Five years ago today, New Zealanders woke up in lockdown – or, officially, alert level four – for the very first time. To mark the occasion, we’ve dredged up a selection of weird and wonderful recollections from that unprecedented era.

The MSD ‘assistance’

I was in lockdown at my parents’ place and was newly unemployed, living with my early retiree parents and equally unemployed brother. In short, we were the least stressed people in our suburb. Because we lived on a small cul de sac in a low-income neighbourhood with young families and elderly alike, I distributed some flyers in our street, offering shopping services or any other help. I got a few texts thanking me for the offer but no one took me up on it.

Instead, a neighbour with lots of kids texted to say they had just received a week’s work of family dinners from the Ministry of Social Development (they were automatically delivered to people receiving certain benefits) but didn’t have freezer space and would need to chuck them out, so would we like them? The meals were yum but it really drove home the sentiment at the time that actually a bit more cash for those with the least would have been a lot more helpful than 20 frozen dinners at once. / Madeleine Chapman

Pretty stink time to be in your early 20s

Spending a third of your Covid subsidy on bottom-shelf wine that you would either drink alone while listening to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters or drink alone while convincing your friends over Zoom call that Everything Will Be OK. And then, after a while, showing up to neither your friends’ Zoom calls or your online uni lectures because you’re depressed as hell because your third government-approved mental health walk of the day doesn’t hit the same any more so you’ve resorted to scrolling TikTok for hours instead. And then spending the next five years of your life feeling sorry for yourself for losing your “most formative years” to a pandemic. Fetch the Bolt Cutters remains fantastic, and I still haven’t finished my degree. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith

‘My son could say armageddon before he was two’

I had a young baby and spending the time cooped up together, going on our daily walks and waving to our neighbours, many for the first time, felt like a gift TBH. My son could say the word armageddon before he was two. Bob Dylan released Rough and Rowdy Ways and I took that as a sign I had to analyse all the lyrics while gently churning through the “good wine” saved for the apocalypse. The absence of cars on the roads felt like we’d been catapulted into an Eden of the future – been troubled by vehicles and their speeds down our family-riddled street ever since. / Claire Mabey

Wearing rubber gloves to pat a puppy

I was living in a flat that had a tiny self-contained sleepout in the back garden. The couple living there had just got the cutest little fluff, a black puppy that was so adorable its incessant barking was easily forgiven. We had a meeting among the weeds in the backyard. It was the perfect day, the wind was still and the sunshine warm. The sleepout dwellers decided that they’d maintain a miniature bubble, just the three of them, instead of joining us four potential germ vectors.

The problem was that there was no fence between us, and the little pup had grown accustomed to our attention and affection. Negotiations on physical contact with the needy fluff were tense. It was decided we were only allowed to pat him if we wore dishwashing gloves. / Gabi Lardies

A moment of enforced neighbourly cheer

I lived alone in an apartment building but luckily I had a new dog to keep me company. Also, I was working pretty much constantly for this here website, so that helped pass the hours (as did drinking alone and listening to Fetch the Bolt Cutters – shoutout to Lyric, my lockdown kindred spirit years before we’d even met).

There are a few traumatic memories, however (like the time I locked myself out of the apartment and Stanley the dog was stuck inside), but one that until recently had been buried deep is this: inspired by overseas lockdown Insta content, a prominent radio personality who lived in my building decided to enforce some neighbourly camaraderie by getting us to all come out onto our balconies and sing Queen’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ in unison, while she filmed us.

I’d hoped the resulting content had featured only on her stories and thus was long gone, but scrolling back, I have regretfully discovered it’s still there, immortalised for all eternity as a post. Watching it now, it’s actually kind of sweet, with toddlers and old people alike having a dance on their balconies,  but there’s also me, standing there gormlessly, dog in my arms, not exactly getting into it. I could swear I was singing, quietly, but c’mon, that’s not an easy tune to belt out, and really I just wanted to go back inside to repeatedly refresh the locations of interest* while Stanley chewed through another Macbook charger. / Alice Neville

*Update, 9.30am, March 25: Alice has now realised that the locations of interest website launched in the second lockdown in August 2020, so this memory is not 100% factually accurate, but the sentiment stands.

When Auckland suddenly cared about the Blues

New Zealand moved to level one Covid restrictions on June 8, and a nation had never felt smugger. The following weekend Aucklanders celebrated their ability to gather en masse again by doing something truly out of character: attending a Super Rugby match. While the rest of the world watched their favourite teams play in eerily empty stadiums with fake crowd noise pumped in and cardboard cutout fans watching on, Eden Park was filled with 36,000 (or 43,000 according the TV commentary) unmasked punters waving flags like we’d just won the war – a utopian vision not just of a world without Covid, but a New Zealand where afternoon rugby was allowed to exist. / Calum Henderson

Hours-long Zoom parties

It is so so funny to think about it now but there really was a time when it was completely normal to open your laptop, start a video call with a group of friends, and then just drink or do literally nothing in front of your screen for hours. No one was doing anything and yet there was so much to talk about.

My favourite hectic Zoom party was a leaving party for one beloved Spinoff staffer. Everyone got dressed up, there were formalities and speeches, and the “afters”. The “afters” lasted like five hours, with people occasionally leaving the call to have dinner or put their kids to bed and then returning an hour later with a fresh drink. It somehow wasn’t even that awkward? But it never happened again. Even the later lockdowns couldn’t replicate the sheer determination to spend virtual time together. / Madeleine Chapman

Exploiting my dog for fame, zero fortune and desperate laughs

A mate of mine was working at Metro and put the call out for some cute animal stories almost immediately after the first lockdown was announced. In hindsight, these were the halcyon days of lockdown life. We still had some wits about us to know people might like a bit of light comfort, news hadn’t gotten grindingly grim and we were also panicking about dying/losing our jobs. Gratuitous dog content? Why the fuck not!

We filled in a little questionnaire, and Albie, the naughty puppy, had his two minutes of minor fame being flogged online as a comfort during weird times. “We have to walk him,” I said back when walks were still a fun adventure, “so that helps a lot because otherwise I’d be living my worst life under the duvet. He’s very funny and unlike other dogs, is not demonstrably in love with us being home all day.” As it turns out, his attitude towards us being home all day wasn’t a reaction to unusual times but his personality. Metro was shut down eight days later when Bauer announced the closure of its New Zealand operation on April 2. I believe this to be unrelated to Albie or my mate’s editorial decision to do animal features.

Near the end of that first lockdown, on May 13, we slipped a question to Claire Trevett at the NZ Herald requesting clarification about whether dogs could play together and touch and whether we could pat other dogs. I do not remember why this needed clarification, but Trevett was a true hero for asking this ridiculous question, and Bloomfield was a good sport for answering it. / Anna Rawhiti-Connell

Most people would look at our house and decide painting it was a job for professionals. My mum and dad decided it was a job for their kids.

I grew up in a house that was always being renovated. That’s not hyperbole, it was literally always being renovated. Just one big DIY project that lasted 30 years. Bought in the 70s as a three bedroom, single storey house, by the time I was born in the mid 90s – the ninth of 10 children – the house was two storeys, eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, one garage and a deck that couldn’t be walked on in case you fell through it to your death. 

The flooring was a mix of old carpet, bare floorboards (not to be walked on barefoot because of nails), and a big slab of concrete for the entire newly built downstairs that was – huge luxury – heated. Various walls would be without drywall or insulation for years at a time, resulting in the framing being used as makeshift shelving. I heard stories of my mum spending all day on the jackhammer while pregnant with me (or maybe it was my older brother), wanting to have the basement dug out before I was born. Another brother used to insist that he would’ve been taller if he hadn’t spent his adolescent summers wheeling barrows full of dirt and concrete for hours at a time. 

There was always a job to do, like using pliers to pull out thousands of vinyl staples in the kitchen, or chiselling concrete off a pile of free bricks to build a garden wall. Then once every 10-15 years, a full summer holidays would be dedicated to painting the entire exterior of the house. 

If any normal person looked at the size of our house and was told it needed to be painted, they would say that it was a job best left to professionals. My mum and dad looked at the size of our house and decided it was a job for their kids.

First the scaffolding went up – terrifying metal frames that stretched up five metres high in order to reach the guttering. Once the scaffolding was up on one wall, it would soon be filled with Chapmans of every age. Up to 10 people spread across the wall, performing the same task on their patch of boards. 

If there was ever a strategy discussed, it was never discussed with me, but natural patterns always emerged. The fittest and fastest were on the top level because painting above your head (under the roof) gets very sore very quick. The slower, younger lot handled the middle section which was usually the largest, and the little kids (including myself) were on the ground covering only about five weatherboards but also acting as runners any time someone dropped their brush from five metres up or needed a paint refill from the garage. Those who really couldn’t paint well were in charge of preparing morning tea and lunch for everyone.

Most of us would be on one end with the big brushes, painting any weatherboards within reach. On the other end, my eldest brother and mum were on windows as the cleanest edge cutters. Every day, during the 2001 paint, then the 2010 paint and any internal painting in between, my dad complained that the window painters were too slow. He could do it twice as fast, he reckoned.

In 2008 we window cutters finally let him prove it. He was right. He finished the downstairs bathroom trim in half the time and for seven years I had to look at wobbly purple lines around the window every time I took a shower.

The big painting summer of my childhood felt like a lifetime to me but in reality it was three weeks, surely a record for a house of that size. With so many of us, the whole side of the two-storey house could get two full coats in a single day (which it did because the scaffolding had a daily hire fee).

There was a promotion running on paint that summer – for every 10 litre bucket of paint purchased, you got a free lawn chair. By the end of the three weeks, lawn chairs were being given away as Christmas presents. It took more than 100 litres of paint to finish two coats but no labour costs. My parents never even bothered to get a quote from a professional. 

Fourteen years later, fresh from graduating university and a dozen declined applications for casual retail work, I really needed a job. When my frugal aunty complained about the quotes she’d just gotten to have her house painted, I said I could do it for half the price. Did I know how much paint cost or how long it would take to paint a house alone? Of course not, but the thought of getting a lump sum of money and one big task to complete with it was instantly appealing. 

I estimated how much paint I would need, what equipment I’d need to buy and how long it would take. I grossly underestimated every category. I bought a pair of painter’s overalls for genuine reasons instead of as a student party costume. Thanks to our family’s history with painting, I had a bunch of equipment and tips and tricks up my sleeve. I made my little plans each night for the next day, and took my little trips to the paint shop for replacement brushes and top ups, and had my little lunch breaks and Friday treats. It was the most accomplished I’d ever felt, but it came with some lessons.

Because I was blasé, I painted one east-facing wall in the middle of the day, leading to a massive bubble on the side of the house that I blamed on the paint. When I repainted it in the sun again with a different paint, it happened once more. By the time I digested that you shouldn’t have wet paint in the middle of the day in summer, I’d sanded and painted that one board four times. 

At one point I decided to hire my little sister as a contractor. Despite being three years apart in age, she is Gen Z and I’m not. She insisted on taking her full lunch break and refused to work overtime, eventually decided she couldn’t be bothered with the sun and quit. Such boundaries have served her very well in her career. 

As a business venture it was a disaster. Even with my mum kindly working for zero dollars an hour for half the project, I ended up making something close to $10 an hour. And yet it was the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had. Without a deadline and working alone a lot of the time, painting was peaceful and satisfying. Each wall or window I finished was immediately noticeable and at the end of the day, I cleaned up my tools, drove home and felt proudly exhausted. On my last day on the job, I stood in the driveway and couldn’t believe that I had just painted a whole house. Besides the bubble saga, my aunty was a happy customer. 

That was my last paying job before I went travelling, returned home and became a journalist. It was also the last time I painted a house. Since then I’ve lived in four rentals and every one of them could’ve done with fresh paint. But my heart’s not in it enough to paint someone else’s house for free. Instead, whenever my partner and I briefly entertain the idea of buying a house together, the first thing I look at is the paint. I always hope it hasn’t been done recently. That way I’ll have an excuse to hire myself again for my favourite job.