Your local corner shop
Henry Mance
It’s hard to remember those weeks in March and April when pasta vanished from supermarket shelves and online grocery delivery slots were like golden tickets. It was at that point that corner shops came into their own. They didn’t close, they didn’t complain, they barely ran out of goods. Their sales rose nearly two-thirds in March, April and May, according to Kantar.
I picked up a basket and whizzed round my local store, slightly amazed to discover how much stuff was crammed on to its shelves. Unfamiliar brands of yoghurts, boxes of persimmon fruit, bars of Ritter Sport (who can resist chocolate that poses as exercise?).
To live near a good corner shop is good fortune, not a given. There are around 47,000 local shops in the UK, which works out at around one every 1,400 people. In rural areas, they are disappearing and those that remain can be relics.
Even in big cities, there’s a huge difference between the places where you reluctantly go for emergency milk, and the corner shops that shone during the pandemic — packed with fresh veg and human warmth. A good corner shop reminds you who your neighbours are. The ones near me sell corned beef, instant noodles and the Daily Star. They also stock Leffe beer, yoga mats and the Times Literary Supplement.
My own favourite local shop is truly a convenience store — because it does not have a £5 minimum for paying by card, and offers credit if you’ve forgotten your wallet. I assumed that it, like many independent stores, had thrived during the pandemic. But in fact the lack of commuters at the nearby railway station has cut off its evening business. “We’ll survive,” says one of the bosses. Thank goodness.
Hikaru Noguchi: make do and mend
Rosie Dastgir
“Before coronavirus, people were jaded. They didn’t understand this until now,” says Hikaru Noguchi, the Japanese knitwear designer whose brand sells around the world. When the pandemic hit Tokyo, she paused the workshops she gives in the city after decades of living and studying in London and South Africa.
As the work dried up, her worries bloomed. “Darning was a way for me to get rid of my anxious feelings,” she says, “so I started doing Instagram Live instead to show what is wonderful about darning and mending.”
Noguchi’s approach draws on the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic of hand-hewn simplicity and beauty in old, worn objects that yearn for care. Her methods of repairing damaged garments beautifully also tap into a rejection of disposable fashion, the tendency to condemn a jumper to landfill at the appearance of a moth hole.
She has practised sustainability for years, and her recent book Darning: Repair, Make, Mend promotes darning not simply as craft but also as a means of self-repair. Yet it was during lockdown that her reach fanned out beyond her dining table in Setagaya, a suburb of Tokyo, to a worldwide communion of stitchers keen to learn.
In March, about 30 people joined her Instagram Live from their lockdown perches; by December, more than 3,000 followers from Brazil to Johannesburg were watching her transform threadbare socks with jewel bright mohair yarn. “How is your winter, how is your summer?” she sang out, her instructions toggling between Japanese and English as comments and emojis spooled up the chat.
In the early weeks, she was sensitive to people’s constraints in sourcing materials, drawing inspiration from the old sewing box that her English mother-in-law had in Hackney during the war. Very simple, low-tech. “Basic needles. Old English darning thread in men’s sock colours; beige, grey, brown.” Make do and mend conjures frugality and hardship, but Noguchi saw this as an opportunity. Instead of flaunting her rainbow yarns and darning mushroom to her followers, she reached for whatever was close to hand; a humble ladle, a spool of thread.
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The Old Vic — keeping theatre alive
Sarah Hemming
A curtain call for those UK theatres that battled on and brightened our evenings in 2020 would be a crowded one. Among those lined up to take a bow would surely be London’s National Theatre for its near-instant offering of NT at Home (free online streaming of earlier shows); Headlong theatre company for rapid-response original drama made on Zoom; Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley Theatre for innovative online work, and both the Bridge Theatre, London, and producer Nica Burns for being among the first to open their theatre doors and admit audiences again.
But step forward the Old Vic for a special ovation. Leading the line in streaming live performances, the theatre ensured that even if you couldn’t see Andrew Scott in the flesh, you could at least have him in your living room. The In Camera series has brought us top-drawer performances filmed on the Old Vic’s handsome stage and transmitted, live, via Zoom into homes across the world.
Beginning with Lungs, starring Claire Foy and Matt Smith, the season moved on to Three Kings, a new solo piece written expressly for Scott, with the actor demonstrating up close his mercurial talent. Michael Sheen followed him into the spotlight, leading a mesmerising revival of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. (You can still see Lungs and Faith Healer as part of In Camera: Playback.)
The scheme made an artistic virtue out of necessity. There’s a special intimacy and intensity to seeing actors as fine as this, at close quarters, and knowing that every twitch and sigh is live, not edited. When Scott finished his spellbinding monologue, everyone in my living room burst into spontaneous applause — the only pity being that the actor himself couldn’t hear it.
Elsa Majimbo: the Covid comedian
Jemima Kelly
“Ever since corona started, we’ve all been in isolation and I, like . . . miss no one!” Elsa Majimbo says as she zooms into her face with her phone camera and back out again, laughs, says a few words in Swahili and then adds: “Why I am missing you? There is no reason for me to miss you!”
Posted on to Instagram in late March, when much of the world had just gone into lockdown, the quirky low-fi video soon went viral and began the process of turning Majimbo, then an 18-year-old Kenyan journalism student, into a worldwide comedy sensation. Majimbo now has 1.5m followers on Instagram, among them Rihanna and Naomi Campbell.
It’s hard to put your finger on what it is exactly that makes Majimbo’s videos quite so hilarious and delightful, but part of it is the “we’re-all-thinking-it-but-don’t-dare-say-it” nature of her humour. In one of her clips, posted under the caption “When I’m required to participate in anything social”, Majimbo gleefully tells the camera “I wanted to meet up but ooh, it’s a pandemic!” and then repeats that sentiment in various ways as she munches on crisps and lies back on her pillow shrieking with laughter, wearing a pair of Matrix-style plastic sunglasses — all elements that have become her trademarks.
Majimbo has shown the extent to which this pandemic is a shared global experience. Some of her fans might be tens of thousands of miles away from her and from vastly different cultures, but her videos still resonate.
Though her brand is partially built on the idea that she is lazy and work-shy, and while her videos might come across as effortless, she gives the impression of being highly driven in a Zoom interview with the Financial Times. In the new year she is starting a podcast, and once coronavirus restrictions have been lifted, she plans on moving to Los Angeles to further her career.
“It’s too early in the game to lag,” she says. “For someone like me to even have been able to get such an opportunity — it’s insane. With my background, it literally seemed impossible — like something like this wouldn’t happen in 1,000 years.”
In praise of small weddings
Anna Nicolaou
On a relatively ordinary afternoon last month, my best friend got married. In any other year, this would probably have involved several months (if not a year) of planning, shopping and anxiety for me, and infinitely more logistics for the couple. But not this one. After a weekend at the beach with her longtime partner, she texted me: “btw getting married lol”.
In the ensuing weeks we picked out a dress (online), a mutual close friend got ordained (also online), and by mid-November it was wedding day. We brought pizza, cake and champagne to New York’s Prospect Park and huddled under blankets to fend off the late autumn chill. There were seven of us in total, including a photographer. No parents, no family members.
$48,600
Average cost of a wedding in New York in 2019
Thanks to lockdowns and isolation, I had barely seen these friends in person for more than a quick walk or phone call since March. Passers-by in the park watched what was happening and cheered it on. As the sun started going down and the temperature dropped, we retreated back to our homes. But those idle few hours felt more intimate and unique than the months-long extravaganzas that had been typical of pre-pandemic weddings.
In New York the average wedding in 2019 cost $48,600, according to a study by The Knot website. This year, those in the business of putting on weddings — venues, florists, DJs, event planners, caterers and others that make up an industry worth $74bn in the US alone — have been hit hard.
But there are already resourceful wedding planners offering up their services for “microweddings”, as more people opt to have small ceremonies in backyards and parks during the pandemic. Maybe these tiny, ad hoc weddings will turn out to be a fleeting function of Covid-19, and we will all inevitably return to our old ways. In this case, I hope we don’t.
Headspace: how to stay sane in a pandemic
Elaine Moore
Spiritual enlightenment via smartphone is easy to scoff at. So is any sort of belief that is based in Los Angeles, endorsed by celebrities and available to buy for a $69.99 annual subscription. But for millions of people, Headspace’s daily meditations have been a source of solace.
If ever the world needed the cheerful voice of former monk turned mindfulness guru Andy Puddicombe, it was this lost, strange year. Between the frightening early weeks of the pandemic in mid-March and the end of the first wave of lockdowns in June, download rates for Headspace doubled.
The goal of mindfulness is not to stop thinking but to pay closer attention to our thoughts. That may seem perverse in a crisis. But anyone who tried to numb their mind with Netflix and snacking in 2020 knows that zoning out is not a long-term fix. Acknowledging panicky thoughts is more effective than trying to drown them out.
Headspace has focused its efforts on trying to help groups under the most severe strain, offering free subscriptions to US healthcare professionals and NHS workers in the UK. It can take credit for encouraging mental health to become a central discussion in the workplace too. Inbound requests from companies seeking to support staff rose 500 per cent this year.
There are limits to the things mindfulness can achieve. But perhaps it can help to prevent a delayed traumatic reaction to the pandemic. If there is a choice between post-pandemic depression and a roaring ’20s full of fun and freedom, who wouldn’t wish for the latter?
Taylor Swift’s lockdown flourishing
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Fans monitoring Taylor Swift’s daily routine during the spring lockdown gleaned titbits from the singer’s Instagram posts and the odd interview. Watching old films, listening to old music, cooking, looking after her cats: that was the gist of it. Except Swift was covertly doing something else too.
The singer’s secret was revealed in July — a surprise album, Folklore, which she made while in quarantine. Its prior existence was unknown to all but a close circle of collaborators and intimates. So was a companion album, Evermore, which suddenly materialised two days before the singer’s 31st birthday this month.
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Surprise albums are showbiz feats of magic. Originally designed to foil pirating, they have become tricks in their own right, rabbits produced from hats to cries of delight from the fandom. But it’s not Swift’s usual way. With her country music background, she typically takes an old-school approach to releasing albums. Campaigns involve precisely targeted marketing and a drip-feed of advance singles. Then comes the concert tour, the next act in the sales cycle.
Swift was supposed to spend 2020 touring last year’s Lover. The two new albums that have instead emerged represent a double reinvention, not just in the manner of their release but also stylistically. The songs are reflective and hushed, a shift from the brighter hues of her previous work. Her co-producer Aaron Dessner calls them “anti-pop”; although that hasn’t stopped them being immensely popular. Folklore was streamed 80.6m times on Spotify on its first day, the most ever by a female artist.
Kwesi Botchway, painter of the modern age
Jackie Wullschläger
Like a blast of sun at midwinter, the new paintings that most lifted my spirits this year are Kwesi Botchway’s monumental, hyper-stylised portraits of black figures: a “Farm Boy” in translucent pink with the looks and bearing of a catwalk model; “Green Stone Earrings”, where everything except the woman’s huge jewels is bright orange, in luminous contrast with dark skin; and the bar girl, contemporary stare, classical pose, baroque gossamer gown, perched high and laconic in “Blue Stool Gaze”.
Twenty-six-year-old Botchway, awarded a residency earlier this year at Accra’s Gallery 1957, painted these party figures alone under lockdown, playing with imagery sourced from social media, entangled with a visionary response to French Impressionist mark-making and celebration of urban democracy. He calls his style “Afro-impressionism — impressionism from the Black perspective”, where colour is political — black skin is deep purple, historic hue of royalty; fashion is dyed luxury emerald, sapphire. Showing black people “living nice”, Botchway wants to “elevate blackness and to place it at its rightful space — a space of honour and beauty”.
Still in lockdown, Botchway responded to global protest movements with dynamic banner-bearing figures, one in reflective shades, another in stunning headdress, like a crown, surging against vibrant yellow, in “blacklivesmatter (divine protesting)”. Among an important emerging generation of black figurative artists, Botchway is a riveting original, producing memorable images while querying straightforward realism, and invigorating his medium with an urgent conceptual edge.
High culture on the small screen
Adrienne Klasa
For some in the arts, adversity has spurred creativity. Yo-Yo Ma, arguably the greatest cellist alive today, spent part of the pandemic performing via a series of Instagram videos he has called “songs of comfort”. He also performed a series of pop-up concerts for essential workers with pianist and longtime collaborator Emanuel Ax from the bed of a flatbed truck. The audience stood in hula hoops in order to maintain social distancing.
Elsewhere, the Joyce Theater’s digital revival of State of Darkness — Molissa Fenley’s seminal and technically demanding 1988 solo work — is the perfect work for the quarantine era. A single dancer performs alone on the New York theatre’s darkened stage for 36 minutes, building whole scenes and moods in isolation. Recordings of the series of seven interpretations by different top-tier dancers are streaming to Jan 10 ($13 a ticket, joyce.org).
But perhaps the most striking piece of work I experienced during the pandemic was this series of beautifully filmed and produced performances of new commissions for solo viola by Lawrence Power. Each was filmed in an iconic venue in the UK shut down during lockdown, among them London’s Royal Festival Hall and the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. The compositions are gorgeous and technically demanding, the interpretation masterful, and their urgency captured on film. The full series is available on YouTube, with several commissions still to be released.
Animal Crossing: blissful escapism
Tim Bradshaw
The super-rich had parties on private islands, offering guests rapid testing on arrival. Silicon Valley executives decamped to Hawaii. For the rest of us, there was Animal Crossing: New Horizons — the Nintendo Switch game that offered escape and safety in a chaotic year.
Tens of millions of players have travelled to their own unique island since the game was released — at precisely the right moment — in mid-March. There, they could build and decorate a home, plant and harvest fruit trees, tend to their gardens or even carve out a new landscape.
Unlike the storm-shrouded isle of Fortnite’s battle royale or Call of Duty’s promise of cathartic violence, there is very little peril in Animal Crossing. The worst a player might encounter is a spider bite or a swarm of wasps — though the latter can be dispelled with a well-timed party popper. If one of the talking animals who shared your island did get sick, all you needed to cure them was a honeycomb. There was, however, financial volatility, as players chased the ever-fluctuating price of turnips on the “stalk market” and panicked when the interest rate paid on savings in the “Bank of Nook” was slashed in April.
Yet Animal Crossing also brought opportunities that were denied to us in the real world, such as travel and socialising. Dodo Airlines flew me to friends’ islands, where I could marvel at just how many hours they had spent digging up dinosaur bones for their island museum. We traded turnips, went fishing and even watched shooting stars on a clear night.
But perhaps Animal Crossing’s most compelling feature was not its benign time-wasting but its ability to mark the passage of the seasons. There were special events for “Bunny Day” in spring, summer bug hunts, Halloween and birthday parties. Now there is snow on the ground and the villagers are getting ready for the New Year’s Eve countdown — and another year of blissfully little happening.
The city slows down
Dave Lee
I can’t say I gave it much thought when, a couple of weeks into lockdown, the signs started going up on our road.
“Closed to through traffic.”
We’d become a “slow street”, part of a scheme under which 25 stretches around San Francisco have been pedestrianised — unless you were pulling into your house, or engaged in the heroic task of delivering all that we’ve been ordering off the internet.
Streets are being slowed all over the world, in London, Milan, Berlin, Bogotá and Paris. Discussion has quickly turned to whether such arrangements should be made permanent (or, as some have asked, torn down immediately).
Keep them. Sometimes it takes a crisis to show us a better way. What was designed to help us socially distance, has in a different way brought us closer together. Perhaps through a sense of shared purpose, that need to just get out of the house, the community in which I live has suddenly revealed itself.
This is a city where, in normal times, a great number of its residents are picked up each morning by huge blacked-out buses, shuttled to a desk at Facebook/Apple/Google/wherever, and returned bleary-eyed some 10-or-so hours later. Now we’re all together on the slow street; taking a stroll with our partners in the middle of the afternoon, or riding bikes with the children after a day of Zoom-school. At the weekend there’s a little band playing on one corner. It’s a mile-long stretch that empties your mind and pacifies your Apple Watch.
Sadly, it feels inevitable that our slow street will one day be taken from us. And I get it — when the cars come back, our tranquility would mean a busier road somewhere else. But I hope the spirit can remain.
Joe Wicks, healthy-living hero
Guy Chazan
With lockdown shutting gyms down for months at a time, enforced idleness beckoned for millions. Joe Wicks, aka the Body Coach, rode to the rescue.
I was one of the hordes who worked out at home to Wicks’s YouTube videos — simple fitness routines that raise the heartbeat, loosen the joints and get the endorphins flowing.
Wicks’s chirpiness grated, as did the constant plugs of his latest exercise DVD. But there’s still something endearing about him. Most internet fitness gurus might as well be avatars. Wicks is real, a bloke-next-door with shaggy curls who pants, coughs and splutters between sets. It makes your own exhaustion somehow more bearable.
A former teaching assistant who grew up on a council estate in Epsom, Wicks became a personal trainer and then in 2014 began posting workouts and snippets of nutritional advice on Instagram and YouTube. Lockdown made him a household name. He launched a “PE with Joe” programme on YouTube that started out as a replacement for school PE lessons but became popular with adults too. Aired daily during the first wave of the pandemic, it was viewed 80m times.
It’s not clear whether Wicks has fully succeeded in his mission to prevent Britons becoming a nation of couch potatoes. A survey by Sport England found that more than 3m people were less active between mid-March and mid-May compared to the same period a year before (perhaps understandably).
I’ll continue with the Joe Wicks workouts during Germany’s current lockdown — though I’m waiting for the neighbours to complain. The creaking floorboards from all those mountain-climbers, burpees and lunge jumps must be annoying the hell out of them.
Photo Kathmandu: broadening the art world’s horizons
Rachel Spence
“Good soil is not abundant: Tharus have always known this . .. ” Accompanied by images of denuded trunks and abandoned wells — but also aerial views of lush treetops yet to be felled — the phrase encapsulates the tragedy that befell indigenous Tharu communities forced over many decades to relocate from their ancestral home in the Chitwan forests of Nepal.
Until last week, I knew nothing of the Tharu. But thanks to Photo Kathmandu’s decision to reinvent themselves online, due to the pressures of Covid-19, I was tugged into their disappearing world. The exhibition is one of several displays that the festival will host over the coming year. For at a time when most art events are shrinking, PhotoKTM has decided to expand from its customary five weeks to an entire year.
The fact that we can now visit PhotoKTM without damaging the planet makes it welcome in an art world increasingly ashamed of its carbon-heavy circus. Furthermore, many art lovers are longing for more of what Robert Hughes described as “slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water”. It’s also true that photography is the most satisfactory online art, losing less “aura” than painting or sculpture.
If PhotoKTM has thrived as well as survived our annus horribilis, it’s because it was born a warrior. Its first edition was inaugurated in 2015 when Nepal was devastated by an earthquake that claimed 9,000 lives. “That year taught us [ . . . ] dogged grit,” says festival director NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati. “We have known from experience that the festival can be a time and place for us to gather, share, learn and find hope together.” Surely art can do no more.
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