Humour, resignation, determination, laziness, frustration, anxiety, restlessness, courage and today, let’s have it for anger. I feel angry that our grandchildren belong to the first generation in 60 years to have their education interrupted by events beyond anyone’s control. However the wartime generation could at least play with their friends. They may have been huddled with them in air-raid shelters or roamed across the bombsites with them, but at least they could touch them, but our grandchildren can’t be in the same room with them, wrestle with them or pass objects between them. I know this lockdown is loosening but the circumstances are nervous and constrained, without that abandon that children should be able to enjoy. William Blake’s poem ‘The Schoolboy’ laments the child who should be running free “when the birds sing on every tree” being imprisoned within the school room:
“But to go to school in a summer’s morn,
O! It drives all joy away;”.
Now the opposite is true, the children want to be walking to school with their mates, in the classroom with them, break-time, lunch, walking home, meeting after school. I feel angry that Covid-19 has stolen this from them and that relaxed time with other kids is a long way off beyond restrictions, 2 metre tapes on floors and staggered times. We’ve just spent a happy hour with Mollie on Zoom playing charades, discussing what colour a zebra would be if you removed its stripes and Googling the lives of famous inhabitants of Wirksworth. We introduced her to Ellen MacArthur and watched film of her on her yacht and Mollie told us about Sir Frederick Treve’s relationship with the Elephant Man. Net gain? I think we learned more than she did.
I’m also angry with the weather, which I feel is permitted righteous anger. Careful to follow guidelines we have been planning our first social engagement, with a walk and meal in a friend’s garden – proper social distancing, care with cutlery and plates and proper sanitizing. Now the forecast looks as if it could scupper the occasion. The prospect of this leaves me shaking my fist out the window at the low grey clouds and the lovely Louise Lear who has just delivered the forecast for the next few days. Talking about the weather is of course what we British are famous for. I remember days in North Queensland in Australia where the weather didn’t do anything except blister your skin which meant there was nothing much to say unless you wanted to talk about cricket.
But Covid-19 has robbed us of another topic of talk – road routes and mileage per gallon, because we’re not going anywhere. Bill Bryson comments somewhere about how social intercourse in the UK is always commenced by discussion about which route each person took to get there. Again, in Australia or America this is not a viable source of conversation as there are so few roads. I remember years ago watching an American production of an Alan Aykbourn play in which a character explains that he has arrived by the A3. The cast assumed this was a train and had the good sense to consult me at the rehearsal stage. They were mesmerised by the possibility that a considerable part of an English dialogue would be about a road.
In a recent venture in the car we reflected on the good old days when there were roadworks everywhere, which always provided a lively topic of conversation. In fact I have a reputation extending almost to our front door for my ‘Ballad of the A610.’ Like ‘The Times they are a Changing’ or Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ this has proved a timeless anthem marking universal human experience with its seminal chorus lines, “They’re digging up Codnor again again, They’re digging up Codnor again.” It’s almost with a sense of nostalgia for the old days of traffic lights, men with reversible Stop/Go signs and rows of bollards, that I’m wondering if, in the wide world beyond Crich, they are digging up roads again? We had a hint yesterday when we found our route to Wirksworth closed and then discovered that the only other
viable route was due to be closed as well. It was very re-assuring to know that the old normality of idiotic planning had been restored, reminiscent of the time earlier when 3 out of the 5 roads into Crich were closed and it seemed you couldn’t get into our next village, Holloway, at all. How I yearn to drive away with the wind in our hair, like Mr Toad of Toad Hall spinning along the open road and encounter signs like the one that said, ‘This Road will be Closed Tomorrow’ and which stood there for the next month.
Now we’re facing if, how, when we can re-open the church building. What cleaning regimes will need to be implemented and what risk assessment will have to be undertaken. I am angry that the simple and beautiful action of tip-toeing into a quiet, wonderful, sacred space, tasting the silence, sharing in the lives of all who have worshipped there in the last 900 years and just sitting and being, has been blighted by this Covid curse. Prayer and meditation in a place of peace now has to be carefully planned, a burden and a risk.
Coming back to the weather: too damp to go out, not wet enough to stay in, colder indoors than outside, not cold enough for the heating, miserable outside, miserable inside, nowhere to go, no one to see, don’t want to read, don’t want to watch TV, don’t want to draw, do gardening, play music, paint the radiator. I know what I’ll do – I’ll paint the radiator, except now its pouring so I can’t get to the garage to find a brush. Yes I will. No I won’t.