The return of the long-lost hobby

The experience of the lockdowns in western Europe throughout 2020 and 2021 was broadly similar for members of the Work-From-Home class. Sure, each country lent its own characteristics to restrictions. France bureaucratised virtually all movement with a complex certification system; the Dutch government advised single people to find a “sex buddy” during the periods of national house arrest.

But in much else, the patterns were the same, especially among the working-age young. The naff jokes. Another day, another loaf of sourdough: tick! Over-the-top and probably useless in-house infection control. Who didn’t initially quarantine their post or wipe down their shopping? And just about everywhere, lots of rule-breaking. 

A friend, in Paris for the duration, told me that the famously draconian curfews just facilitated longer communal home drinking sessions. When people really needed to, or really felt like it, they broke the rules.

But beyond the dreariness of lockdown culture, a series of positive albeit second-order effects began to take shape. The repeated spells of isolation have forced many of us to work out what we really like doing, and then to pursue it. 

It has bred a genuinely eccentric mindset that puts into perspective popular caricatures of Millennials and Gen-Z as wedded to a Stakhanovite outlook of instinctive conformity. It has been a period of speedy maturation for the children of the 90s. 

Before the pandemic, talk of work and play often revolved around a sense of hyper-competitiveness. Am I missing out? Do I fit in? Where is my next promotion coming from?

Now, that competitiveness feels a little dulled. Attitudes have softened. In parallel, we increasingly place more of a premium on quality, in conversation, as well as in experience. Face-to-face conversation feels, naturally, far more urgent than it did before. 

In late summer and early autumn, I really felt that a sense of “opening up” had set in. An easy serendipity had returned to city life. Dropping in, going out on a whim, chance meetings – this is a quality of experience heightened by the fast pace of urban life.

I can’t count the number of times my contemporaries have decided to finally get round to pursuing a much cherished personal project with an enthusiasm that seems genuinely fresh. 

Hobbies as varied as model aeroplane construction or Real Tennis (an antiquated precursor to Lawn Tennis played indoors) and even French lessons have been approached with renewed vigour and appetite.

This post-lockdown love for eccentric hobbies and occupations falls on fertile ground. In the early to mid-20th century, novelists perfected the type of the tame eccentric (probably posh) ne’er-do-well who pooters around from useless pursuit to useless pursuit – from PG Wodehouse’s ridiculous Gussie Fink-Nottle, newt fancier, forever “treading on life’s banana skins”, to tragic Tony Last, thoroughly devoted to his decaying country house, Hetton Abbey, in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

In George Orwell’s celebrated 1941 essay, The Lion and The Unicorn, the modern English eccentric takes on a central role in the national story. The English have an “addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations,” he writes: “We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans.” 

This appetite for minor pastimes and a “nice cup of tea” signifies, for Orwell, the meaning of the liberty of the individual for the English: “the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.”

So much for the liberty of the individual in an era of lockdowns. But the pattern Orwell describes has been given new colour and quality over the last few months as we have emerged from our isolation. Let’s hope our hobbies outlast the winter.