Christina here. Before the pandemic, I think it’s fair to say that most of us were very aware of time and it was very important to us – even ruled our lives. We were setting alarms to get up in the morning, checking train or bus schedules to get to work by a certain time, having our lunch at a precise time, plus there were appointments to keep and tv programmes to watch. Being late was something we tried to avoid and we probably glanced at our watch (or the time display on our mobile) regularly, sometimes obsessively, during the day. My days weren’t quite so strictly scheduled as I’m self-employed and work from home, but when I still had my dogs (now sadly deceased), their stomachs had time-keeping down to a fine art. They structured my time and they would never have let me get away with not taking them for a walk at the same hour every day. In other words, I lived by the clock.
However, after nearly a year in lockdown, I’m finding that the concept of time is becoming very fluid. It’s almost as though we’re living in a dream, where everything is unreal or even surreal. There are no appointments, no specific times to keep, no rush or urgency about anything. The days simply float into one another seamlessly, with nothing to distinguish them from one another. Mostly I have no idea what day or date it is, and I find I don’t care because it doesn’t matter. The only day that registers even vaguely is Sunday, and that is only because I have a weekly chat scheduled then with two friends. And Sunday seems to come around approximately every second day!