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For a while, as the lockdown well and truly bit, you probably had a hobby. Perhaps you baked a sourdough baby or whittled a corona six pack, or made do and mended old clothes, unearthing from a bathroom drawer a bijou sewing kit – aha! – snaffled from a far-flung hotel. Perhaps you deployed Blitz metaphors as you tilled the garden in a Rosie the Riveter boiler suit, or chipped the limescale off the shower tiles. Perhaps you became a compulsive quizzer, hoarding trivia like an earnest University Challenger.
And perhaps, as we enter this new phase – lockdown 2.0 – you are still sifting through niche websites in search of a bag of yeast, still watching YouTube videos about how to cross-stitch, and still doing 100 crunches before breakfast. But more likely, you have forsaken your personal project in order to join the nation’s collective wartime industry: gossiping.
Production has geared up as the days feel soupier and soupier, and we grow more and more restless (for drama). Remember those neighbourhood WhatsApp groups? The ones which once pinged with offers of surplus carrots from a bountiful Oddbox, or suggestions of (socially distanced) sundowners in time for the 8pm Clap for Carers? Their focus has shifted rather. Now, the collective goal is to identify the person breaking council rules by lighting fires in their back garden, or work out if number 22 (not in the group) had a BBQ with “outsiders” yesterday.
Read more: “I’ve Been In Isolation For 7 Weeks With A Guy I’ve Known For 9”: What It’s Like To Fall In Love In Lockdown
“Curtain twitching is actively encouraged”
© BBC
Indeed, despite the fact that no one is really doing anything, gossip is seemingly not in short supply. Other people’s postponed weddings; other people’s lockdown haircuts; other people’s lockdown puppies; other people’s virtual Hinge dates… You are obsessed with them all. It is gossip – not bitching – the spirit is sociological, not mean-spirited. Still, starved of quotidian small talk with the strangers whose paths we used to cross every day (remember that?), we now zero in on the low-key antics of our friends, family and followers. Curtain twitching is actively encouraged.
And so, on your daily 5.30pm walk with your husband or housemate – a ceremony that marks the end of another day of WFH and delays the evening’s first inevitable quarantini – you sound like a pair of prattling Jane Austen protagonists. Fine, you’re walking round the block with a bag for life rather than strolling around the perimeter of a landed estate, a parasol slung over the crook of an arm. But like Austen’s lot, your talk steers clear of the macro in favour of a forensic examination of the micro: you gossip endlessly about people you know. As exercise is now unlimited, and you are permitted to meet a friend from another household, expect a further boom.
Though even without real humans to see, you’ll always have the internet. Your screentime is up 476 per cent since this all started – Instagram is where you unearth the clues that kickstart your chatter. WhatsApp groups are a stream of screenshots (“did you guys see this??”). One friend has become newly obsessed with a boy from university whom we haven’t seen in a decade – mining Instagram for tip-offs as to whether or not he is breaking lockdown rules. The (possible) culprit lives in Australia and none of us are sufficiently familiar with the situation there to tell for sure, which only makes the speculation juicier. Meanwhile, another friend started using Zoom’s internal messenger to send gossipy asides to her colleagues during video meetings – until she realised that her boss might be able to see them. There are now social media accounts devoted to gossiping about people’s bookshelves and virtual meeting backgrounds (see Bookcase Credibility on Twitter, and @ratemyskyperoom on Instagram).
I have gone a bit left-field and found myself newly obsessed with scouring the virtual annals to reacquaint myself with the most legendary celebrity gossip. The other evening, during a sad shadow of the bank holiday Friday that should have been, I re-read everything I could dredge up about Wagatha Christie (another lifetime!). This week? I’ve grown obsessed with Blur versus Oasis, a vintage, ’90s beef I can’t even remember the first time around. For this, I blame the rash of ’90s Instagram accounts I recently followed.
On the other hand, those with a taste for the contemporary and scurrilous had plenty on their plates last week. On a day when Britain’s death toll exceeded Italy’s – a dubious crown to claim – many papers led with something different. Poor old Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who resigned last week from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), after it was revealed (probably by snooping neighbours) that he’d been visited by his girlfriend on two occasions during lockdown, thereby breaking the rules he had helped to write.
In all the predictable quarters, the tone was salivating. “Prof Lockdown broke lockdown to get his trousers down,” squealed The Sun. “‘Professor Lockdown’ quits after trysts with his married lover,” said The Daily Mail, rubbing its hands with glee at an opportunity to roll out its dedicated lexicon for sex scandals (who ever uses the word “tryst” IRL?). Still, even many of those notionally offended by the chiding, moralistic (and fairly misogynistic) tone of much of the coverage still thrilled in the collective experience of a national “scandal”. “Not Neil!” said one friend, even as she spent the whole afternoon texting me lurid link after lurid link.
Rumour and speculation abound, though one thing about gossiping is certainly true: it’s much more fun than watching sourdough rise.
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