Lockdown 2: it's back, with more self-improvement guilt than ever before

It’s the night before Lockdown 2, and there’s a queue outside every restaurant on my local high street. Even the seriously iffy ones. Crowds of hunched-shouldered drinkers have formed outside pubs, and the white noise of their conversation is occasionally interrupted by the clap of a firework. No one knows quite what this is. The atmosphere – so highly charged with anxiety it could probably be harnessed as a renewable – is celebratory, pessimistic, and deeply chaotic.

Having the pre-lockdown “last hurrah” on the same night as the US election certainly made for an ominous vibe. In Lockdown 1, we entered the unknown. Now, in version 2, we trudge back into the very much known; the tired, the cliched. The sourdough starter Groundhog Day, that we may well repeat, and repeat, until the very idea of hugging a friend becomes a sort of quaint relic – like fax machines, or Turkey Twizzlers. But, this time, the pressure is on to get lockdown “right”.

Now is the time where the guilt at not having read, or baked, or self-reflected enough in Lockdown 1 can either be assuaged or curbed. And the fear of failing to make the most out of the situation, this time round, is real. Frantically, I wonder what to make my “thing” this lockdown. Homemade pasta? Homemade tattoos? The perfect stock? I picture myself in a kitchen piled high with animal bones, my eye twitching as I become increasingly hellbent on extracting their essence in a liquid form so potent it will transform my endless soups into something otherworldly.

For many, of course, this is a time of intense stress over paying the bills, finding a job or keeping a roof over their children’s heads. So the fact that the rest of us are stressing over “failing” Lockdown 2 probably says a lot about us as humans. Is there a single activity left that we haven’t tainted with a competitive element? Yet again, the most stressful collective event many of us have ever lived through is transformed by some into a race for self-improvement: get fit, learn French, read In Search of Lost Time in its entirety (in French). Why, during multiple simultaneous global crises, are we still defining ourselves by our productivity? Surely there needs to come a point where we start patting ourselves on the back for just surviving. When a day spent in bed, binge-watching Schitt’s Creek becomes a bold act of self-preservation, rather than, say, an egregious waste of the limited time we have left on a planet crumbling like Wensleydale.

Regardless of whether, for me, Lockdown 2 is about productivity or simply coping, there are a couple of rituals I’m quite looking forward to. Even the idea of another Zoom pub quiz is oddly appealing. Call it Stockholm syndrome, but there’s something comforting about the structure a game brings to an otherwise disjointed and awkward Zoom call. And if we hate these quizzes as much as we say we do, why are they still a thing? Zoom quizzes don’t exist in a vacuum. Some of us kind of like them. And I’m finally willing to admit I may be one of them.

And is no one else sort of excited to find out what this lockdown’s banana bread is going to be? My money is on something autumnal, like gingerbread, or maybe even – seeing as we’re heading back to hating the US a normal amount now – something American like pumpkin pie. With Christmas on the way, it might also be a fun and festive little change in the crushing drudgery of the new lockdown to start washing our hands to Jingle Bells. Honourable mentions for resurgent lockdown rituals go to doomscrolling, hourly dissociative breakdowns, and midday masturbation.

But however we spend Lockdown 2, we need to be less hard on ourselves. And I say this as someone whose guilt at not having even come up with the premise for a novel in Lockdown 1 still nags away at me every single day. In particular, those of us with mental health problems have enough to deal with over the next month (or however long this ends up lasting) without the pressure to live our best lives. Until we acknowledge that it’s fine and normal to gain weight, or fail to meet goals, or generally slow the hell down, Lockdown 2 is going to be all the more miserable.

Indeed, the only ones of us who should feel ashamed of our behaviour during Lockdown 1 are those who ripped people off for toilet roll, shimmied up 5G pylons with a box of matches, or drove to Barnard Castle. Failure to “make the most” out of a bad situation isn’t a crime, especially when it’s a daily struggle to make the least out of it.

• Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper and Diva