Are you a pleb complaining about lockdown boredom? Don’t
I’ve got lots of smug and self righteous tips for you
Every so often, I log onto Twitter with my mid-morning macchiato and feel plagued by the injustice of it all. Left, right and center, people are having the indecency to vent and share frustrations over what I refuse to acknowledge is an undeniably challenging and emotionally battering time for all of us. So after dropping Rosie and Jameleon-Maximus off in our estate to roam the Scottish Highlands for the day, I put pen to paper to offer you some handy hints on how not to annoy me on twitter. Because after all, I am better than you.
- Use your au-pair’s spare bedroom to make a fun den for them to play in and perform their latest concertos. If that sounds like too much work, get your au pair to sort it out for you and just take pictures to illustrate what a yummy mummy you are when it’s picture perfect.
2. Call Eddie in the civil service to get you a quiet waiver on travel to Aspens with you and your pals from your polo set if it all gets too much for you. If Eddie can’t wrangle it again, get your husband to pay for you, Samantha, and Marsha to stay in the Caribbean for two weeks so you can enter the USA anyway.
3. Be inventive! If you can’t go to the cinema, use your home cinema room in your enormous iceberg basement and get a servant to stamp your tickets and sell you pink-Himalayan-salted popcorn.
4. If you’re struggling with bills, make your own soda bread with the children and grow your own organic herbs in the west wing gardens. Once you’ve got your gardener to show you the right way to seed rosemary, you’ll have no problem at all budgeting for your next sea bass sauce!
5. Be sure to post endless Instagram photographs of how well you are coping with your delighted teenagers who are now FREE from the constraints of modern society and will surely be delighted to spend the another year making flower garlands in the forest while you drink a bottle of chardonnay and take a handful of ritalin to deal with the stress of interacting with them.
6. Get your private doctor’s to write you a serious looking letter saying you are suffering from a rare disease that means you have to completely ignore any measures everyone else has to obey and then threaten a police officer with legal action if he questions why you are holding a birthday party for Rosie with 80 people in Regent’s Park.
7. Enjoy some ‘you’ time by watching out for all posts from The Guardian and The Times and then launching into a pious rant about how your family are finding lockdown delightful and so is Rosie because of what an ingenious, creative and free-spirited parent you are. Tip: make sure you block any of your friends who point out you get extremely drunk and call them at 4am to wail about how you can’t see your lover in Paris every weekend.
8. Use lockdown as an opportunity to boast about your virtues by buying some horrifyingly westernized self help books on meditation and Buddhism and some Tibetan singing bowls, that you will no doubt use every week for an Instagram shoot. You can also detox all that negativity by discovering you are actually gluten intolerant and, because you have ‘reawakened’ yourself through isolation, able to commune with the dead. You can really irritate all your friends with this for hours, which will help add to your sense of superiority and victimhood.
9. Use your gardens, hothouses and fifth estate in Surrey to get away from it all when you feel sharing a whole wing of the house with one of your offspring’s ukelele compositions are getting too much for you.
10. It’s important to let anger and negativity go to hold onto the social media illusion that you are breezing through losing two years of your life to isolation, loneliness and despair. Use this time to have a flaming row with your husband over the fact you haven’t had sex in years and you feel he has stolen your youth from you only to trap you in a world where you are aging, ignorant and alone. He will no doubt distance himself further from you, giving you the opportunity to have an affair with the gardener, the au pair or the amazon prime delivery driver. Score!
Remember: it’s not about whether you win a Facebook piety competition, it’s about whether you feel self righteous and fulfilled, at least to the extent that the agonizing horrors of having to spend three hours getting baking powder and rye flour out of Rosie’s pashmina cape was worth it. If someone calls you out on being a sanctimonious, out of touch Lockdown Marie Antoinette, at least you can sleep peacefully in the knowledge that you aren’t the one trapped in a bedsit in Lewisham with four children to feed on £20 a week. That’s surely a comfort we civilized people can be thankful for.
