- Wake up, 5am
- yoga, prayers, quick half-marathon
- 7am
- wake the family up, fruit-based breakfast
- 8am-9am
- practice Medieval Russian
- 9am-7pm
- workday, peppered with webinars, virtual power lunches, mentoring, painting, sushi, homeschooling, lecturing on Uzbek cinema and a letter exchange with incarcerated Bosnians (need to keep on top of Balkan languages)
- 8pm- 9pm
- sprint mercilessly for 15km + outdoor workout
- 9pm-10pm
- innovative re-cap sessions to foster my children’s development + bedtime.
- 10pm-12am
- fulfilling dialogue with my happily self-actualised spouse… just a normal day in lockdown Britain, looking forward to getting back to my normal productivity levels once this quarantine ends #stayfocused.
So recounts the blog, LinkedIn post, Twitter thread, Instagram story, Tinder profile, newsletter, newspaper column, Meetup group, skywriter and nationally circulated text message by James Yuppie, a 37-year-old project manager from North London.
Since the relaxation of lockdown and escalation of alertness, however, acquaintances are starting to question whether he really is the lockdown renaissance man he appeared to be online.
‘When I saw him, he was mostly upside down, nearly naked and reeking of vodka and onions’ said one dogwalker, ‘a small collection of sparrows seemed to have taken pity on him, offering him cigarette butts and woodlice, but he just kept asking them if they’d seen his kids, and why his wife wasn’t coming back’.
This follows a spate of revelations that, contrary to digital verisimilitude, most people haven’t used the lockdown respite to become entrepreneurs, pursue new passions, cultivate wholesome bonds with their families and smash fitness goals. Instead, each additional tentative jog looks to have been counter-balanced by three back-of-the-cupboard cocktails.
More results are to emerge as, er, we do.