Nigella Lawson expresses anxiety about emerging from lockdown, saying she has become ‘utterly content with desocialisation’

Celebrity chef explains that while she enjoys her friends’ company, she ‘doesn’t want much of it yet’ as lockdown continues to ease

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Nigella Lawson has expressed her anxiety over emerging from lockdown as restrictions continue to be lifted, explaining that she feels there is no room for the “psychological clutter of other people”.

On 23 June, the prime minister announced an update on the easing of lockdown measures in England.

As part of the new updates, which will come into force from 4 July, up to two households are allowed to socialise indoors together as long as social distancing guidelines are followed.

While some members of the public will likely take advantage of the new rules to socialise with friends and family in closer proximity, others – including Lawson – may be more wary.

Writing in The Sunday Times, the celebrity chef said that after “weeks of being alone” she believes she is “entirely unfit for society”.

The 60-year-old explained that having gone into lockdown before it was formally established on 23 March, “the idea of emerging from it is making me anxious”.

“Yes, a part of that is a fear of the health risk involved, but I know really it’s because I have become utterly content with my desocialisation. I have gone feral,” Lawson said.

The columnist described how not leaving her home for a long period of time has led to her living in “squalor”.

On the other hand, she has been enjoying not wearing make-up on a regular basis, she said.

Looking forward to a time in the very near future when people will start leaving their homes more to socialise, Lawson wrote that “rather than finding solitary confinement alienating, it’s what has always passed for real life that seems so unnatural to me now”.

“It seems unfathomable, for example, that we used to go out at night,” she wrote. “Why would you do that? How did any of us have the energy? A cluttered kitchen surface is easy to manage, but the psychological clutter of other people, their demands, their noise, their easy claims on your time? How is there room for all of that?”

The food writer continued, explaining that she doesn’t mean to say that she doesn’t enjoy her friends’ company.

“That is not to say I don’t love my friends. Nor do I deny that company can be as uplifting as it can be exhausting,” Lawson said. “I just don’t want much of it, not yet.

“And so – in words I never thought I’d utter – I’m going on a diet: the 5/2, only with people, rather than food.”

She explained that she intends to spend either two evenings a week or two lunches at the weekend socialising with other people, where she will “pretend to be a normal person, letting those strange entities, people, into the garden, and apply myself to learning how to have conversation again”.

“For the other five, I will continue, greedily and gratefully, to feed on solitude and silence,” Lawson concluded.