Bye-bye, Fomo – now the party is being Zoomed to my laptop
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Version 0 of 1. Even before what is technically known as All This, my vices were decidedly homebound At 41 and with three kids, there are precious few vices still available to me, and now there are even fewer. If I crave a big night, I get into bed at 8pm, reach for my laptop and rewatch the whole first series of Channel 4’s Stath Lets Flats. And if I’m having a proper massive one, I rewatch the second series, too. But even before what is technically known as All This, my vices were decidedly homebound, and not just because I did them in my home, but because they were literally about homes. My wholly unguilty pleasure has long been the magazine Architectural Digest, specifically its tours of celebrity homes. It is no exaggeration to describe these articles as an obsession, because they hit my two weakest spots: the private lives of famous people and eccentric home decor. If you have talked to me at any point over the past five years, you probably thought I was listening; but I was almost certainly thinking about news anchor Anderson Cooper’s wall of devotional oratories, Sharon Stone’s fur-covered armchairs, or Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s all-white mansion. Daily, I cherish the interior shot of the Kardashian-Wests with their four children, all dressed in white, looking less like the inhabitants of a luxury family home and more as if they’ve been sectioned in a secure psychiatric unit. Yet despite this fascination, I rarely see the homes of people I know. Most of my friends have small kids, and the last place any of us want to be on a night off is (alas) our homes, the sitting room strewn with plastic toys, the kitchen filled with lists of things we were supposed to do that day and now probably won’t until June. So we go out, or used to anyway – to the cinema, the pub and other places it now feels cruel to name. Similarly, my colleagues were generally seen in the office itself or various drinking establishments nearby (shout out to Waitrose wine bar in King’s Cross. Were we ever once so carefree?) Anyway. Now we all socialise by (and I struggle to say this without feeling like Mr Spock explaining something very dull to Captain Kirk) video-conferencing apps such as Zoom and, if you have friends who are younger than 35, Houseparty. Because I am over 35, I prefer the former, because you have more control over who’s bursting through your screen. But the fact that I now have an opinion about video-conferencing apps is as shocking to me as my discovery that I can cope with staying in every night. Like Joe Wicks, video-conferencing apps were something I never thought about pre-All This, but are now so entrenched in my daily life they have started to appear in my dreams. So while I know we are living through history, I also know my memories of it are going to consist largely of Zoom (and Wicks). I have regularly scheduled dates with different groups of friends and meetings with colleagues, everyone’s image in its own square, like a remake of The Brady Bunch opening credits. I am not ashamed to say that on my last trip to the supermarket before the lockdown I stocked up on mini prosecco bottles, and my evenings now consist of me swigging the fizz while talking at my laptop. Bye-bye, Fomo, ain’t nothing going on outside: the party is happening here. Where once my friends and I would gossip, and my colleagues talk about work, now we look around each other’s homes – ooh, pineapple sconces! Seeing a colleague in their domestic setting feels almost as intimate as seeing them out of their usual work suit and buck naked: by day, he presents as a humourless tax expert, but now you know he lives in a home decorated with “World’s Number One Daddy!!!!” finger paintings. Rare is the working-from-home video call in which a child doesn’t wander into view, because we are all that expert on Korean politics speaking from his home office on the BBC news. When a friend’s husband appeared on a five-way video call and announced that, out of all of us, I had the best wallpaper, I nearly choked on my prosecco and considered calling up Architectural Digest to suggest a story on me. Where once my friends and I would text one another, calling only in an emergency, we now regularly pop up on each other’s laptops as we work, so desperate to see a face that doesn’t belong to someone we live with that all the old concerns about intruding into each other’s day have been hastily jettisoned. Best are the night-time calls from close friends. Many of us are working after dark because the children fill the daylight hours; as soon as they’re in bed, we switch to the night shift, writing in the silent, anxiety-ridden night – until a friendly face floats up, a cheerful balloon against a stormy sky. In fact, writing this column took longer than planned because a good friend in the US Zoomed up halfway through. We admired one another’s wallpaper, shared our mutual shock at how fast normal life had vanished, and how quickly we had all adjusted, like a river flowing around a boulder, and I waved at her children and she waved at my dog. We were separated by screens, distance and once unimaginable fears, and yet in some ways closer than ever. |