for being such a loyal customer. He somehow gets disconnected from the chat and ends up calling me from his personal phone, which feels weirdly intimate. He says he has been working from home, he’s alone in the flat and ‘it’s all a bit weird’. I sigh. I know, Peter. I know.
1am Spend all evening drinking and playing a game called Jask, to which you don’t need to know the rules; you just need to know that I tried to pass off ‘rice’ as a brand name and the others weren’t having it, despite my cries of ‘IN THIS ECONOMY!?’ (I don’t know what I meant by that either).
1.30am Get a Bolt home because public transport is irresponsible and also not running at this hour. Find myself tipsily thinking how sad life will be when everything is back to normal and I can’t justify paying to get cabs everywhere. Wonder if I have Stockholm Syndrome.