Whether talking to family, friends or strangers, calls hardly ever end when both parties are ready
So you just called to say “I love you” – but how long should you stay on the phone?
New research suggests no matter who we’re talking to, or what we’re talking about, conversations rarely conclude when the two individuals want them to end.
Continue reading...When you emerge relatively unscathed in a devastated world, there is a risk of being out of step, of lacking empathy
Most mornings, as soon I wake, I retrieve some voice messages left overnight on WhatsApp. Sent from friends in the Northern hemisphere, they are missives from the pandemic, a granular account of what daily life is like in lockdown over there.
For almost a year now, various friends and I record and send audio messages back and forth that contain the sort of ephemera that seems too slight and unimportant for email but satisfying to listen to in the morning as I have my first coffee.
Continue reading...Long-term social isolation is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. What has the last year meant for those who don’t share their homes?
When the first headlines about coronavirus began to appear in January 2020, they had little impact on south Londoner TJ, 25. “It seems outrageous now, but I thought: ‘I’m young, I’m healthy, I’ll be fine.’” By the time the first lockdown was announced, his mindset had begun to shift. He’d been single “for ever” and his housemate was spending lockdown with her parents, but he felt that same batten-down-the-hatches optimism many did in the era of weekly clapping and Zoom quizzes. “But that first weekend, the silence of the house and all the hours to fill – I got this inkling… mentally, I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of this. Four weeks in, I was genuinely scared for my mental health, I wasn’t coping at all.”
TJ is one of an estimated 7.7 million people in the UK who lived alone for most or all of the last year. “It’s not a game of Top Trumps, it’s not like my anxiety is more profound,” he says. “But it is different when you’re experiencing it all on your own.” In November 2020 the Office for National Statistics released findings that showed acute loneliness had climbed to record levels, with 8% of adults (around 4.2 million people) feeling “always or often lonely”, and 16-29-year-olds twice as likely as the over-70s to experience loneliness in the pandemic. “You’d never think fear of missing out would exist when we’re all stuck at home,” TJ says. “But I’d be scrolling through Instagram, seeing friends with their boyfriends or housemates, and thinking: ‘I wish I had someone. I feel so alone.’”
Continue reading...Longing for a cuddle? Newlyweds, siblings and housemates hug the people they can – and look forward to being close with those they miss
Continue reading...They grew up in a ‘nowhere’ suburb in the 70s, smoking skunk, going for rides and dating girls. The photographer reveals why he decided to capture the ravages of time on his old childhood gang
Rick Schatzberg had a dark epiphany a few years back, when two of his friends died in quick succession, one from a heart attack, the other from an overdose. “When two people you know and love die within six weeks of each other,” says the photographer quietly, “you realise that death is not just something that happens to other people, to the unlucky people. It’s something that is suddenly very present.”
Schatzberg’s response was to undertake a project about encroaching mortality – his friends’ and by extension his own. The result, several years in the making, is The Boys, a photobook that is both nostalgic and brutally realistic: a visual evocation of youth in all its instinctive carefreeness; and old age in all its debilitating inevitability. Composed of casual colour snapshots of his male friends in the 1970s, and large-format contemporary portraits of their ageing bodies, it lays bare what the novelist Rick Moody, in his accompanying essay, calls “the sobering action of time”.
Continue reading...This is a rare moment when excluding people doesn’t have to mean we don’t like them, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith – so handle your approach with grace
Now that lockdown restrictions are easing a little bit in my area, my family’s been getting a few requests for playdates and dinner visits. It’s exciting but we don’t want to turn our lives into a rotating door of visits and visitors, because there is still risk out there. One of the people who’s been quite persistent in inviting us over lives nearby, and volunteers for the same organisation as me. But geography is where the closeness ends – we don’t have that much in common and, face to face, our conversations are often awkward. If we’re going to expand our small circle we want to prioritise people we like better. Is there a polite way of telling someone we don’t want them in our bubble?
Eleanor says: I’ve been waiting for this moment, the one where our reaction to the risk starts to change, even though the risk itself stays more or less the same. In normal circumstances we expect our reactions to have a half-life: when there’s a fact we can’t change, like “she left me” or “I didn’t get the promotion”, there’s a point when we’re meant to move on.
But when the fact is an ongoing risk, instead of something that recedes into the past, it’s not clear how long our reactions should last. We don’t know what the half-life of fear is meant to be. To some of us it feels as though the fear should be dissolving by now: we’ve had the big reaction, we’ve processed the horror and, like any other grief or upheaval, there’s a point where we need to return to normalcy.
Continue reading...As coronavirus keeps us apart, I have developed a very wholesome thirst for the physical intimacy we used to have with friends and family
Lately, when I find myself reaching for my phone for a distraction, it’s no longer just to mindlessly swipe through Instagram stories and semi-ironically decipher my horoscope. Instead, I catch myself constantly returning to my camera roll. In particular, the photos where I’m touching my family and friends.
There’s the fuzzy Christmas party set of my colleagues and I, all cheek to cheek, craning our heads to get in a series of group selfies. There’s a backyard family lunch, me with my arm slung over my mum’s shoulder. There’s a day at the beach with my sister and her kid, us each holding a hand as we drag her back to the car. And there’s Mardis Gras night. It was just a few weeks ago but today the photos feel as though they belong in a history book. Friends and strangers covered in glitter and sweat, dancing close at a street party, arms wrapped around waists, exuberant kisses being planted on faces, all of us joyfully, drunkenly close to each other and vigorously engaged in whatever the opposite of social distancing is.
Continue reading...Whether it is local ‘cat-seducers’, out-and-out thievery or marauding toms, our feline friends are prompting furious rows and rivalries between neighbours
Forget teenagers with asbos or improperly demarcated boundary fences. Cats are the great neighbourhood menace of our age, as likely to rip apart once-harmonious communities as Japanese knotweed. They pad between homes, destroying civic feeling, pitting us against each other in our search for their devotion. Think politics creates division? Cats are worse.
Last week, it was reported that a Hammersmith couple, John and Jackie Hall, had waged a legal battle to prevent a nearby resident, Nicola Lesbirel, from stealing their maine coon, Ozzy. The Halls accused Lesbirel of repeatedly feeding Ozzy, taking him into her house and replacing Ozzy’s collar with one that had Lesbirel’s phone number and the words “My home” on it.
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