“I thought I knew how it would play out,” she says over Zoom. She felt she had good foresight for how to prepare for the first lockdown.
People visited, but her pain levels meant that being touched was difficult. She experienced a protracted recovery after a spinal injury in 2018, requiring long periods of bed rest. Nina Smith is 40, and lives alone in south London. “We’re utterly reliant on the caregiver to satisfy the body’s core needs. “The human body has built all its models based on touch received from caregivers,” says Dr Katerina Fotopoulou, a professor of psychodynamic neuroscience at University College London. Before birth, when the amniotic fluid in the womb swirls around us and the foetal nervous system can distinguish our own body from our mother’s, our entire concept of self is rooted in touch. The need for touch exists below the horizon of consciousness. The ache in my solar plexus that married these thoughts often caught me off guard.
I missed the smell of my friends’ clothes and my nephew’s hair, but, more than anything, I missed the groundedness only another human body can bring. I had been sofa-bound with Covid and its after-effects before lockdown was announced, then spring and summer passed without any meaningful touch from another person. I live alone with my staffy, and by week eight of the first lockdown she was rolling her eyes at my ever-tightening clutch. There’s only so much a dog can do, even if that is a lot.
