By In the rush for the world’s media to find great things about lockdown to write about (working from home, doing yoga, tending to our enormous gardens) they’ve quite forgotten another.
It’s a fine contraceptive!
Where I live not only has it been a lot harder to go out and meet people.
Even if it wasn’t, I am quite a lot less attractive than during the “old normal”. So lockdown is still doing a very good job as a contraceptive when it comes to my online dating.
And some of the reasons this has happened are the same ones that made lockdown such fun to start with:
1. Baking my own bread
During the lockdown v1, the newspapers were full of articles going on about how great it was to break your own bread.
Unfortunately I let these lockdown fanatics brainwash my feeble mind.
Under the influence of lifestyle pieces about how great homemade bread was, I went to an old cupboard and unearthed a bread making machine.
I found I could make naan bread. Really good naan bread.
A delicious couple of months later, I emerged blinking into the new normality.
2. Low carb diet
Unfortunately I was nearly a stone heavier than in my profile pics.
So I promptly went on a low-carb diet. Then it all happened again and I put the weight right back on – plus a little extra for luck.
If I was the entrepreneurial type (which any reader of this blog can see I am clearly not) I would set up an exclusive dating app.
The only people who would be allowed to join would be those beautiful people. People who had somehow managed to avoid getting fatter during lockdown.
3. Zoom cocktails
As someone with friends scattered around the world who I rarely get to meet up with, the advent of the new phenomenon of Zoom cocktails meant I got reacquainted with quite a few of them virtually.
Unfortunately it also meant that my liver got reacquainted with dealing with the kinds of quantities of alcohol it hadn’t seen since I was a reporter on a local newspaper.
Only there was nothing virtual about the pounding this poor organ took.
Then when the lockdown actually lifted there was a kind of rebound effect. Everybody wanted to go out at every possible opportunity – and get smashed (presencially rather than in the comfort of our own homes). My liver was crying for lockdown V2.
4. Lack of vitamin D
…which duly arrived.
Only this time it happened not in the bright springtime days of the first version where I could soak up a few rays on my balcony.
It happened as the nights were getting longer and colder.
Just to make it worse gyms were closed. And a municipal lockdown meant it was impossible to go for a walk in the woods, (and pretty much has been for the last 6 months).
False marketing
I know that complaining about how lockdown is actually affecting one’s health is considered a sign of derangement by many people.
But I’m pretty certain that my current dating profile pics where I am tanned and rugged are so out of touch with the reality by now that I could practically be prosecuted for false marketing by my matches.
However with my current chewing gum complexion and freshly-baked pastiness, I look like something which has crawled out from under the counter of a Wuhan wet market stand. Thanks lockdown!
Uglifying effect
Despite all of the optimism around the new vaccines, I can’t help but fear, pessimistically and paranoically, that these are bound to have some further uglifying effect which hasn’t been discovered yet.
I can just imagine some new study has proved that all vaccines have been found to have a rare side effect of causing some people to grow an extra chin or a hairy wart on their cheeks.
Fortunately, we will be joyfully informed in lockdown-loving newspapers like The Guardian, this side effect only affects an insignificant section of the population.
Take a bow single people.
What do you think? How are you finding online dating under quarantine? Click for more stories about dating during covid
