‘The magic of the casual acquaintance has been lost during lockdown’

‘Casual sometimes acquaintances don’t know about about my flaws, so when I’m sat under their gaze it can feel like I don’t have any’, writes Annie Lord

(Jacek Zmarz)

Ever since the UK government imposed a coronavirus lockdown, many of us have been surprised to discover that it’s the little things – not the extravagant or the particularly earth-shattering – that we’ve missed the most. The Independent lifestyle desk’s new essay series, Life After Lockdown, is an ode to everything we took for granted in the pre-Covid world – and the things we can’t wait to do once again when normality eventually resumes.

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She was my ex-boyfriend’s sister’s friend and though I didn’t really know her, I knew I liked her. I think her name is Emma, yet I could be wrong. Once she gave me a hair bobble because I was sweating in a nightclub. Another time we bumped into each other in Lidl and I ended up chatting with her in the dairy aisle about Jeremy Corbyn’s chunky forearms until I was too tired to cook the tart I had come to buy ingredients for.

The last time I saw her she was following a man I presume she was on a date with into a beer garden. “He’s wearing flip flops!” she grimaced as he marched ahead to get a pint. “At least he’s not wearing Uggs?” I joked and she laughed and when she put her arm around me her shiny black hair smelt like coconuts. “Urgh, we need to do that drink,” she said. “Yes. I’ll message you,” I said. I didn’t, but then we both knew it wasn’t a real suggestion when we made it.

Before coronavirus, my existence was filled with people like Emma – casual acquaintances I made I don’t know when or how, who bumping into was a shot of unexpected joy and excitement and nothing more; people who constantly drifted in and out of my life but never stayed long enough to develop a friendship with.

But since lockdown started at some point between yesterday and two years ago, I haven’t seen any Emmas. Most people hardly go outside now and if they do it’s to see the people they love, not to risk things for those people they meet on the way to somewhere more important.

There are a lot of Emmas in my life. There’s the woman at the gym I make stressed glances at when the HIIT class teacher suggests 30 seconds of burpees. There’s that guy I always see at house parties — John? Jack? Jake? or some other non-descript J name with four letters — who the only thing I have in common with is that we once saw this guy get so mashed he started having an argument with a living room wall thinking it was his girlfriend.

I’m not sure there is anything more delicious in life than when you are walking with a friend and behind you someone’s shouts your name

There’s the woman I meet in smoking areas who I am always incredibly, almost psychotically, polite too. “Take a whole stick,” I say, thrusting my pack of filters towards her. “Honestly, take them, please”. There’s the guy who always arrives at the friend-of-a-friend’s birthday when I’m already hammered and the only conversation we have — if you can call it that — involves shouting the names of authors we like at each other. “Joan Didion!” “Mark Fisher!” “We actually have so much in common!” Or there’s my friends’ ex-flatmates’ girlfriend who I regularly drag into toilet cubicles with me where I tell her she’s brave for having armpit hair.

These superficial acquaintances will never mean as much to me as my real friends, of course, but I miss them because they make me feel good about myself in ways that people who really know me often can’t. I’m not sure there is anything more delicious in life than that feeling when you are walking with your friend and behind you someone’s shouts your name and it’s one of these Emmas and you hug and then talk about the weather or something else inane. Your friend is like, “who was that?” and you’re like, with a smile that could not be smugger, “just some girl.” The whole exchange makes you feel known. In lockdown I feel the opposite: like a ghost floating through the world only to collect toilet paper and sunburn.

The relationship you have with friends is icky in comparison to that which you have with Emmas. Friends make you feel loved but loved despite your ugliness. Mine know about that annoying shrieking noise I make to get attention when people are talking over me. They know about that time I told everyone at school about my friend’s threesome just because I enjoy the heady rush of sharing secrets. They are bored of me breathing in and asking “can you see abs? There’s a line there, right?” They’ve rung me to confront me about something annoying I’ve done only to have the phone call end with me annoyed at them for being annoyed at me. I never remember birthdays.

Casual sometimes acquaintances don’t know about any of these flaws, so when I’m sat under their gaze it can feel like I don’t have any. To them, I am this smiling, slicked avatar who can juice a funny anecdote into the thirty seconds that pass as the number 48 bus pulls up. Hearing their belly laugh I would bounce up to the front of the top deck replaying the encounter in my brain. Sometimes it’s nice when people don’t see who you really are, just who you pretend to be.

Sometimes it’s nice when people don’t see who you really are, just who you pretend to be

Even after lockdown, I will probably never go for a drink with Emma because to do so would be to mar our relationship with something honest. What would happen if we did make it out for that drink only to realise we have nothing in common? I don’t know if we actually like each other or whether we just like the feeling of recognition that comes from bumping into each other. We talk to each other in a voice about three decibels higher than is natural. Sometimes we scream before we hug.

Acquaintances were already becoming rarer in modern life. It’s hard to say hi to people when they are walking around with podcasts blaring through their AirPods. Lockdown is only going to make it harder. A two-metre gap is so ingrained in our psyche that maybe next time I see Emma we will just gloss past each other, the option to scream and hug removed from our infrequent encounters and with it, most of the enjoyment of them.