Our Popalong toddlers love singing ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’. Some over-exuberant parents narrowly avoid cracking the tiny toddler skulls on the ceiling but that’s all part of learning good parenting skills. “They were neither up nor down” could be a description of current moods for those of us sealed up in our safe cocoons. Just concentrating on life as we are living it here is neither up nor down: nothing to get too angry about or too happy, or too sad or too anxious. "Take each day as it come," we are advised. In short we’re short on things to get passionate about. It’s different when we listen to the news, but here on our walks or in the garden we experience just a slightly undulating plain of feelings, like the vague serenity of being slightly drunk. Though I do know it’s not like that for everyone.
Maybe it’s the weather but at the start of this isolation I did think we might be getting somewhat frayed by the end of the first month. We had a debate at that time with the grandchildren about at what point would their grandparents start eating each other. There was some consideration of who would devour whom first but we didn’t get on to recipes. Initially I also anticipated that there might be some austerity in the home by now, beyond shortages of flour and garden compost. So how good would we be at the sort of making do my mother cultivated during the War. That frugality became a lifetime habit for many of that generation and in its turn influenced those of us who were children in the late 40s and early 50s, still victims of sweet rationing. We now call it Recycling. If you were of that cohort you may recognise this picture.
Deirdre didn’t, which may account for the dark stare she gave me when I asked her if she had a sock darning mushroom, because one of my woollen walking socks had a hole in it. My Uncle Herb, a legend of both frugality and generosity could make a tea bag last several days and would conjure wonderful meals out of a few leftovers. This did on one occasion lead to a chocolate blancmange produced with a flourish for dessert turning out to be leftover gravy. Rather than have a bathing costume (and he spent his 40 years of retirement sunbathing by the Mediterranean) a pair of sagging underpants with no elastic did the job, at least while there was mixed company, otherwise he was even more economical with his wardrobe. Another pair of underpants would protect his head from the sun and the smarter items in his haute couture were either gathered washed up on the beach or bequeathed by dead people. He would have survived perfectly happily in this current situation with a very regular routine of walks, meals, naps, sunbathing, swimming and early to bed with a Jean Plaidy (borrowed not bought). Never having a need to hurry or multi-task he once pointed out to me the absurdity of my reading while eating – do them separately so you can enjoy both fully. He taught us to cut open a tube of sun cream to scrape out the last globs and if he had had his own teeth, and if such a thing had existed, and if he had ever seen a need - for how many days would he have re-used the same strip of dental floss? How many weeks for an inter-dent brush? These last items may soon present a challenge, because if we run out I can’t see us phoning ourCovid-19 Community Support to switch on the flashing blue lights and fetch us some more.
Sometimes names appear in my mind like ear-worms for no apparent reason; ambient use has embedded them unconsciously into our heads - Rory Cellan-Jones (with the ll pronounced KTH). Why? Seligman (1975) has suddenly emerged into my thoughts – Why? That reference I used quite a bit in footnotes in some postgraduate studies in the late 70s. I like his notion of Learned Helplessness, because that way I can blame everyone who loved me for the fact that I can't do things myself. More recently he has specialised in the Psychology of Flourishing, or Positive Psychology. That is far more pertinent for months of lockdown – allowing us to focus on what we do well and not feeling we have to master the things we can't do. Apparently people who can make those positive choices are the ones who flourish and live longer. Glass half-full people. By nature I’m a glass half-empty person, or even a 'where’s my glass gone person?' But we have options and lockdown might be a field for exercising them. I like it when infant children who have been naughty are taught to see that they made a bad choice of behaviour and so are empowered to make good choices in the future. So I can choose to be positive today, though to be fair it’s easy with the sun shining and the birds singing.
I guess to a certain extent, unless circumstances press hard upon us, we can sing that reggae song while bouncing about at the knees, ‘Don’t worry. Be Happy’. A useful ear-worm for today.