THERE are people learning during this lockdown, I know. My sister is an academic. She has students going through vivas right now. And there are people using their spare time productively and imaginatively. I am not one of them.
I haven’t started learning a language or how to sew (ridiculous at my age). I am no wiser on nuclear physics or quantum theory or 18th-century Swiss history or even which one Khloe Kardashian is.
No, truth be told, all I have managed in the days and weeks and months under voluntary house arrest is to glean something that many of you probably knew 25 years ago when Seinfeld was first on the television. That George Costanza is a truly terrible human being.
I know, I know. Lockdown is my chance to work my way through Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography, read War and Peace or learn the difference between Beethoven’s Symphony No 1 and his Symphony No 8 (other than the numerical, obviously). And yet I’m managing none of that. But I can just about get through a 22-minute (or thereabouts) episode of a 1990s comedy. Sometimes two.
Back when Seinfeld first aired, in the mid-1990s, when Costanza’s terribleness was still current, I wasn’t keeping up. Night shifts, new baby, the BBC’s ability to make sure you missed the programme by constantly shifting it around the schedule. But in this hemmed-in world, and since the entire series is now on All 4, I’ve been catching up. I think the episode where George tried to get a date with the actress Marisa Tomei even though he had a fiancee called Susan was the last straw. That or the fact that he then phoned Marisa to ask for another as soon as Susan died (after licking the toxic envelopes George had bought for their wedding invitations because he was too cheap to splash out for the more expensive ones). Like I said, a truly terrible human being.
It’s not much of an addition to the sum of human knowledge, is it? A realisation about a TV show most people who were interested probably had 25 years ago. But you know what? I’m fine with that.
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Because there is no right way to get through this pandemic. You don’t have to be a better human being on the other side of lockdown. Honest. You can be the same bumbling idiot you were before and that’s okay. There is no moral imperative to improve yourself in this time. You can if you want to, but if you’re having trouble just getting through the day then you do what it takes. I’ll take the American sitcom.
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