RICHARD ORD: My bone of contention with lockdown backdrop fever

After analysing the fossilised hip bones of our prehistoric ancestors, archeologists have been able to deduce that ancient man did a lot more tree climbing than was initially thought.
Thumb-thing interesting for future archeologists!Thumb-thing interesting for future archeologists!
Thumb-thing interesting for future archeologists!

Fast forward a couple of million years and scientists will be finding the same tell-tale wear marks on our hip bones, and deduce that coronavirus had us climbing the walls.

Certainly, they’ll have a field day analysing human thumb wear and tear during the Age of Lockdown. My pair of knuckle-dragging sons have been doing little else but gaming their pea-sized brains to oblivion on PlayStations.

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That scientists can not only enjoy, but actually make a living out of looking at the battered bones of a long-dead monkey man would have made me laugh this time last year. After three weeks of lockdown, Stone Age femur forensics sounds like a blast.

Lockdown could be seen as a welcome opportunity to strengthen the bonds between father and son. Instead, I have grown more acquainted to the back of my youngest boy’s head.

During his regular stopovers, the back of his bonce is the first thing I see as he disappears into the bathroom for his hour-long shower! I next see it at the fridge door as he contemplates what food he will be devouring on the hour, every hour throughout the day, before it settles down as a silhouette against a video game screen for the remaining hours of daylight.

I’m left to ponder the long term effects of this coronavirus pandemic. I should perhaps be soul-searching the existential questions raised by this life-affecting emergency, instead I can’t help wondering just how much time people must spend sorting out the perfect background for a video call on laptop. Honestly, I’ve never seen so many book collections in my life.

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Instead of listening to the words of the many experts and MPs appearing on news bulletins from their lockdown homes, I find myself trying to read the spines of the enormous book collectio ns that they’ve engineered to appear in the background.

My extensive study of this backdrop fever has established that the greater the book collection in the background the more insecure the muppet in the foreground.

A more honest backdrop would be a pile of empty wine bottles, unwashed plates, and, in my case, a boy playing PlayS tation and eating the last KitKat!

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