How to survive lockdown as COVID-19 cabin fever hits

The media dances between adjectives. Depending on who is doing the scribbling for the autocue, we live in unusual, unprecedented, extraordinary, unique or challenging times. Sometimes all five at once.

For me, a lockdown is none of the above. When I was writing the Fine Cotton Fiasco last year, I barely left the house for three months.

As someone accustomed to warding off the horrors of cabin fever, let me give those battling with it a few handy tips:

Trousers are optional.

Shaving is a waste of valuable time.

You can eat whenever and whatever you want. And if you drop a little on the front of your shirt, no one cares because no one is watching.

If you leave your seat for any length of time, even a few seconds, cats will steal it.

Personal grooming is redundant.

There has been a bit of confusion over the vexed business of hairdressing and hairdressers. First, they were to close, then they would be available only for thirty minutes per customer and then it was back to a tonsorial artist’s free for all.

My view in these unusual, unprecedented, extraordinary, unique, challenging times is we should leave our uncoiffured bonces to their own devices. Let your manes grow long with a nod to the 1970s when hair was king. Where big hair was admired, and bald men declined the razor in favour of a nifty comb over.

Where one could let one’s hair grow for months before popping into the barber shop.

“Just the Barry Gibb today, mate.” “Give me the Phil Spector, thanks” Or, “I need a complete do over. Do you know what Peter Sutcliffe looks like?”

Afterwards, the cheerful scissor man would dust you off before asking with a knowing wink, “Something for the weekend, Sir?”

We have these things to look forward to when these unusual, unprecedented, extraordinary, unique, challenging times have passed.

Right now, we can save our communities, our nation and the world by simply sitting on our blots, watching television. It’s the kind of heroics I have long been waiting for. We can be a race of supermen and women by measure of the depth of the arse groove we make on our couches.

In these unprecedented, unusual, extraordinary, unique, challenging times our role models are hermits, the weirdly introverted, stick in the muds, even humble scribblers like me.

I live in a world where I am often stuck for long periods in a small home office surrounded by books on floor to ceiling shelves, a laptop, a television and a radio with the grim visage of Sydney gangster, John Frederick ‘Chow’ Hayes, as beautifully captured by my old mate, Bill Leak, looking over my right shoulder.

The work, which should have won the Archibald Prize, was originally entitled, “A Portrait of the Mass Murderer, ‘Chow’ Hayes” but Bill painted over this preferring for the gentler physiological based description. “John Frederick ‘Chow’ Hayes, 79 years, 175 cms. Painted between 15 June and 22 August, 1991.”

Chow Hayes was our first gangster. We know this because the NSW cops deployed the Americanism in a NSW Police gazette in 1928 for the very first time.

There are many stories about Chow that are worth telling but one stands out.

People who know Sydney well will know a newspaper stand has been a feature on Oxford Street, near Taylor Square for more than a century. Not far from it, further up the street a sly grog shop operated on the second floor above one of the shop fronts in the 1920s and ‘30s.

It was in the wee hours and the newsstand proprietor was busily stacking the shelves with the first editions of the morning newspapers. A crook bundled down the stairs from the sly grog shop and made his way down Oxford Street towards the city. A car pulled up, Chow got out from the passenger side, pulled a gun from his overcoat and fired five times, killing the man stone dead.

Chow hurried back to the car which sped off along Oxford Street towards Paddington. The newsstand wallah had seen it all and at close quarters. The ne’er-do-well was bleeding out in front of him just metres away.

God only knows what was going through the eyewitness’s mind – probably a mix of mouth agape shock, mental paralysis and an urgent need to urinate but his ordeal was not over. He spied Chow’s car do a u turn and head slowly back in his direction, pulling up across the road.

Chow got out again and marched towards the paper seller, his hands in his overcoat pockets. As Chow approached, his right hand emerged from his pocket, not with a smoking a .38, but a ten pound note which Chow wedged into the man’s hand.

“That’s for yer bad eyesight,” Chow said, before walking off and climbing back into the car.

I searched high and low for a record of this incident but could not find it. Chow was never charged over the murder. The research was made more difficult by the fact I had not even an approximate date of the murder, not a year, not even a decade. Hours spent scrolling through newspapers on microfiche came to nothing and I gave up. Perhaps it was apocryphal, a piece of Sydney folklore.

But when Chow sat for Bill Leak in Bill’s Surry Hills studio, something approaching confirmation came.

Bill had heard the story and when he thought the time was right, looked around from the canvass and cleared his throat.

“Chow, I heard you killed a bloke in Oxford Street…”.

“What?” Chow’s face turned fierce at what seemed like an attempt by his portrait artist to fit him up with a murder blue.

Bill demurred.

“I heard there was an incident in Oxford Street,” and proceeded to tell the story of the crook and the newsstand wallah.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Chow replied.

Back in my office, Chow is smoking a durry, looking down fiercely, reproachfully. It keeps me on my toes.

In these times not of lock outs but of lockdowns, when self-discipline wants to take a holiday, when you think, I need a haircut or I need a beer and I need fourteen people to come to my house and help me drink beer, ask yourself what would Chow think?

He’s bound not to be happy about it. And when Chow was unhappy a lot of people got – well, there were a lot of incidents.

Stay inside. Stay safe. Stay well.

This column was first published in The Australian on 27 March 2020