The Side-Eye on…coping

‘Sometimes, you just have to cope.’ I would have happily killed the calm speaker of those words, had she not been four years old and, at that moment, the only family member who was not weeping into a tangle of tent pegs and a horror show of groundsheets. Now just when you thought it was safe to go on holidays, plan a big Christmas, have a party, it’s all been snatched away and it looks like we’ll just have to cope again.

Having been through one lockdown, the grass never looked or tasted sweeter than when we started to emerge. As we stare down the barrel of the winter months that will be largely spent staring at our four walls again, listen for the sound of a nation sucking in its breath and facing up to the fact that our personal limits are about to be tested once more.

For many, our personal Room 101’s now feature homeschooling or lack of social contact; the misery of missed family or the horror of care home visits in full PPE. For many others, the bridge too far is the smaller stuff, the things that feel selfish or small-minded to bemoan, yet are an essential part of our individual arsenal of coping. Single-pressed coffee and the morning flirtation with the coffee truck guy by the train station? It put the spring in the step of one friend for a solid year after a miserable breakup. The thrice-weekly visit from her cleaner helped one overwhelmed woman manage to keep the work-family-life show on the road before lockdown and upended the family into chaos when they stopped. Weekend walks into the hills or Friday night pub blowouts – nobody needs to stride up the Sugarloaf or get a round in for the team after a stressful week. Still, it mattered. It was a tick in the ‘good things’ box, something to hold onto as we navigated the usual snakes and ladders of daily life.

For some, 2020 has indeed been the year when they finished C25k, made yoga a daily habit and maybe even moved to an off-grid farmhouse whence to raise rosy-cheeked children and no-dig crops in bliss. For the rest of us, it’s been mostly a total shitshow at best and if you’ve made it through this far, just put your head down, keep walking and keep doing whatever it is you need to do to get by. We’re used to the idea of policing some of our less glorious habits or tendencies. Bag of crisps and half a bottle of wine as soon as the kids’ heads hit the pillows, online shopping for shoes for a life we no longer have. Naughty roll-ups outside the back door or a box of chocolates that mysteriously empties itself as soon as the fourth episode of the box set slides onto the screen.

No-one is pretending that these activities have been slapped with a five-a-day sing-if-you’re-vegan do-gooding sticker. But as the night draws in and words like ‘curfew’ and ‘recession’ and ‘R-number’ get dropped into casual conversations, let’s give ourselves a socially-distanced hug and raise a giant communal shoulder shrug to boot.

Because sometimes, you just have to cope.

Jennifer Coyle, September 2020.