As NSW rolls into extended lockdown, I’m setting up a temporary home-school/office for me and the three kids around the ping pong table. Lest this gives you a ‘fancy games room’ type of mental image, let me disabuse you. This portable table currently fills our single lounge room and holds a half-completed 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle in mind-melting shades of brown, a game of Civilization that will likely last longer than this lockdown, and craft projects in various stages of completion. Biggles the dog (my smallest, hairiest and naughtiest child) steals craft materials with glee, chews them to pieces and covers the floor with glitter and cardboard confetti.
We clamber around the ping-pong table like mountain goats. To the west lives the piano, where my son, who dislikes the soft pedal, is teaching himself to play The Flight of The Bumblebee, and to the east, three racks of drying laundry. To the south, I have squeezed a couple of camping chairs in front of the electric fire, where we perch to play cards. The ping pong table forms the intersecting circle of a Venn diagram of lockdown, winter, rain and home-school.
2021, activate!
This morning’s press conference breadcrumbed us with the chilling word ‘October’, and I am preparing myself for a lengthy period ahead of working via Zoom. It’s the second year of the spicy cough and the Toilet Paper Wars. We’ve all had to adjust by now to online video.
As well as attending meetings - smiling and nodding on mute while the dog and children are all shouting - I’ve had to learn how to run training, which involves breakout rooms and whiteboards and polls, and a terrifying number of things that can go wrong. My Zoom learning curve has been steep, and not without embarrassing mishaps. At my first work meeting for this new job, I spent time putting on lipstick and curating the background mess out of shot. I took Biggles for a walk to buy myself a half hour of calm dog-energy. (Like a toddler, Biggles gets desperate for attention and starts pushing my hands off the keyboard.) Halfway through the meeting, my husband Keith walked in the room to see that Biggles was still wearing the harness we call his ‘bra’.
‘Ooh, Biggie!’ cried Keith, in the falsetto voice we employ when talking to the dog, as I reached desperately for the ‘mute’ button. ‘You’ve got your bra on!’
Delivering real-life training, I once accidentally nervous-farted in front of a room full of attendees. I would have got away with it, I think, had I not been as taken by surprise as the participants in the first row. ‘Oh!’ I said after the squeak reverberated its unexpected bassline. ‘Pardon me!’ There was only the briefest of pauses before I moved smoothly on. ‘If I can draw your attention to this next slide…’
I work in crisis and trauma. I can handle an unexpected fart. But Zoom, I fear, offers me a whole new medium in which to disgrace myself.
I could turn my avatar into a cat or a potato, leave the mic on while I go to the toilet, or stand up to stretch, while forgetting I am sans pants. (This faux pas seems particularly possible to me, considering that Zoom allows us to live, should we choose, like newsreaders, armed with a full face of makeup but nude from the waist down.)
Despite the many possibilities it presents for public humiliation, Zoom has its benefits. There’s a charming, socially-levelling clunkiness to the process as we stumble through this new world together; dressing for the part and curating our backgrounds so that we seem to know what we’re doing. It is, so often, comedically ridiculous, deliciously illustrated in the meme comparing Zoom meetings to seances. ‘There’s someone who wants to join us. Elizabeth, are you there? We can’t hear you. Can you hear us?’
If adaptability is one of humankind’s greatest characteristics, it is desperately needed in this moment, as we grapple with profound change on two levels: the macro picture of pandemics and climate change and social upheaval, and the micro-pressures of mental health and meaning-making; both set against a backdrop of lockdown madness.
Zoom can be complex and difficult, but it’s also absurd and brilliant, and if we’re using it, it means we’re lucky enough to have work that allows us to stay at home, resplendent in our loungewear, gloriously braless, and safe from the invisible threat in the air around us. And sometimes, in my house, Zoom involves a door opening quietly and a child commando-crawling across the floor to pass me a note that reads ‘Mummy! Do you want a cup of tea?’
This lockdown, we all must adjust to a whole new set of circumstances, like my highly useful ping pong table. It will be strange, but I have faith in our ability to adapt for as long as we must. Dear God. ‘October’.
Quickly, comrades, take five breaths and apply these livestream puppies.
Lockdown Links
Shows
As a family, we loved Pride and Prejudice (the 90’s BBC 6-part series) and now we’re starting the deliciously Paris-set Call My Agent (Netflix.)
Keith and I are re-visiting Veep and I LOVED watching Kate Winslet’s real forty-something face MOVE in Mare of Easttown. (Both on Binge.) I inhaled Season 2: Couples Therapy on SBS with unseemly pleasure. (SBS on demand) and I just loved Our Yorkshire Farm (sheep, epic scenery, nine free-ranging children. (Ch. 9).
Podcasts
Lately, I’ve loved Sentimental in The City, Bed Of Lies, Maintenance Phase but I have a strong new favourite: True Story where Tig Notaro (my favourite comic) and Cheryl Hines (Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm) watch and dissect documentaries. Tig! Cheryl! Docos! So good. The series reminded me of a few incredible docs that I wish I could watch again for the first time: Icarus, The Staircase and Three Identical Strangers, for instance.
Books
As a family, we’ve been reading Adrian Mole out loud, and are up to the third voume, The Cappucino Years. Enjoyed by every age in this house. For me, a few recent standouts include Helen Garner’s This House of Grief; Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl; Rick Morton’s My Year of Living Vulnerably; David Lebovitz’s The Sweet Life In Paris; George Johnston’s Clean Straw for Nothing and the wonderful Good Indian Daughter by my friend Ruhi Lee.