Lockdown Five Years On – Why Do I Secretly Wish For Another?

How fast have five years gone? I still remember those surreal days, teaching live lessons from my kitchen table, trying to make geography engaging with tales from the farm while my students bartered their attention in exchange for showing me their dogs, gerbils, and cats (and a gecko called Ralph). It was an odd, uncertain time, but if I’m honest—I secretly loved it. The slower pace, the strange intimacy of peeking into each other’s worlds, the unexpected joy of swapping funny sheep pictures for snapshots of scruffy terriers. Looking back, I can’t help but feel a quiet longing for that peculiar stillness.

And who can forget the great race for hand sanitiser, toilet rolls, and pasta? The sheer thrill of spotting a lonely pack of penne on the supermarket shelf, the wild-eyed scramble for the last bottle of soap. Evenings were spent glued to the news, waiting for the latest updates, as if they held the key to some kind of normality. It was a strange mix of chaos and stillness, of panic and peculiar comforts—and, in some ways, I almost miss the simplicity of it all.

But what truly softens the memory is the unseasonably beautiful weather, a silver lining that made those strange days feel somehow sunnier—both literally and figuratively. Long, golden afternoons spent working outside, lessons taught with the window wide open, and the unexpected luxury of slow mornings with a cup of tea in the sunshine. For all its strangeness, it was, in some ways, a bizarrely pleasant time.

No one really says it out loud though, do they? The quiet, guilty thought that maybe—just maybe—we didn’t use lockdown as well as we could have. That in between the fear, the uncertainty, and the sheer weirdness of it all, there was also… time. And now, in the rush of normal life, we secretly long for a bit of that again.

Not the awful parts, of course. Not the worry, not the isolation from loved ones, not the endless news cycles filled with doom. But the stillness. The slower mornings, the longer evenings, the feeling that, just for a while, the world had stopped expecting so much from us.

At the time, we told ourselves it was okay to just be. That we didn’t have to start sourdough baking or write a novel or get fit in the living room. But now? Now, looking back, it’s easy to wonder: Could I have done more?

Some people seemed to emerge from lockdown having mastered a new language, renovated their entire house, or started a wildly successful side hustle. Meanwhile, others—many of us—just sort of existed. Worked if we had to, stared out the window a lot, took daily walks, watched an alarming number of TV box sets, and tried to convince ourselves that this counted as making the most of it.

And honestly? Maybe that was enough.

But now, life is back in full swing. The endless to-do lists, the relentless emails, the constant feeling that we should be somewhere, doing something, achieving more. The stillness we had, whether we wanted it or not, is long gone.

It’s not that I truly want another lockdown. But I do sometimes wish I could step back into that sense of pause—to slow down without needing the world to grind to a halt to allow it.

Maybe the real lesson isn’t that we wasted lockdown, but that we need to carve out moments of stillness now, without waiting for life to force them upon us.

So here’s to slow mornings with a cup of tea, to watching the sun set just for the sake of it, to finding little pockets of calm in a world that always seems to be running at full speed. And here’s to forgiving ourselves—because no matter how we spent that time, we got through it. And really, isn’t that enough?