Even news of funding to save the arts can’t cheer me up. I’ve resorted to reading my old diaries

A look at what I was doing this time last year is a startling reminder that I don’t want to live in any kind of ‘new normal’, writes Jenny Eclair

A pub visit now would be anything but carefree (PA)

I’m struggling a bit this month. Despite the very welcome news about increased funding for the arts, I’m finding it hard to look forward when there’s still so much uncertainty.

Far easier to look back, then, and I find that scrolling through the pages of my 2019 Filofax – yes, I am that person still using a paper diary – instantly transports me back to a world that is now straining to return to its former glory.

Scribbled across the pages of July 2019 are many dull reminders for window cleaners and VAT returns. Then there are the usual pencilled diary dos for middle-aged women: the Monday morning cardio class that I’d just started attending, and the Friday lunchtime yoga session with Anna. Anna was my favourite yoga teacher, an Italian woman who owned a cashew nut farm back in Italy – a farm that had only ever produced one nut.

This gym is obviously still closed. It’s next door to the cinema where the last film I saw was Little Women with my daughter, the packed cinema convulsing together over Beth’s death (sorry for the spoiler). Hopefully the cinema will open on 10 July, but whether I’ll pluck up the courage to be an early returnee, I’m not sure. After all, Beth picked up that infection from being in the same room as that poorly family. Is it worth the risk?

Among the domestic notes littered across the pages are various work commitments. “O+W” stands for the podcast Older and Wider that Judith Holder and I used to record in a studio with our producer Daisy, the three of us squeezed into a tiny space in my manager’s offices in Kensal Rise. For me, the podcast commute from southeast London involved two trains and one of those weird single-decker buses, a rare sight in London, that take you to surprising places. I used to go via Leon by Shepherd’s Bush station and pick up my lunch, whilst Judith would commute in from Oxfordshire.

Judith and I have continued recording remotely throughout lockdown; my agent’s vast office complex having been under wraps since March, and all those desks empty.

Every diary entry takes me back to a pre-pandemic, mask-free time that I, like everyone, took for granted. It transports me to the boiling summer day I sat in the Groucho Club within elbow touching distance of my fellow judges on Helen Lederer’s Comedy Women in Print panel, discussing the finalists for the funniest unpublished novel category, while outside Soho thronged and card machines beeped in the ramen bars.

Later that day, I took an Uber with my partner to Hampton Court. We had tickets for the flower show; the afternoon was full of sunshine and flora and the train back to Waterloo was packed to the gills.

July 2019 also took me up to Salford to film a batch of Countdown programmes, complete with a studio audience, plus hair and make up artists. There was a talk for my publishers at a place that had something to do with Formula One. I know this because there was a massive racing car in reception – and no one laughed when I asked to sit in it.

I saw friends and had my family round for lunch. I had to stay in for a boiler man and do interviews for a novel that was due to be published in August. I paid the alarm company and had my hair bleached in a crowded salon. My cleaner came on Fridays and we gossiped, like we always did. I bought tickets for shows I wanted to see at the upcoming Edinburgh festival and my partner and I were invited to a preview evening at the Royal Academy for the Summer Show, where flutes of champagne and canapes circulated – remember finger food? Afterwards, as the sun went down, we walked towards Green Park and popped into the Wolseley on the off chance there might be a table for two. By some miracle we were in luck, and scoffed down steak and chips, a glass of red for him and two glasses of Chardonnay for me, because that’s how I roll.

I held a friend’s newborn baby; I started writing a non-fiction book; I popped in to see the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and the Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern. I attended a one-day lino-cutting course at the South London Gallery and promptly bought a lino-cutting kit. And one Saturday, while the old man and I looked at llamas at the Lambeth Country Fair, someone crashed into our car.

It wasn’t a particularly exciting month. It was usual. There were up and downs, but I wasn’t scared of catching something that could kill me. And that’s what I miss, because I’m not buying your “new normal”. Arts funding or not, the new normal is awful. I want my old normal back, please.

How weird to feel nostalgia for a time that is a mere 12 months ago. I wonder how we’ll feel in another 12 months’ time, when we’re looking back to now?