An early morning email arrives. It’s from our friend, Tom, and it reads: “Negative massif, in case you’re worried!” I can’t remember when, exactly, Tom began using the French for massive as an all-purpose expression of enthusiasm – more and more, I notice, it is his word for “yes” – but I understand his desire to greet the day (and us) with a glorious affirmation that just one little pink line has appeared on his latest lateral flow test. Only moments before, in our own Covid-19 testing centre (AKA our kitchen), we received similarly joyous news. Let the trumpets sound. It seems that our beloved annual outing to hear Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican will be going ahead, after all.
Wide awake in the small hours, I sometimes picture a vast landfill site filled to the brim with only the remnants of used lateral flow tests, those bits of plastic now so integral to daily life that we cutely abbreviate them (“latty flow?” we offer, in the same casual tone that we once might have said: “cappuccino?”). It presses on my mind, this medical detritus; no one ever mentions how – if – it’s all to be recycled. But like everyone else, I cannot do without the wretched things now. Here is freedom, I think, in the moments after it becomes clear that no second pink line is going to appear. Another day of life. Lately, my response to opening the door of the cupboard where I keep my (increasingly hard to top up) stash of LFTs is Pavlovian, kicking in even if I’m only after a bag of coffee. My heart hammers. My mouth goes dry. I’m as a nervous as if I was going on a date.
There are two approaches to the current lockdown-that-is-not-a-lockdown. The first, which is by far the more popular, is to try to protect Christmas by doing nothing that might involve any risk of catching Omicron before then. You stay in, and you tick off the days. The second is to test and test and test, and then (so long as the result is negative) to go out and squeeze the pips from life. Naturally, I don’t cast any judgment on people who are doing the former; I know very well what Christmas means to some families. But I am taking the second approach, and if this means that I’m in isolation on Christmas Day, well, so be it.
It seems to me that the deferral of pleasure, a key principle of my tussocky northern childhood, no longer really works as an inducement, moral or otherwise, in a world in which (is there a German word for this?) postponements are themselves more than likely to be postponed, sometimes indefinitely. Basically, I am determined not to mothball my embarrassing 2021 Snoopy diary until the day I finally test positive, or the day (31 January) that Schroeder finishes playing his tiny piano, whichever comes first.
“Everyone has something that feeds their soul,” said the theatre director Nicholas Hytner on Newsnight last week, as he appealed once again for government help for the creative industries (across the country, shows are closing as actors and dancers, singers and stage managers test positive for Covid; meanwhile, advance bookings have dropped like a stray champagne flute from the dress circle).
Hytner is always brilliantly persuasive, combining clarity with feeling in a way that won’t cause the lip of the politician to curl (though Nadine Dorries may yet prove herself the exception in the coming weeks). But I felt the force of his words more than usually this time. My soul did grow somewhat emaciated without concerts and galleries; even now, it could still do with a little cultural Complan.
But there’s something else: the hundreds and thousands of people for whom cancellations spell doom. They also press on my mind. On Thursday night, I went to see James Graham’s new play Best of Enemies at the Young Vic in Waterloo. It has had rave reviews, and its cast includes a big star in the form of David Harewood – and yet, there were empty seats.
This was a sad sight, though not quite as sad as that of the glamorous new West Indian restaurant we went to afterwards, where only two tables were taken, and waiters outnumbered diners three to one. Every day the emails arrive: a beloved hotel closing “until April, God willing”; a box office getting in touch with “sad news”. On social media, I read that the owners of a favourite (and now hibernating) West End restaurant are offering a Christmas raffle instead of Christmas tables; of a beloved pub in Sheffield whose chef does not know if it will be possible to keep going for more than a couple more days.
Ridiculous as this may sound, I feel duty bound to go out; to spend what spare cash I have on a ticket for something and a bowl of pasta afterwards. It’s as if there is a debt – quite a pressing debt – that I must repay. The arts and hospitality kept going through the pandemic against the odds, and they were ready, just as the government had told them to be, when the various lockdowns ended. Everything (or almost everything) reopened, and it was miraculous. I have sometimes cried at the theatre in the past, but never from happiness I think – until, that is, I saw the sold-out musical Anything Goes (another Barbican show) in the autumn. Watching Sutton Foster and the rest of the cast tap dancing as if they were born to it, I lost it completely; my cheeks were inky with mascara. I was just so grateful and relieved.
And now, I guess, I feel it’s my turn. I’ll sit in my mask at the theatre, and I’ll order wine in a half-empty restaurant, and I’ll do these things as often as I can, until someone tells me that I can’t, or a little pink line appears in a rectangle of plastic. Again, whichever comes first.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
