Locked in. Isolated. I looked outside my house and it was a ghost town after the first lockdown was announced. The whole process felt so surreal it was almost like a dream- or nightmare. I couldn’t help but have strong feelings of boredom after all the social aspects of my life were cut out. Sure, I could talk to mates through messaging, calls or even a FaceTime, but it just wasn’t the same and felt like a temporary fix to a larger issue.
So, to try to cure my insane boredom I took to google- ‘Things to do when you’re bored’ I typed and swiftly clicked the first result I could see. Results ranged from going on a jog to trying origami and becoming a tik-toker or influencer – which I would be terrible at if I tried; minutes soon became hours filtering through all the different ideas of how to entertain myself as I tirelessly searched for the right fit. Looking back on it, this was a good way to pass time however I needed to pick an option so I thought to myself that I needed a challenge, not an easy task that I could complete in an hour but something that would take me a while to wrap my head around.
I finally came to the decision that I would attempt to learn a language. The question was which one, I could’ve tried to learn a whole different language like German or Italian, however I chose French as I’d already had experience in it from school. I then searched about learning French and covered the basics, and even cracked out my old GCSE French books to go over more advanced phrases and sentences, which brought back a wave of nostalgia and sent me on a tangent of thought.
I finished learning French for the day and went to sleep. I woke up the next day and never continued to learn French. Even though I never became fluent in French, it was something fresh and new that otherwise I wouldn’t have even attempted to do if it wasn’t for the lockdown and allowed me to reminisce about my time at school.