This morning a great grey dismal pall of apathy deflated right over our house like a huge soggy tent, though it appeared to have missed Deirdre whose energy and positive attitude was mildly irritating. Thus I was taken trudging around local fields purely for the exercise, without any pretence of joie de vivre and blackbird song fal de da. It somewhat resembled school cross country runs when our masters retired into a staffroom of tea and tobacco smoke and sent us off on a circuit of the meadows. Fortunately our house was on the route so some friends and I could safely stop off and join the others at a point near the end. This morning’s was inevitably restorative though hardly an expedition of discovery and a few conversations by the way reminded me that we are still part of a vibrant community. There was a rather worrying interlude as we watched a very elderly lady, who quite frankly should not have been out shopping and certainly not driving a car. The scratches and dents told an alarming story.
Some plants I had ordered were delivered with a wicked amount of packing, but heavy rain now prevented me from planting them out so in a rather desultory frame of mind I started reading a magazine article. Do you realise that sales of Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’ have increased 1000 fold since March? The writer posited the notion that we are fascinated by the daily statistics because statistics delude us into thinking we are in control and will eventually signal some hope. It left me thinking that self delusion is actually an important survival mechanism. Two groups of workers were given a very tedious task to accomplish: one group was paid, the other wasn’t. The second group, hearing that the others had been paid, claimed to be gaining a lot of satisfaction from the job – a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. The heightened sense of birdsong, jobs completed, exercise and springtime walks, community solidarity could all be put down to cognitive dissonance. After all we didn’t want this virus to lock us up in this way so maybe we are counterfeiting positive attitudes and cheerful conversations as an avoidance. But there is another way of looking at this, and you can see I’m emerging from my early morning grump. Instead of fabrications of the mind to protect us from the awful realisations of how our society has been hit, we have genuinely discovered alternative mind sets, the birds are singing and hedgerows sprouting. This is not about clichés like clouds having silver linings; it’s about experience being more complex, and I am assured it’s fine to have bad days. Good and bad do co-mingle, beauty and ugliness do sit side by side, our moods and ways of seeing can vary from hour to hour, as the weather forecasters say, “sunshine and showers”. Our intention to enjoy the benefits of the current condition is part of the equation, the glass half full part, “Always look on the Bright Side of Life,” de dum, de dum, de dum. It’s the life flow that will carry us along and take the muddy bits too. In the spirit of this more positive attitude, we’ve actually got a click and collect spot at Sainsbury’s! We’ve been acutely conscious of our neighbours’ insights into our grocery habits, and we haven’t wanted to be seen as consumers of anything but the healthiest of foods. Now we could secretly order some Doritos, Magnums, and even doughnuts without being found out. I’ve checked with Deirdre, she hasn’t ordered doughnuts, but the chippy is re-opening! (If someone will collect them for us - because we're not supposed to!)
A shy and uncertain flicker of sunshine this afternoon lured me out into the garden to confront the shock of weeds. Multitudes of them had obviously been lying in wait to ambush me as soon as the rain came. There they were, triffids, Venus fly-traps, strangler vines, plants with teeth, plants exuding toxins, plants with serrated leaves and I’m certain they were grinning at me as they sucked up nutrients from the soil and prepared to engulf every shrub I’d been nurturing. Well actually they were mostly starter dandelions and chickweed, but they appear to be plotting a takeover.
However, with so many statistics of death and sadness, I’ll welcome all things growing and quote Gerard Manley Hopkins:
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Perhaps I’ll just sit and grow a wilderness.