Deirdre has gone in to frenzied cleaning mode, dusting ornaments as if they have personally offended her, sweeping the floor with a violent hatred, going round the house like a crazed Dyson. I’ve heard that some women in the last weeks before giving birth go into the same mode. Dust and sunlight, of course, don’t mix and the motes, now aroused, float lazily in the low slanting sunbeams of the afternoon. Hopefully this eruption of domesticity along with the dust will soon settle down. There’s even been a threat to clean a silver bowl that certainly hasn’t been shone up since midway through the last century. This is a time for discovering the things we brought from our parents’ houses, then transferred them in obscure boxes into our new home 18 years ago. Boxes were set upon boxes, priority boxes were hauled to the front of the pile, non-priority boxes were pushed into the spider webbed shadows and are now emerging like Tutankhamen’s treasure into this alien epoch. Items are found that we swear we’ve never seen before, others hook echoes of evanescent memory. I suspect they’ll go back into boxes and back into the shadows.
There is now talk in the media of how the lockdown will be lifted, presumably in phases with we oldies the last to be dragged out into the open. We spoke the other night on Skype with some friends in New York State. They demonstrated their masks and explained how they were allowed to the store with masks or scarves. This is the country of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As I write ministers and their advisers are debating whether masks should be worn here, but with the extra rider that availability shouldn’t detract from the NHS. This will ignite that wonderful spirit of British amateurism and DIY which won us an empire and brought us victorious through two world wars. I was assessing the viability of a couple of work masks I had bought to use when doing electric sanding, if I ever got round to electric sanding. They could surely be washed. A friend of ours is a paediatrician and they have one mask to go round the whole team, which has to be washed and disinfected as the next paediatrician comes on shift. In a state of half-sleep, just before waking, known as the hypnapompic phase, I thought – ‘bras’. I won’t divulge whose. But could two masks be made from one of these. I don’t mean the little black lacy ones, but the well-cupped variety designed to do a job. What about Darth Veda masks? Don’t dismiss my hypnapompic musings, this is an accepted condition for creative thinking. In my case, of course the creative thinking degenerated into, “Is there a poem in this?” And I suspect there is.
I had to drive, highly sanitized, to Wirksworth this morning to collect my lawn mower after a service. There was a sadness driving through that lovely little town seeing Le Mistral and Mercia all closed up. I reflected on other favourite haunts including The Loaf, Fuel, Nourish 44 and the Book Cafe in Belper, and seriously began to speculate would we ever feel able to drop into any of these places spontaneously for lunch or to meet up with friends. Will we ever enjoy that sort of abandonment and carefree treating of ourselves again?. One thing that weighs heavily on me is the lack of opportunity for spontaneity in anything from a pub lunch to a hug to nipping down to Scarthins to dropping into a garden centre and coming away with an unplanned shrub.
So meanwhile let us make do with chatting to a passer-by over the wall or a staged conversation in the driveway with four of us set out like the bases in a rounders game, even if we are yearning to move in closer and turn our rounders game into a locked arm swinging basket in a barn dance. So let us finish with a quotation from Shakespeare, as it’s his birthday, “He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.” (Merry Wives of Windsor). May these be so for all of us – thank you William.