Joe Wicks, Houseparty and banana bread: These things weren’t welcome in lockdown 2.0

Remember the time when it was acceptable to nominate your mates to do a 5K run? Never again

3 years ago

Now we are coming to the end of the second national lockdown, this got us thinking about all the ridiculous and absurd trends and crazes that we all indulged in within the first lockdown to try and cope with the loneliness and boredom of staying at home. However, did they really help us keep our sanity or did they just drive us all crazy?

Why was everyone panic buying toilet roll as if they go through a roll a day? Why were people tagging you to run 5k when you couldn’t even manage to get out of bed? Why was everyone recording themselves downing pints of beer? It’s safe to say that we were more prepared for lockdown 2.0 as we had done it all before, but thank God that these trends did not grace us with their presence the second time around. Just the name Tiger King is scarred with the memory of binging Netflix without showering for three days.

PE with Joe

Getting up at nine am is bad enough, never mind doing burpees and press-ups in your living room which reminded you of the days of secondary school PE when you had to run laps of the field and then go to class all sweaty and out of breath. While it was a good way of getting exercise in principle, did anyone do it religiously every morning and not give up after five days? I wish I had the discipline, but this was not a trend I could get behind. Joe Wicks, I’m sorry, but I’m glad we left you back in April.

Baking banana bread

What was this all about? Why were the baking shelves in supermarkets suddenly emptied and everyone was posting their attempts of baking banana bread? I probably gained five pounds just looking at all the posts of cakes which people had baked. I think we all ate enough sugar in lockdown one to get us through the whole year, there was no need to bring back the baking craze for lockdown two.

Tiger King

Tiger King is the epitome of the first stage of lockdown one: the time everyone just lied around binge-watching Netflix trying to distract ourselves from what was happening in the outside world. If you didn’t watch Tiger King then you felt isolated in more ways than one as social media was flooded with Tiger King memes and the names Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin were everywhere!

There hasn’t been a Netflix binge-worthy equivalent to Tiger King this lockdown. But maybe that isn’t a bad thing. Should we ever go back to that place where we stayed in bed all day getting square eyes not knowing what day it was?

Running 5k

However, that being said, we may never want to go back to that Tiger King slump, but we definitely don’t want to go back to the time when you got tagged to run 5k every day. Wow, wasn’t that a contrast, from binging Netflix to running what felt like a marathon within the same month?

While it was for charity and I applaud everyone who participated and donated, this was a trend that had no place in lockdown 2.0. We have swapped running 5k to writing five essays for the end of week 10.

Panic buying toilet roll

That moment when you went to the shops and there was no toilet roll left and it somehow became a meme and a pinnacle part of lockdown. There really was no need for panic buying, at all. We all definitely learnt from the first lockdown. If people started fighting people in Sainsbury’s for pasta and toilet roll like they did in March, I would think the world really had gone mad.

Instagram tags

This was another random social media trend: getting tagged in 10,000 challenges a day to share baby pics and your day in gifs. There really was so little to occupy our time (after finishing Tiger King, of course) that we all started tagging each other to do challenges on Instagram as if that was our only form of communication.

Don’t get me started about “until tomorrow”… I’m still very confused about why that was ever a thing.

Houseparty

When lockdown hit and we were locked indoors, we all forgot about the usual ways of communicating with our friends online and opted for the platform Houseparty to video call our friends, ignoring the fact that FaceTime still existed. Why was this app ever so popular? It drained all your battery and froze 90 per cent of the time.

Houseparty, we are glad to have buried you in the depths of our memory from the misery which was the first lockdown. We will not be resurrecting you anytime soon. May you rest in peace.

Quizzes

By the time it got to May and there was no light at the end of the tunnel that lockdown was going to get any better, everyone started to make quizzes for their friends to entertain each other a the replacement for Whoops Wednesdays in Sugar. People really got creative with these quizzes!

My favourite rounds were when it got personal and your friend would ask questions about the group and you struggled to remember who it was who fell down the stairs at pres that one time but then realised that it was you. Such fun. But after the tenth quiz, it all starts to feel a bit dull when the only questions that haven’t been asked are how long does a camel live for and where in the world is Tunisia. I think we have exhausted all the different rounds for lockdown quizzes. I think we should look back at them fondly and not overdue a good thing.

Downing pints

Another strange Instagram trend was tagging your mates to down a pint as quickly as you could while recording it then posting it on social media. Downing drinks is definitely not my strong suit, but anything to remind me of the days of downing shots in GLOW or VKs in Sugar is something I can support. That is until you realise that the earliest you will be back in Sugar is September 2021 and then you want to cry.

We all learnt some valuable lessons from the first lockdown, but let’s keep some (and quite frankly most) of these trends where they belong back in March. No one wants to be reminded of the glimmer of hope we still held in those times that lockdown would be over by July and we would all go back to uni like normal in autumn. It’s nearly the end of November and I’m starting to forget what socialising felt like.