Remember nights out when you were 15 and too young to be served in bars? Armed with badly photoshopped fake ID, over-zealously applied eyeliner and a sense of entitlement, my friends and I would try to inveigle our way into Koko in Camden. It rarely worked. One or two of us might persuade the bouncer we were 18, or climb in through the bathroom window, but inevitably the group would split — cool kids on the dancefloor, the resentful majority of us making for the park to get drunk on whatever we’d managed to steal from our parents’ kitchens.
On Saturday night, having a margarita with a friend on Hampstead Heath, I felt like I had regressed. I was wearing nice jeans and makeup for the first time in months but had no chance of getting into a club. This time around though, I wasn’t resentful. There is a fragile sense of something approaching optimism in the air. We can expand our horizons, seeing one friend a day (without having our own faces staring back at us on Zoom) and going on longer walks, even taking said friend on them with us. Good — I’ve exhausted every street near my house and while I’ve enjoyed going down roads I’ve never taken before I am ready for another borough.
I had my isolation routine down but now there are new rules to get used to. Not hugging when I met my friend felt strange, like we had rowed, and private conversations are more difficult at a two-metre distance in the open air. There was also a sense of “f*** it” — we’ve endured however many million weeks of living with anxiety, only seeing our families; we need a massive drink. Only responsibly, from our own bottles and two metres apart.
The merrymakers behind us seemed to forget how far two metres is the more they drank, inching closer. If this worries you, act out the bit from Dirty Dancing where Patrick Swayze tells Jennifer Grey the importance of “my space” versus “your space”. And if you have a weak bladder, don’t drink. Another friend was happy to see his father at a distance but wouldn’t allow him inside to use the loo (he had to have a nature wee behind a tree).
We were experts at pub socialising — when the conversation lulls you go buy another round. When it’s just two of you on a bench it is more intense. My friend tried to lighten the mood with a commentary on the fashion choices of everyone and their dogs until we had to go for a walk because I feared we had become the most hated people on the Heath. Actually, walking is preferable to sitting for talking honestly — it’s freeing to be fixed on the path ahead rather than each other. I remember that from when I was 15 too. If you wanted to talk properly you’d suggest a walk away from the group. Not that my friend and I were discussing anything profound. Our conversation centred on where we go out after lockdown, freely and in big groups where we weren’t forced to talk one on one.
* Apparently this is a golden age for TV, but that doesn’t explain White Lines. The murder-on-Ibiza Netflix drama stars Laurence Fox as a DJ-turned-yogi with an unforgivably bad Manc accent who says things like: “I went to look for him in Goa. I ended up finding myself.” Ok, that bit is funny and the scenery is as close as we’ll get to a summer holiday this year, but the rest is deeply naff. Laura Haddock, left, looks permanently aghast — she’s wondering how she ended up in this shonkfest.
