nicolette kaponis

So how many new skills have you mastered during this Covid-19? Are you fluent in Latin? French? Turkish? Is your personal brand lighting up Twitter/Instagram/Facebook as you sell the wellness candles you cooked up in the kitchen after you created an online festival but before finishing a new dress made from scraps around the house you can wear when you next meet a friend for ‘exercise’ with a keep cup full of ‘coffee’? Spoiler, it has wine inside. Thought so. But guess what. It seems that if you haven’t managed to generally improve yourself, and a substantial number of people online, during this dire time of unprecedented crappness, then apparently you’re doing it wrong. (Bonus points if said improvement was expressed in a language other than that with which you were born). Having missed this chance at enlightenment earlier in the Covid-19 mayhem, this week I decided to give it a go. To change up lockdown life for the better. I vowed that no longer would I spend my ...

Like the rest of the virus-ridden world, my life adventures have become very, very small and very, very specific. Who knew there would be a time when we would simultaneously carry smartphones in our pockets that allowed us access to the world and to perform actions that seemed impossible only a few short decades ago, AND count down the minutes until it was time to visit the mail box. Yes, the humble mail box. (Junk mail now arrives into our home to delirious applause and whoops of joy.) Gone are those heady London days of riding on the top deck of a double-decker bus , or spending the day at Ascot or popping over to Bath . To distract myself from the apocalypse, I have eschewed the 1000-piece puzzle in favour of unpacking boxes from my childhood. A sort of time capsule exercise in reverse. It gives me a chance to remember a time when life was lived outside, when we could touch things and people with carefree abandon, and it helps me not count down the days, hours, minutes un...