I do wish I was at the ballet, even though saying that makes me sound like the kind of twat that thinks Waitrose’s xmas buffet selection is superior to Sainsbury’s - even though Sainos is clearly the more varied, still extremely premium if u ask me and also cheaper option - and yet will still pretend they prepared the puff pastries without a hint of irony or coy “ooh, they did take me several hours to prepare” mandatory micro-joke (which actually, contrary to my apparently aggressive dislike of phoney buffet hosts, I am absolutely here for. Especially at xmas, when all kinds of heard-it-100-times-before family-focused jokes should be encouraged, imo). The ballet, actually, is extremely far removed from this kind of snobbery - the ballet is magic. It is actual perfect magic that you can go and actually witness and it is the epitome of magical winter activity. What’s more is that the ballet is the perfect example of the best kind of activity; one that is enchanting, and exciting, and requires (expects, even) dressing up in something nice for, and that is decadent and beautiful and moving and exhilarating and, if you give it a even just a moment’s consideration, completely unnecessary. The best kind of event: the unnecessary, magic ones. And I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this - the kind that we’re missing as current, in UK lockdown 2.0, the kind that isn’t essential.
Essential is a word I hadn’t much considered pre-pandemic. I’d used it, as a joke, about expensive mozzarella or a pub-poured pint of Guinness, and I’d said it in work meetings and maybe once or twice to justify working from 9am until midnight, but I hadn’t really given it much thought. Had you? Ever considered what is essential? What thoughts, and feelings, and events and foods and places and routes and people are essential to you? I was ambling around, grateful for my favourite people and things and enjoying all the good bits and doing all the essential bits, like food shopping (actually food shopping is the fucking best and it’s a treat that it counts as essential, but still) and drinking water and setting an alarm and paying rent and washing my hair, and so on and so on and so on. But the pandemic - another word we’d used only in the context of zombie movies pre-2020 - has changed the stature of the word essential. Essential workers: now the pride of the nation, and as anyone who has ever worked a minimum wage job would know were always the most key components of society. Essential items: shampoo? Conditioner? Conditioning masks?? Hairspray???? Basket judging, a sport usually played for fun, became sinister this year; people assessing how many of your purchases are essential, shielding your basket as you beep your non-essentials through the till at the end of the big shop - or worse than that, the pressure of thinking that people are assessing how many of your purchases are essential, even when you’re just caught up in your own pandemic-addled head. Essential guidelines: known elsewhere as rules, the breaking of which in 2020 doesn’t lead to an hour’s detention but to possibly infecting someone vulnerable with a malicious virus. Essential has become a COVID-infused word, one that’s spat out in anger, or muttered from behind a mask, or read aloud from a pre-written speech by feckless morons at Downing Street. It’s a word of monotonous necessity. Essential doesn’t have the glamour of crucial, the drama of vital, the authority of requisite, the desperation of indispensable. Essential isn’t a movie-lead word - it’s a best-supporting-actor role at most. Certainly this year it is anyway. Essential goes on, under it all, the current beneath the streets dragging the days along, making sure everything runs as it should, the cogs turning the machinery.
But here’s the thing: I think the idea of what’s essential is transforming the longer this horror show goes on. Essential is becoming the the things that keep us sane, the glimmers of light in the dark, the winter sun through the gap in the curtains in the morning. The daydreams of a life without a malignant virus lurking at every turn - hugging a friend you bump into on the street, going into not out of a restaurant at 10pm, celebrating a birthday with fifteen people, dancing, a lock-in at an underground bar, being unable to move for tourists eating halloumi fries (fucking halloumi fries) as you cut through Camden market, secretly grateful for the warmth of the masses and the food trucks. Putting a fancy dress on and false eyelashes and holding hands with someone in the cold night and getting the bus and nearly falling down the stairs as it jerks stopped and going to the fucking ballet. What I’m saying is: I feel now, after the year that is 2020, that it is the ballet that’s essential. Because the ballet isn’t just the ballet, is it? It’s unattainable, it’s magical, it’s otherworldly even before the ballerinas are on stage, even in just arriving at the venue, it’s a slice of a different place, a different stratosphere. The ballet, really, is hopeful. And actually more than anything else, it is hope that’s essential to us now. Hope is the current moving under the streets, pulling us through the days, pulling us through lockdowns and government failures and through pain and through death. Hope is vital, and crucial, and requisite and really, totally and completely indispensable. It’s essential, in the most basic of terms. The absolute minimum, the bare necessity, the one-luxury-item-you’d-take-to-a-desert-island. The ballet is hope, and I miss it.