February 10th The Only Goth in the Village

At last a jewel of a morning – a sky of sapphire blue and crystals of frost and snow crunching underneath. The puddles were frozen and the mud hard packed and the fields which have been rather swampy allowed you to tread lightly across them. It was that dry clear ice cold that makes you feel winter is purging the world of contagion – even if it’s not! So a walk out with Andrew and discussions about everything from the failures of the early church to the Louisiana Purchase to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was most welcome. To add that final burnish of sparkle, there was some warmth in the sun, my spring seeds have arrived and I’m about to order next winter’s logs for stacking and drying in the glorious summer we will have. The Six Nations is in full swing and we’ve been vaccinated. I’m in danger of sounding merrily optimistic, at least until it clouds over again and back we go to that tug of war between hope and despair, introversion and extraversion, anxiety and confidence.

I have been Zoom schooling Gothic writing this week, delighted that I was able to use Trump supporters as an example of those dark forces that subvert and seek to overthrow our notions of order and civilization, comparable to the Gothic hordes that invaded Rome in 410AD, but less elegantly dressed. Pandemic and planetary catastrophe for generations have been relegated to science fiction but have now emerged into the consciousness and possible. Frankenstein encapsulates our faith in technology and the accompanying dangers and fears. My 12 year old students were privileged to hear me expound upon the Gothic Invasions of Rome, Freud and Jungian ideas of the unconscious of the Id and archetypes, the Goth movement of the 70s and 80s, are there Goths in Wirksworth (apparently there are emos!?) , Whitby Abbey and the importance of meeting English assessments by employing alliteration, onomatopoeia, similes, metaphors and pathetic fallacy, to which I added punctuation as a good idea. This is where the ability to turn off sound is useful for Zoom students because they can’t do that in the classroom. I recalled that skill I developed first period in the afternoon of setting work while I dozed behind an important looking text book.

When we moved into Crich in 2003 it had one Goth. - the only Goth in the village, to mimic a catch-phrase of the time. He used to trail his lonely ragged and shadowyway past our house most days. I saw him the other day wheeling a pram looking very bright and proud.

I tried to explain the genre to Deirdre but we agreed that we’re running out of conversation and it would be a good idea to go walking with some different companions.

An interesting consequence of this long long lockdown has been a reassessment of the wobble we’ve all lived with between home and the non-home. Today I saw that Samuel Johnson said, “to be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”

Whether his wife agreed with him, I don’t know, he was notoriously pompous, opinionated and bad-tempered – but that’s where we are all headed if lockdown continues much longer. Whether we worked in the public or private sector, we were conditioned into the attitude that home was where you went to refresh yourself so you could work harder. This is in opposition to the other attitude that we only work so we can afford a nice home, holidays and retirement, or at least enjoyable weekends. Now, of course, with instant communication and working from home any differentiation between home and work is being eroded anyway. Lockdown therefore is facing us retirees with the challenge that home is all we’ve got and it maybe that some are finding this satisfying, some constraining, some de-skilling, some brutal, some a blessed relief. No doubt many have discovered the compulsion to stay at home an oasis of calm in what has been a busy life, for others it has intensified conflict, poverty and dissatisfaction. For me, and for many others, I’m sure, it’s highlighting what we’ve always wanted from home and what we’ve valued about non-home: which relationships, which involvements, which entertainments, which journeys. Hopefully we’ll be able to make well informed choices as we tentatively dip our feet back into the non-home.

Vaccination has created a rather wonderful group solidarity amongst the over-70s - all checking each others’ appointments, locations, which dose – Pfizer or alternatively the Oxford, which in a Belfast accent is called AsdaVinegar, after-effects, efficacy, success-rates, mutations and variants. I can’t imagine these sorts of topics being discussed in Crich’s streets and shops a year ago. We are a village of septuagenarian epidemiologists: a good selling point for estate agents trying to market all the new houses we are getting. Worried about your cough or whether to book a holiday? Concerned about the spikes and proteins in the Brazilian variant? Someone in the queue will give you expert advice.

Meanwhile the sub and aspiring septuagenarians stand by and listen jealously as they await the meagre crumbs that drop from the Boomers’ table. We’ve run out of vaccine but we did find this teak oil on the centre aisle at Lidle’s, it’s sure to have some efficacy. Or maybe there’s the Gothic one enriched with vampire blood – there’s sure to be some conspiracy theorist zombie who would believe it.