Isolation is a difficult time for everyone, and I have found the vast amount of initiatives the public have come up with in order to stay sane, and not end up murdering our siblings, admirable. I have found my personal experience of the COVID-19 crisis to be quite the opposite. I have been abandoned by my loved-up father, who has renounced himself of the responsibility of looking after me, to have a much more enjoyable time with his partner (the word enjoyable being hypothetical). Living by myself is somewhat different from the living conditions we are all used to in Plymouth; waking at 1 P.M. to your slobbery, hungover, lifeless Uni mates each one of you regretting the ignorant decision to have one more in Switch knowing full-well you had a 9 A.M. the next day. Well, I am still waking up at 1 P.M. so nothing’s changed there.
Many say their worst fear of living alone would be loneliness. I beg to differ. An incident I had the other day made me realise just how much we should appreciate our siblings or housemates. I experienced, what is in my opinion, the worst possible scenario when living alone. Coffee is a laxative, and often, after my morning brew, I tend to feel the need for some ‘me’ time. Naive and vulnerable, I was in my own world (critical mistake), scrolling through social media. One slight lapse of concentration can engender disastrous consequences. Mid-flow, I look to my right, and lo and behold, what we all were dreading would happen (I know you are just as emotionally involved in this as I was) happened. The toilet roll was in the cupboard in the utility room, waiting for someone to swap in the new for the old, one of life’s many lone-living lessons. Never had I wanted the saviour that is my irritating sibling more than now. In one second, your sibling goes from being someone you want to put in the tumble dryer to the Good Samaritan. The shear relief of seeing that godlike giving hand, slowly and sort of involuntarily peeping round the door. The gratefulness is unparalleled.
Forget it. This was not an option. I started weighing the shower hose; ‘is it long enough to reach?’ I asked myself, ‘will I have to just hop in the shower?’. Maybe in my pigsty of a Uni house, not in my dad’s house, of course not. There was only one option for me. The risky waddle. No obstacle course, no booby trap is approached with more care than the dreaded ‘toilet roll walk of faith’. More often than not, it’s poorly executed.
The worst part of my experience was that my dad lives in a terrace house, and the utility room has a window facing directly to my neighbours kitchen. So not only was this a risky waddle, I was under pressure. Hoping that they were not making lunch or if they happened to see me, hoping that I executed with flying colours.
I always find that the final straight of Mission Retrieve Fresh Roll is taken with less caution. It’s almost like a game of musical chairs; everyone is walking slowly, staying at a safe distance from the chair not making any potentially risky movements. Then: QUICK! It’s a desperate scramble to sit back down as quickly as possible. In the end, I managed to successfully execute the extraction and make it back to base camp. I finally could resume what I had originally set out to accomplish.
And… Relax.
So, next time you want to yell at your siblings wishing you never had any, just remember, they are there when you’re at your very worst.