Lesser Reported Stories from Lockdown

The Champagne Was Being Kept For a ‘Special Occasion’. She Drank It On a Random Tuesday Night.

Last August, Sinead McNulty was in her local off-license when a bottle of Dom Perignon caught her eye. She had received an emergency tax refund that day and was feeling unusually flush.

“Normally I’m an €8.99 bottle of sauvignon blanc kind of girl but I saw the champagne and I just felt compelled to buy it,” she recalled.

She took the champagne to the cashier and balked when she realised it cost €200.

“How much?” she said, trying to play it cool. “€200, ”chirped the cashier.

It was a shock to the system. Too mortified to leave it behind, she produced her debit card.

“Can I tap?” she asked.

“No,” replied the cashier. “That’s well over the limit, like.”

On the way home, she cursed herself for once again frittering away money. “I was so angry at myself that I vowed to save it for a special occasion,” she explained.

For eight months, she didn’t touch it. Not when she landed a promotion at work. Not even when she was asked to be godmother to her best friend’s daughter.

Then she found herself in the middle of a global pandemic and unable to face into another evening of making one of The Happy Pear’s recipes for lentil dahl.

“I needed a release,” she said.

And that’s how McNulty wound up drinking an entire bottle of champagne alone last Tuesday night.

“I got completely shitfaced and watched old interviews with Florence Pugh on YouTube,” she sighed.

A week later and she’s full of regret.

“I thought I would drink that champagne if I ever got engaged or bought a home,” she said. “But instead I drank it while listening to Florence Pugh talk about what an honour it was to work with Greta Gerwig and how she brought a feminine energy to the set of Little Women.”

“Who does that?”

***

‘At Least Staying Inside Means I Can’t Spend Money,’ She Thought. Then She Spent €300 on Artisan Jigsaw Puzzles.

When social distancing measures were first implemented, Violet Switzer tried to look on the bright side.

“I figured that being forced to stay inside would probably be good for my finances,” she explained.

And she wasn’t wrong. With iced lattes and almond croissants out of bounds, she made immediate savings.

“If this goes on long enough I might have enough for a deposit on a house,” she remarked to friends.

A few weeks into quarantine, however, and she found herself growing bored. It had been weeks since she last dropped €12 on a negroni and she was having spending withdrawals. She needed to buy something, anything.

“I got a sponsored ad on Instagram for a jigsaw puzzle and I thought, ‘Why the hell not?’”

She spent €39 on a 200-piece flamingo and palm tree puzzle. “You could say it was my gateway,” she said.

Weeks later and Switzer estimates that she has spent somewhere in the region of €300 on jigsaw puzzles. Most were purchased out of guilt.

“I bought one from a botanical garden gift shop in Somerset because they posted on Facebook that they needed financial support and I started to worry about their survival” she said. “I’ve never even been to Somerset. I don’t know why it came up in my feed.”

Then she felt bad about not supporting female-owned businesses.

“So I bought a puzzle covered in quirky boob illustrations,” she said. “I haven’t even completed any of them.”

“I am arguably in worse shape financially than I was when this started,” she concluded. “I should never have stopped buying iced lattes.”

***

She Thought a Photo of a Cherry Blossom Tree Would Perform Well on Instagram. It Got 14 Likes.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Ailbhe O’Rourke decided it was time to go for a walk. She had been confined to her apartment for days and was in need of some fresh air.

When she stepped outside, she spotted a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. Underneath it lay a carpet of pink petals. “It was like something from a postcard,” she said.

As she admired it, she had an epiphany. “This would probably perform well on Instagram,” she thought to herself.

She regularly saw friends and acquaintances receive dozens of likes for photographs of cherry blossom trees.

“They’re basically Instagram catnip,” she said.

Having populated her Instagram feed with #tbt photos for a month, Collins refused to let this content opportunity pass her by. She reached for her iPhone and proceeded to document the scene in front of her.

After cropping and filtering the photograph, she posted it to Instagram with the caption: “It’s the little things ❤︎”

She expected to get “upwards of sixty” likes for the photograph.

She waited for the red hearts to roll in. And waited. And waited.

Twenty-four hours later, the photograph had racked up a paltry fourteen likes.

Collins is now back in her apartment and trying to put her finger on why it tanked.

“The only person who seemed to really like it was a girl I worked with in Mace a few years ago,” said O’Rourke. “I haven’t spoken to her since 2015 but she said the photo was gorgeous and that we should meet up for ‘a few vinos’ after lockdown.”

She paused for a moment.

“And I once saw her ask for a roll with chicken tikka and egg mayonnaise at the deli counter so her approval means very little to me.”

***

She Cut Her Fringe With an Arts and Crafts Scissors. Now She Really Can’t Go Outside.

Before coronavirus, Lorraine Moloney was religious about getting a haircut every six weeks. “I have a blunt bob and fringe so I have to see my stylist Thiago pretty regularly,” she explained.

When hair salons shut up shop, Moloney was hopeful that the closures would be very temporary. “I figured we would probably be back to normal in three, four weeks,” she said.

Last week, she looked in the mirror and was horrified by what she saw in the reflection. “I looked like the Dulux dog,” she said.

She couldn’t wait for Thiago. It was time to take matters into her own hands. She opened YouTube and searched ‘cut bangs tutorial’. For twelve minutes, she watched as a 19-year-old Australian vlogger named Matilda Pickles explained how to cut your own fringe.

“It looked easy,” said Shepard. “I was like, let’s do this.”

The only scissors Moloney had at her disposal was a child’s arts and crafts scissors, which she assumed was fine to use. A scissors is a scissors, she thought. Wrong.

As soon as she started trimming, she knew she had made a grave mistake.

“I gave myself a too-short fringe,” she said. “And I discovered something about myself: I do not have the face for that.”

Now Moloney finds herself actively hoping that the lockdown is extended until 2021.

“Nobody can see me like this,” she said. “I mean it.”