Lockdown, like any human experience, affects different people in different ways. I read many complaints of boredom and the slow passage of time but that is not how it has affected me. For me, time continues rushing quickly past – much too quickly for comfort.

Admittedly, I have a companion with whom to share my life and my time. Were I living on my own, it would be a different story. I have lived through periods of loneliness – mercifully, they were relatively short – and do not care much for my chances should I ever find myself on my own once more.

Boredom comes, I think, from a lack of variety in life, when the hours and the days stream past all apparently identical and indistinguishable. Life becomes a desert of sameness.

Paused bus holding up the traffic

Lockdown, and being for the most part confined to a relatively small area of town, has taught me something. It is that the faster we live, the broader our gaze and the less detail we see. When life slows, we have the chance to narrow our gaze and to see detail that escaped us before. Depending on your outlook, such detail will either be exciting or it will bore you witless! Happily, I have found it exciting.

I have learned about my immediate neighbourhood as never before. Streets that once simply provided the way to the shops or the doctor’s surgery have come to have an identity of their own, to be fascinating in their own right. Anonymous streets now have names and the houses in those streets, once just a blur of doors and windows seen in passing, have individual personalities, their differences and quirks now features to be noticed and enjoyed. Christmas, and the gradual transformation of houses, shops and streets with decorations was fun and exciting. Almost as much fun was watching the decorations disappear, and the world return to its previous condition.

Every week, usually on Sunday, we do our food shopping. We drag the shopping trolley round to Sainsbury’s in Liverpool Road, crossing through Chapel Market to the store where we queue, if we are early, or go straight in if we are later. I hurry ahead, pound coin in hand, to claim a supermarket trolley. Inside, we each collect our list of items and meet to combine them and pay at the checkout. Always the same and pretty boring, eh?

Well, actually, no. Every Sunday is different. Activity in Chapel Market is different, the scene in the supermarket is different. Funny things happen, annoying things happen, but they are all different. Different, that is, if you look deeper than the blur of the usual and see what is really happening. That family arguing over what desserts to buy, that customer lost in thought standing just in front of the shelf you need to reach, the empty space where what you were looking for is missing, that elderly gent trying to jump the queue and being shouted at by other customers, the tub of yogurt that suddenly leaks as you pick it up.

In Sainsbury’s

Trivial? Maybe from some perspective but these are the fine details in the tapestry of life which, without them, would be static and colourless.

On the way home from the supermarket, we again pass through Chapel Market, much busier now than on our way in. The stalls are just the same as usual… Oh, no they are not: I’ve never seen that one before and where’s the fast food tent that’s usually just here? I hold my breath as I pass the fishmonger’s stall because I find the smell disgusting after 30 years or so of being a vegetarian.

In Chapel Market

I hurry on ahead of Tigger to reach the coffee shop. Who’s serving today? They greet me because they have become used to seeing me. Coffee comes forward and I reach for it but – oops! – it’s not for me but for that customer longing in the corner. There is chatter between staff and customers but with my poor hearing it just washes over me, a sort of music of odd words and intonations.

Coffee in hand, I rejoin Tigger, patiently waiting outside. She tells me that wherever she chooses to stand, people come and stand beside her. Maybe they think she is queueing for the coffee shop.

In the coffee shop

We have to wait before crossing the main road. It was quieter when we came but is now busy with an apparently unending, slow drift of passing traffic. I step off the kerb and…

“Motorbike!” says Tigger and I jump back onto the pavement with a half-embarrassed, half-amused giggle.

So the days pass, quickly, too quickly. They are all the same and yet all different. I sometimes wish I could rewind them, relive them, check the details and catch what I missed the first time around. Next time I’ll look more carefully and not miss what I suspect I missed this time. But of course, there will always be new details to take in, so many that the jug of memory overflows and spills half of what’s on offer.

There is plenty of time but there is never enough.