Innumerable film makers, poets, novelists and memoire writers from
Johnny Cash to Oscar Wilde have presented images of incarceration and included a description of the regulated time in the exercise yard with no talking and prisoners strictly socially distanced. It's often when our hero plots his escape with his mates or, in Oscar Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' when the convicts get to see that "Little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky." I must admit that when Michael Gove outlined the constraints of the exercise periods we are allowed I immediately thought of this engraving of Newgate Prison by Gustav Dore and of us walking round and round in circles two metres apart. For many people that's probably how it feels. But for us in Crich it's very different. We hear of people flocking together in some distant beauty spot when we walk straight into one everytime we leave the door. Jane Garvey in 'Woman's Hour' this morning said the scene around Broadcasting House was "post-apocalyptical", David Hockney said recently, "They can't cancel Spring." Both statements are true.
Our periods of exercise are a blessing not just to our (or my) crinkled old body but also to our dangerously inward focusing minds. When we moved to Crich we thought we would always be going out walking - but we didn't. Allowed, as we are, one excursion in the interest of fitness, we feel obliged to take it. So now we're house-bound we get out walking everyday, and so does everyone else - and we greet each other from our safe distances. Nor is it just with 'The Crich Nod' of the past which some of you may have encountered either in the street or in 'Nothing Rhymes with Crich' , but with opulent praise for the day, the place, the weather. So as imprisonment has lead to exercise so isolation has lead to community. I can now manage the Tors Steps with only one stop "to admire the view". Instead of dashing through it in a car, I'm seeing nature more intently and it's not just the springing of hedgerows and vibrancy of birdsong, it's the springing of family brought on by this freakish crisis. There was a Dad pushing a buggy up The Common with at least four other children, and they were all laughing. There was a Mum playing badminton in the garden with her little boy; another Dad kicking a football with his son on the lawn. And this when everyone should be at work or school. There are whole households out with the dog, with sullen and bleary eyed teenagers suddenly alive and relishing the moment, and actually enjoying their parents!!
I know this confinement of families is also leading to domestic violence and abuse and that is terribly upsetting. I sometimes feel bad writing this blog in this manner, because I know we are extraordinarily blessed here at the moment and we can sound smug when elsewhere life is grim, so grim that even Boris is now sadly in intensive care, which hits home to us how serious things are. But I have just recorded what I have seen this afternoon and need to hold on to that while facing up to the other.
THE CRICH NOD
Was that the bloke who never spoke?
And did he meet my eye?
Was it a sudden itch or a nervous twitch
Or a too tightly knotted tie?
Was that a scowl or irritable bowel
Or some sinister intent?
Or an electric shock or some grit in his sock
Or the barest acknowledgement?
A mere chance meeting and a furtive greeting,
Just a gesture of recognition,
A blink of the eye like a Russian spy,
Joint conspirator on some mission?
A familiar face in some foreign place,
A bull-fight or Eisteddfod,
A slight drop of the chin and you’ll know you’re in,
You’ve been granted a quick Crich nod.
And when I go to meet a rather blunt St. Peter
At the judgement seat of God,
There’s that familiar quirk, he gives his halo a jerk
And I’m in with a curt Crich nod.