If this week of lockdown has taught me anything – it’s the value of friendship: from fab conversations to friends offering to do my shopping, and sadly a sudden sense of loss.

Another thing this week has drummed home is that watching a group of middle-aged people try and get a grip when it comes to the wonders of modern technology can be frustrating, time-consuming and unintentionally funny.

First up was chatting with two friends who I worked with back in the 1990s. This proved relatively painless despite confusion about when we were going to chat. One of us foolishly thought it was 9 am. Two of us quickly disabused her of that notion and, of course, we needed to Google how to get gallery view in Zoom (in case you’re wondering you swipe to the left) but apart from those two minor hiccups it all went remarkably well.

However, when 4 of us tried to do a group Skype call, it proved to be far more complicated. Primarily this was because one of our number has Business Skype which on no account should be confused with normal Skype. Sadly two friends did. Thus they were on normal Skype while two of us were on Business Skype. As luck would have it, I was the only one who could access both. Thus I had the unenviable task of trying to get the others to join Business Skype, sending the appropriate links, forwarding emails, while chatting to my friend on Business Skype.

Next thing I know Business Skype friend is calling me on my mobile. Why are you calling me? We’re on Skype together. ‘Yes’, he sighed, ‘but you haven’t switched the mic on your computer on.’ I looked down on my screen. Sure enough, I hadn’t. I’d been talking to him for a couple of minutes by then and hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t been responding to anything I’d been saying. (Nothing new there then). I’m not sure what that says about me as a conversationalist but I suspect it wouldn’t be that positive.

It did remind me of the time, however, when I was performing in a play in Berlin. After the final night, my fellow actors were complaining that the director had refused to speak to any of them. (It hadn’t been that happy a production in case you were wondering). ‘Oh, no, that’s odd. He talked to me all right,’ I assured them. ‘You sure?’ they all asked. ‘He blanked everyone else.’ I gave it some thought. I had indeed gone up to talk to him, had chatted for a few minutes and then walked off, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t recall that he had said anything back. How galling is that? You blank someone and they don’t even have the good manners to notice!

Anyway, I digress. After the Business Skype devotee managed to get hold of WhatsApp, thanks to his very understanding Mrs allowing him to borrow her phone, we finally sat down to chat via that particular app a mere thirty minutes after proceedings had begun. Yes, that’s how long it took for us to all be on the same app. 30 minutes! I’m guessing if we had taken advantage of the teenage kids that two of my friends have and appointed them in charge of communications, set up time would have been much, much shorter.

In another attempt to stave boredom away – it was either that or clean the oven  and/or grow my own boyfriend – I joined a meet up group online. I’d been meaning to go to this German conversation group for years, but have always put it off. I think out of fear that as a middle-aged woman I’d be surrounded by a group of foetuses (i.e. 20 somethings). As it turned out, it was a lot of fun, and I would fully recommend checking out the numerous meet up groups there are to see if there is one you can join. It’s easy to do. Just click on the link: www.meetup.com, sign up (it’s free) & see if anything takes your fancy.

In other news, Jen Brister and I managed to work out how to podcast via Zoom. Well, I say we, what I mean to say is Jen managed to figure it out. Buoyed up by this major technical coup, we decided to do an Instagram Live that Tuesday. Admittedly, it did look touch and go for one moment (see photo of conversation below).

Nevertheless, we ended up having over 100 viewers which was 100 viewers more than we thought we might end up having. In fact, we were so encouraged/desperate/delusional, we are planning to make it a weekly thing. So feel free to join us next Tuesday at 8:30 assuming we (i.e. Jen) can remember how to do it.

As for the real world, I no longer have to go to the clinic three times a week to have my wound cleaned, unpacked and repacked. In fact, things are looking so good that I am now down to one visit a week. On the downside, going to the clinic is the only time I am out of the house and get to chat to someone face to face. Thus, in one fell swoop, my social life has been reduced by two thirds.

That said, on a more general note, I am rather anxious about leaving the house. After all, we have an incompetent government in charge whose main skills in dealing with the pandemic seem to be limited to lying, banging out platitudes and obfuscating. Couple this with a looming shortage of ventilators, reports of NHS staff being gagged from telling the truth about what is really going on, the fudging of official mortality rates, and horror stories about the possible triaging of patients according to age, then it’s no surprise if it doesn’t make for a very reassuring mix, particularly when you’re no longer in the first flush of youth. Fortunately, I have two lovely neighbours who offered to go shopping for me. Of course, sod’s law being what it is, the one thing I’d completely run out of, I forgot to put on the list!

In much sadder news, a friend of mine was taken by the virus. She wasn’t a close friend. I hadn’t seen her in years. It was one of those things that happen to a lot of us, I suspect. You keep meaning to meet up, but somehow you never get round to it. She was a lovely woman, extremely kind. I remember watching her sing Amazing Grace at her mum’s funeral many moons ago. Her singing was so beautiful, so touching, so heart-rending, I was so moved that I was in floods of tears by the end of it.

She had texted a mutual friend who had kindly forwarded the text to me and her brother, another good friend of mine. The text was from Viv saying she wasn’t out of the woods yet. The next morning she was dead. A lovely woman, gone far too soon who I’ll never see again. Mind you, had life continued as normal, I probably would never have got round to contacting her beside the odd email or text, because we always find some reason, don’t we, for life to get in the way? Just as before lockdown, I would never have thought of group calling a bunch of mates that I’ve been good friends with for the best part of 40 years and whose company I love being in! Put like that it sounds ridiculous. Yet I’m guessing most of us are guilty of doing something similar. It would seem having so much time on our hands now and with a deadly virus looming in the background, it has made us  appreciate the very things we tend to push to the bottom of our ‘to do’ lists in our normal day-to-day lives.

If this week has taught me anything, it’s to make the most of your friends: call them, write to them and once this shit show is over, for heaven’s sake meet up with them! RIP Viv.

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