Floods, holidays and waiting for the next lockdown

Despite everyone going on holidays again, Trudy Tyler is quite happy staying at home, thank you very much. Even the storms have acted as an excuse to stay in. By Christine Manby

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

My south London street is always quiet at this time of year with the schools on holiday, but this year it is eerily so. Everyone who can get out of the city has made a bolt for the countryside, or even another country if they’re especially brave and can afford the possibility of an unexpected spell in hotel quarantine. A friend posted a picture of St Ives on her Insta account. It was busier than Oxford Circus two shopping days before Christmas in “the Olden Days”. If you want peace and tranquillity and the possibility of getting hold of a pasty without having to join a three-hour-long queue, I’d say that this summer Oxford Street is probably the place to be.

My friend Kelly, a single mum who lives in North Devon, should be feeling especially pleased with her life choices right now but she says that she and her son Joe are effectively under house arrest until September. The south west has been heaving with visitors since travel restrictions were lifted. Kelly lives ten minutes’ drive from some of the United Kingdom’s most beautiful beaches, but to get to those beaches requires rising long before dawn to guarantee a parking spot, knowing that when she and her son get back from having a paddle, she may find she is unable to park outside her own house.

“And don’t even get me started on how expensive everything is.”

Some of her neighbours have offset the rising costs by converting their sheds and garages into bijoux holiday lets.

“The people next door had a family from Balham camping on their back lawn last night,” Kelly told me. “I wouldn’t have minded but they were barbecuing right next to my kitchen window. It was torture, Trudy. I’m doing Noom. I think about food all the time.”

I wondered if the thoughtless barbecuers of Balham were the people who usually live over the back from me. They are away. It’s bliss to wake up each morning to the absence of their daughter’s oboe practice.

I suggested a house-swap to Kelly. I’d happily sit in her Devon garden while she and her Joe spent a few days at mine. The museums are open and my house is equidistant from three parks with excellent playgrounds. In the “before times” people used to come to London on holiday.

“Hmmm, maybe.”

Two years ago, Kelly would have leapt at the chance to have somewhere to stay for free while introducing her son to the Natural History Museum and the London Eye, but this year she isn’t so certain. It’s not just Covid. While Kelly was considering my offer last Sunday, she saw Twitter footage of “the biblical floods” on Clapham Common.

She texted me in alarm. “Are you OK?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked, utterly oblivious to the chaos that was unfolding a few streets away. I was using the storm as an excuse to do absolutely nothing for the afternoon. Funny how lockdown, which might have been the perfect excuse to do nothing for months on end, has left me feeling incredibly guilty if I don’t “seize the day” every single day of the week including Sundays.

“After all,” as my brain likes to remind me at three in the morning, “who knows for how much longer you’ll be able to go to that new café on the Common? When we’re all locked-down again, you’ll wish you’d sat on that terrace. And gone to Pilates... You’ll regret not having gone to that reformer class. The gyms and the Pilates studios will be the first thing the government shuts back down.”

“Brain, tell me something that actually sounds like a bad thing...”

I reassured Kelly, who had been enjoying another sunny day in her Devon hell while London was hammered with a month’s worth of rain, that my house was still standing and I wasn’t rowing a kayak down Balham High Road in the hope of snatching the last carton of milk from Aldi. All the same, I could tell that the online footage of Chelsea Tractors having to negotiate large puddles by the tennis courts (which had gone by the time I went to gawp) had not helped Kelly feel more enthusiastic about coming to London for a week.

“I think we’ll just stay here,” she said. “Joe’s made friends with a little boy from Bristol who’s staying in the shed at number four.”

I put my house-swap dreams to one side but then my boss Bella called. She was supposed to be joining the exodus to Padstow but something had come up regarding her lockdown puppy, a cockapoo called Bear.

“I’ve been gazumped,” Bella told me. “The dog-sitter says she’s been offered three times what I was planning to pay her to look after a chow chow in Belgravia. She gave me a chance to match their offer – but £1,500 a week to give Bear a bowl of kibble and a walk around the block twice a day…”

I did the sums and quickly realised that even before she was gazumped, Bella had been prepared to pay a dog-sitter more than she paid most of the staff at her PR company. One thing this pandemic has shown me is that the jobs the wealthy deem “essential” enough to pay good money for are not always the jobs you would imagine. Cleaning toilets? Not worth the minimum wage. Giving a dog a head massage? Have £100 an hour.

“I don’t know what to do,” Bella wailed. “I can’t ask you. Not after what happened with the hamster.”

Bella was still under the impression that her stepson Zack’s hamster, which I’d looked after over Christmas, had died on my watch. In fact, Minky had a couple of months hiding under my fridge before I recaptured her, by which time Zack had moved on to wanting a dog. While Bella bemoaned her luck, I could see Minky from the corner of my eye, attempting to stuff a whole walnut into her cheek. I blushed with guilt at my deception.

“We won’t be able to go away!” Bella concluded. “Zack won’t get his holiday.”

I knew by now that I was going to have to dogsit. A change is as good as a rest, right?