When the coronavirus hit I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying at Harvard on a Kennedy Scholarship, a generous funding package awarded to a handful of British graduates every year. I was enrolled on a non-degree basis, taking whichever courses took my fancy in subjects like English, Philosophy, and History. I was fattening up on Freud, Hegel, and Marx, sauntering around Harvard Yard with a novel under my arm, and attending functions catered generously with canapés and booze.
A week later, I was standing on the balcony of an old friend’s council flat and looking at the grey clouds above the Manchester skyline. I had booked a last-minute flight out of Boston and packed up my things in a hurry. Now I was back in the city where I grew up and the UK had just gone into lockdown.
A week later, I was standing on the balcony of an old friend’s council flat and looking at the grey clouds above the Manchester skyline
In vain, I tried to keep up my Harvard life over Zoom. But life was nothing but the coronavirus now, and I struggled to justify continuing with my course on 19th Century Aesthetic Philosophy. My flatmate was still going to work, so I woke in an empty flat, perused my small pile of books with waning interest, and took my daily walks around the old redbrick factories beside the filthy River Irwell. Strewn with shopping trolleys, litter, and car tyres, it felt a long way from Harvard and the shimmering blue Charles.
I had re-budgeted for my recent losses – it turned out that fleeing a country in a hurry could be costly – and my finances were in a worrying state. I wanted to pick up some work, but it was hardly the time to go handing out CVs. I stepped onto the balcony. The streets were deserted. The only sound was of birdsong. Then, on the street below, something caught my eye: a cyclist in a turquoise jacket with a huge turquoise backpack, the only human in sight.
I googled ‘How to work for Deliveroo’, completed an online ‘interview’, which was really just a series of forms, and a few days later, a package arrived, free of charge, with everything I needed to get started.
It was a relief, after spending so long indoors alone, to be outside cycling on the empty streets, breathing unpolluted air. It felt good to be doing something useful, too. Of course, delivering takeaways to lazy millennials is hardly heroic. But in lockdown, the work meant a little more.
I told him I was a writer. But the truth was, I had not written a word in weeks, nor had I read a page of a book
I delivered groceries to people afraid or unable to leave their homes, and they thanked me profusely through their peepholes. I delivered a pack of cigarettes to a student in the halls at Salford University. He must have been one of the few remaining – the campus was deserted – and he looked forlorn. As I tossed him his cigarettes, I felt I was providing an important service.
I spoke with other Deliveroo riders while waiting outside restaurants for orders. One had given up a teaching job in his native Cataluña and claimed to make more money as a rider. Surely not? I thought. I had already worked enough to know that Deliveroo pays terribly. Then he told me he worked fourteen hours, six days a week. He asked me what I normally did and I told him I was a writer. But the truth was, I had not written a word in weeks, nor had I read a page of a book.
I couldn’t. Coming back to the flat after a shift of Deliveroo, I found it impossible to return to my studies. What was the point?
I had always believed what I wanted most was a temporary break in all human activity. If everything stopped, I thought, I would do some serious intellectual work. I would do nothing but stay home all day, reading and writing. But now that, implausibly, productive life had all but stopped, the last thing I wanted to do was read.
Now that, implausibly, productive life had all but stopped, the last thing I wanted to do was read
What I had not realised was that when everyone was at home and nothing was going on, intellectual work did not seem nearly as important. There is something decidedly contrarian about reading and writing: it’s hard to say exactly what intellectual work is, but the one thing it’s definitely not is real work. That is part of its allure.
Usually, I wanted to stay home reading books while everyone else went to work. Now that I was meant to stay home, I found myself desperate to slip into my Deliveroo gear and get to work.
Only when the lockdown began to ease, when, from the balcony, I saw people leaving for work or returning home with shopping, did I find myself drawn to pick up a book. I had been meaning to read Gustave Flaubert’s classic 1856 novel, Madame Bovary, in a new translation by the American short-story writer, Lydia Davis.
I had read the novel in my first year of university and it had gone right over my head. Now I couldn’t put it down. Was it, I wondered because the translation was better? Or was it because Boris Johnson had just told people to get back to work and now reading a novel seemed more enticing than ever?
An unlikely resonance emerged between 19th century rural France and Manchester in lockdown
When Flaubert introduces us to Emma Bovary she lives alone with her father in a small village. She reads novels and dreams of living a passionate romantic life. When she meets Charles Bovary, she believes her time has finally come, but married life turns out not to be what she’d always imagined. She grows bored; she has affairs. She reads more novels. In the end, Emma’s imagination is her undoing. Unable to accept the mundanity of daily life, she gets into terrible debt in her bids to escape it.
As I read, an unlikely resonance emerged between 19th century rural France and Manchester in lockdown.
Aren’t we all just itching to get out into the world and to be around people? And, once we’re there, don’t we long for our books, our films, or whatever it is that fills us again with the longing to be outside? I know I do. As Flaubert is reported to have remarked of his masterpiece: Madame Bovary: C’est moi.
