Once in 2020 there was that balmy golden age of early lockdown when we were all going to maintain laudable regimes of fitness, personal development and novel hobbies. A vista of a summer of home Pilates and vigorous walks opened up. Amazon was kept busy delivering keep-fit apparatus and all sorts of self-improvement gear. We were going to emerge into a sunny August muscled, broadly educated, stimulated and stimulating, sensitively attuned to the world around us and mentally, emotionally and psychologically perfectly balanced.
Lately many of us are questioning our own mental states or those of the people who annoy us. So Shrove Tuesday was very pertinent, enabling us to feel shriven. Shrive – Shrove – Shriven; Drive – Drove – Driven. Why not Dive – Dove – Diven; Jive- Jove – Jiven.? Such an interesting Shrove Tuesday English lesson I used to teach while they were tossing pancakes in Domestic Science. This year the precarious nature of my mental state was demonstrated when I looked at the pancake on my plate and recalled that my mother always garnished them with lemon juice and brown sugar, so I grabbed the brown sugar from the cupboard, spread it liberally and recoiled as it added nothing to the sweetness. I suppose it says something about our changing diet over the generations when Bulgur Wheat occupies the front of the cupboard rather than brown sugar.
Of all that equipment the one I still use is the spiky ball. Each morning I stand at the bedroom window massaging my feet by rolling it from heel to toe and back again. It’s meant to enliven the soles of the feet, sparking me into life and enlivening my senses. Unfortunately the spiky ball has a disturbing similarity to the popular image of the Coronavirus we keep seeing every day on the news, with its glorious orange colours and catchy little spikes. Our spiky ball’s power to disturb found international status in 2019 when we took one to Peru with us, assuming our feet would need some enlivening after trudging
around the high Andes plateau and Inca ruins. It must have rolled under our hotel bed in Cusco and been found by the chamber-maid, because when we returned to the hotel a few days later on the homeward journey, it was handed to us at Reception, discreetly in a bag, by a uniformed gentleman with an enigmatic expression. He was too well trained to manifest in anyway his thoughts about how visiting Gringos spent their time in hotel rooms. I tried to explain its purpose and received a conspiratorial wink.
It’s difficult to envisage the prospect of travel now our mind sets and sense of adventure are so calcified into the constraints in which we’ve been now since second lockdown. These six months are by far the longest we’ve ever been at home. Deirdre’s diary for 2014 has our Welsh family staying with us, we went straight to Poole, returned and went to Gozo for two weeks, came back and a day later went to our caravan for two days, back home and two days later off to Poole again, then returned and a week to Ireland for two weeks. I remember loving every trip but beginning to feel desperate to have a bit of unbroken time at home, sleeping in my own bed, cutting my grass, watering the bedding plants. Such times are now unimaginable.
Like everyone we speak to we are clawing at the walls, desperate to get out onto the open road or into the sweaty beery snug of a pub. A clear blue sky is like a tarpaulin thrown over us to keep us in; the wonderful woods mark the limits of our world, at Black Rocks boulders and black and yellow tape remind us of what we can’t do. All the time we are reminded that if we are desperate we’re desperate in a nice location and there are other people more desperate in dire straits. Nevertheless we’re trying to book holidays for later in the year, hoping against hope, having faith in the science, everything provisional upon the data. We are choosing to believe the door is ajar.
In the de-cluttering of old files and paperwork a large envelope emerged of all the correspondence with insurance companies and lawyers following my 1993 car accident. I had no recollection of so many letters which presumably enabled a solicitor to retire early. It seems I had whiplash, possibly broken ribs and post traumatic stress syndrome. I know the guy in the car that hit an oil spill, careered across the road and hit me head on suffered worse. But I was not prepared to discover the psychiatrist’s report! My solicitor insisted on one of these and would not close the case until any chances of relapse were over. It was weird reading a psychiatrist report about myself 28 years later. One observation was increased irritability – maybe he should have kept the case open until now. Thankfully he remarked that my sex life was unaffected but the PTSS was real enough and I still tense up on country lane corners in wet weather and shudder along the A6 late at night when it’s raining.
These old diaries, letters, psychiatrist’s reports that turn up as we use the time to strip down our pasts to the bare essentials, give us a not always welcome insight and reminder of what we once were. We can also be thankful about what we survived and what we went onto become.
I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Ed Bicknell whom I knew at University. It inevitably evoked some memories. He went onto manage Dire Straits. We’ve been learning to do just that since last March.