In a series of deft manoeuvres that remain fascinating to me, my 16-year-old son managed to barter me down from a four-day trip to Devon to 13 hours in Broadstairs on the Kent coast, during which every train, meeting and arrangement was a white-knuckle ride, as to miss one would render the entire thing, plus the weeks either side of it, some variation of pointless. But we caught every train, we made every meeting, and he watched Match of the Day with his friend while I went to an Afrobeats club night with mine. In the morning he ate vegan bacon in record time, while I studiously didn’t mention how incredibly tired I was, and then he had the brass neck to complain about sleep deprivation all the way home. But by then I wasn’t tired any more, because I’d had a huge, adrenalised revelation: this whole escapade had a pre-pandemic feel.
Long Covid aside, the coronavirus hangover has been subtle, in a bad way. In summer 2020, it looked as if it might bring about big changes: maybe we would come out of it recognising which jobs really mattered and stop equating people’s pay with their value to society, the last would be first and society would cohere again. Maybe we would come to understand what we preferred, between getting on a plane and hearing birdsong, between going to the office and making sourdough (I prefer the office, which is annoying, as I do not have an office job), and there would be no “back to normal”, but instead, a thoughtful rebuilding of life along different lines. All of that was bollocks.
Some rewiring definitely occurred. During the lockdowns, almost all extraneous activity – anything “needless” – was banned, but even after restrictions were lifted, calculations small and large had been introduced. Might this be the event at which you catch Covid (again), and if so, do you really want to do it? Who there might be vulnerable and how much do you want to see them? The idea that you would pack into a small room full of mainly strangers, for the pleasure of seeing a man from Bantry try fruitlessly to persuade his wife to stop dancing, and watch a student fall off her heels, and then get back up again, would have been insane. Who are those people to you? Are they more or less important than your sense of smell? And anyway, who wears heels these days? Even clothes seemed to reconfigure themselves along more utilitarian lines: during the pandemic, everyone started dressing as if they might at any moment want to run away or go back to bed. Crocs and athleisure: I’m not saying it’s a bad look, it’s just not very festive.
Short journeys turned into dilemmas, and long journeys were bigger dilemmas, with an extra layer of logistics. After all those months of testing and quarantine, do you really want to be that far from home – what if you have to self-isolate? They left a mark, and shifted the time-distance ratio. Sure, go 70 miles, but not for less than a week. Who do you think you are, Christopher Columbus?
Anything that was true for me was true times 10 for generation Alpha, for whom all activity had to first pass the test of: “Are you sure this isn’t something we could do on online?” Why go to the cinema when there’s Netflix? Why watch Netflix with other people in real life when you could do a watch party? There was definitely a phase when the only good reason I could come up with for leaving the house was feeding Cheetos to squirrels. That didn’t last very long, but it didn’t vanish without a trace, either.
I took our trip way too seriously. I thought Mr Casual and Agent Abstract were the best DJs I’d ever seen and Broadstairs the best tiny town. Every Saturday night should unfold in exactly this manner, which is to say with a lot of flapping, very little time and a large number of trains. When I woke up, I had a more generalised commitment, which was to go places, because why not? That’s the pre-Covid way.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
