Don’t socialise, said Dr Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, discussing the spread of a new Covid variant, if you “don’t particularly need to”. Well. Upon hearing this I immediately began breaking the concept down into digestible parts. What is social? What is need? What is the thing where you are fizzing with excitement at the promise of going out but then, after dragging your best dry-clean-only to the bar through sodden cold and joining a conversation about dairy, you feel suddenly extremely weary and in urgent need of silence? Is that the “particularly” clause? Is that the “don’t”?
It’s sage advice, admittedly, even without the threat of death. The need to socialise has been brought into sharp relief over the past two years, the need to hold a hand that’s not your own, the need to bitch a little shittily about celebrity affairs, the need to simply eat a meal you have not toasted yourself. But many of us have also found, between the yearning and loneliness, some forgotten pleasure in being alone. Many of us also have performed a sometimes-unconscious winnowing of friendships, streamlining our social lives so we now need only leave the house for people we love, friends who are going to make us laugh, or strangers whose presence will improve our posture, bringing out our best and hidden selves.
The absence of socialising has allowed us to consider it more carefully than ever before, what it’s for, what it does for us, what we become when it is taken away. Why we can dread it, too, and we have understood afresh our anxiety around parties. Today, scarred by the pandemic and fattened by its lockdowns, we have the opportunity to organise our wobbling calendars around these lessons we’ve learned, rather than fling ourselves into it headfirst as if a pile of leaves.
“Don’t socialise if you don’t particularly need to” – here is a phrase that might save a generation from five years of weak drinks and bad sex, a phrase that has the potential to smother the idea of fomo like paper round rock. Sure, it has been known to happen, that a mediocre invitation leads to adventure and certain small blisses. I am aware of pub visits that, at 11pm, cracked open to reveal romance, chips, a particular kind of back-of-bus decadence, but for every one of those there are 10 of the other. Ten jolly jaunts to a second location where what can only be described as the “vibe” sours and ferments within seconds, suddenly shining a virtual black light on all the night’s stains. Ten horror films for every romcom, 10 awkward encounters with someone called Nik or Bunny, 10 drinks drunk before revealing a wet cigarette at the bottom of the glass.
I had been considering throwing a Christmas party, but do I particularly need to? Last week’s episode of Succession helped answer my question. Kendall Roy threw a party in the shape of a breakdown, a strobe-lit, loveless, haunted playground of a 40th, a roiling psychodrama soundtracked by the Chemical Brothers. “I took the wrong drugs in the wrong order,” hisses his brother-in-law Tom, “and I can’t get happy.” Upon watching this antipathy party where, even through three layers of screen, viewers could taste the cocaine in the back of their throats, I deleted my guestlist.
I did not particularly need, no, to throw a party right now, when the risk of it being an anxiety-superspreader event was high. I could suddenly picture it – friends wielding negative Covid tests as they stepped gingerly into my tinsel-strangled home. Music playing in fitful starts, the wifi gently weeping under the sudden weight of strange phones. Someone dancing bravely alone in the living room. I would have got the snacks all wrong of course – little bowls of tuna pasta with a ketchup garnish, bits of apple scattered across occasional tables, some tepid Muller Corners. Mulled cava on arrival, the simple request that everybody asked to bring their own straw. The two people who managed to hook up, against all odds and with their partners sleeping at home, would inevitably conceive, despite being nearly 50 and with laminated statements of infertility from their doctor.
All the fantasies of celebration I’d been harbouring since ignoring a series of birthdays deflated with one prick of the UK Health Security Agency’s pin. Did I particularly need to socialise? Or was I, in fact, being a whingy little baby, desperate to relive the parties of my childhood where I was the special girl allowed to eat as much cake as I wanted while someone’s brother drank everyone’s Ribena and vomited on the coats?
Did I want to see these people, my friends, or had the pandemic curdled our relationships to the point where we no longer had anything to say beyond the shiverly, “So what have you been up to?” Was it simply a mass of people that I wanted, their unventilated bodies, their cracker outstretched and looking for dip? Or did I need them? Did I particularly need them, as a living monument to survival? Did I particularly need to gather people around me, in laughter and candlelight, proof I was known and proof I existed?
Well, Dr Harries, the jury’s out.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
