Lockdown Life

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about my last cartoon. I titled it Here we go again and I suppose the only thing I’m a bit surprised about is that the wave didn’t hit earlier in Autumn. And so, on this Thursday 5th November, here we all go again. Plunged into ‘Lockdown 2.0’.

I started my Lockdown Life collection back in April as a way of coping with what was completely out of my hands. That feels like a long time ago now and, oddly, I’m reassured that my blind optimism hasn’t completely disappeared yet – I still have hope that this time, it really will be for four weeks. I might feel differently in mid-November.

Looking at the collection now, the ups and downs are plain to see. It all started with a light-hearted work challenge where my colleagues and I shared our ‘interesting commutes’. That was back when working from home still felt weird and tiring but was also quite novel. By early May, I think that novelty had worn off and, instead, I felt the need to draw out the recurring dream I’d been having about a huge wave – I used a couple of poor fish to represent us during the pandemic and they made a reappearance a few weeks ago. 

Humour is definitely an important feature in many of the cartoons. I was particularly proud of Captain Polly Parrot and the ‘R’ rate. To this day, though the term has definitely become more normalised, I still think of a pirate every time I hear someone talk about the ‘R’. This is definitely an example of me continuing to laugh at my own joke! Sad, I know.

I wrote a blog post about each cartoon at the time so I’m not going to cover all of them again here but there are a few more highlights to mention. I found the news about wildlife reclaiming lost territory during lockdown to be very reassuring. It was marred somewhat by the fact that many of these wild spaces ended up getting trashed as soon as people were allowed to visit them again. However, (Re)claim it is a snapshot from that uplifting moment and it’s probably my favourite cartoon in the collection.

A lot of thought went into Here comes the guilt. I remember the day I drew this well. It was my birthday in early July. The pubs had just reopened and I felt guilty about what to do: Do I go out for a meal on my birthday? Do I go out for a drink at my local to support them? Do I stay at home so that there’s no chance I can infect anyone? As it turned out, I decided on a full lockdown birthday and didn’t venture into a pub until much later in July. I included the quotes in the cartoon to reflect how torn I was at the time. As Matt Lucas summarised it: ‘Go outside. Don’t go outside’.

Though it wasn’t my intention at the time, with us heading into ‘Lockdown 2.0’ in England today, I think Here we go again is a fitting end to the collection. I drew each cartoon because I felt I needed to share something. I needed to draw out the way I felt and I hoped it would resonate with people – or at least give them a cheap laugh or a little chuckle. I definitely still want to share, but, with this turning into much more of a marathon than a sprint, I think lockdown-themed cartoons have had their time. Thank you to everyone who enjoyed the cartoons and read their stories – your comments, likes, shares and feedback have been incredibly uplifting.

This doesn’t mean that my cartoons are dead. I’m still working on a small project with a friend from work and I also have a couple of new additions to the family who I think will be the inspiration behind a new collection. They’re called Claude and Jolene and they wished everyone a Happy Halloween last weekend…!

If you’d like to see any of the Lockdown Life cartoons and read their stories, you can find them all in my blogs:

My Daily Commute / The Wave
(Re)claim it
The ‘R’ rate
The ‘New Normal’
My (first) Covid words
Here comes the guilt…
Testing the Water
Here we go again…