During times of plague the Monarch used to leave London and go on procession around the country. Henry VIII’s favourite escape was Hampton Court but Elizabeth I like Hatfield Palace and Greenwich. Elizabeth, however, being somewhat parsimonious realised that her living costs could be kept down if she and her entire court, including servants and horses, landed on some loyal courtier for a spell of feasting and toadying. Loyal courtiers, of course, were duly honoured and might be recompensed with a knighthood, court office or an earldom. However, this didn’t go very far in defraying the costs involved in entertaining Her Majesty and a few hundred retainers for several weeks, so some hosts went bankrupt. But hosts were very anxious to gain the prestige of entertaining the Royal Guest and spent fortunes equipping their homes in readiness, building new wings, state rooms, ornamental gardens, staging masques and probably supplying a set of new towels. Bess of Hardwick prepared lavish accommodation but Elizabeth never visited, so it all went to the National Trust instead.
In imitation of this regal tradition, today Deirdre and I decided to go a-process around carefully selected hosts in Nottingham. Now it is legitimate accelerating away from the house, posed a delicious promise of variety, amusement and freedom as it does in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road’ which opens with:
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,.
I don’t necessarily think he had the A610 past Ripley towards Codnor in mind, but he hadn’t been locked down for 12 weeks. Whitman goes on:
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently,but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
Walt Whitman, you are so right! As well as breaking the routine, getting out now is a chance to hear other people’s stories, such as being at home with two small boys, being ordered to leave your caravan home with only a few hours notice, having to plan for elderly family members from a distance.
Now Margaret is no Bess of Hardwick, she’s been content with just one husband for a start and Eric doesn’t even have a title, but I bet Bess couldn’t make scones like the ones we had in their garden with jam and cream. It was such a savouring of normality and fun sitting under their gazebo with the candles burning. Another little gesture towards normality was the rain, the flaw in Boris’s guidance on permitted visiting in the garden. The rain came down like a deluge of government statistics demonstrating how well they were dealing with the pandemic, except the rain was more real. It gushed down the gutters, roared down the road, swamped the lawns and stampeded across the gazebo roof. Without stopping to measure the distance between us or follow a one-way system, or obey a one person entering at a time rule or to sanitise our hands, we fled indoors. Here we sat at opposite ends of the room, listening to the thunder and conducting wary manoeuvres around each other when we needed to leave the room to go to the loo in line with regulations. In the bathroom we invented dexterously sanitised manipulations of door handles and taps. Boris would have been very proud of us.
Now we can widen the conversations we hear of very differing experiences. But for people like us, over 70 and intent on remaining free from infection there is also a reassuring solidarity of experience. We all agree the tunnel is widening but the light at the end of it still feels imaginary, we all have adventures with internet shopping, we all miss our grandchildren, we are all reluctant to make plans and we are all disappointed in ourselves for not completing, or even starting those magnificently worthy projects. At the beginning of my blogging I referred to, (perhaps I did, perhaps I didn’t, perhaps I meant to) the Guardian article in which we were urged not to feel guilty if we didn’t write a ‘King Lear’ or discover a law of physics or write a great poem as did Shakespeare, Newton and Milton respectively while isolated from the plague. At our age, if we were ever going to do anything like this we would have done it already.
Meanwhile Facebook is populated with wonderful tapestries, joinery, cooking, painting, houses decorated, gardens redesigned – all by people who exploited the opportunity yet still sometimes feel they’re not achieving anything.
However, you also hear it said that if you want something done ask a busy person. I pale when I recall how much I achieved alongside full time work. I wrote books and plays, articles, musicals, acted, sang, brought up children, did a Masters Degree, edited a magazine, was a chief examiner and sat on countless committees (and that was just one weekend – no not really – over about 40 years) and I know readers of this blog who might have done all that in one weekend. For some of us it may be this period of enforced leisure has made us lackadaisical which has generalised to all our experience, sapping our energy and motivation. Or it may be that the lockdown has aged us and deskilled us. Or it may be that on release we will need to get busy and pressured again in order to complete the masterpieces we are failing to do at the moment.
So the choice is before us:
a) Get our act together and feel some pressure now and feel a sense of achievement.
b) Don’t get our act together and don’t feel pressure and learn to enjoy it
c) Don’t bother to read (a) and (b)
d) But we can’t escape this one – at some point we’re going to have to decide what we want to accomplish, if anything, when this is all over.
I think I quoted from this song weeks or months ago, but I wonder if I might aspire to write something comparable to this during lockdown:
don't worry (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
don't worry (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
don't worry, don't worry (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, don't do it, be happy (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) put a smile in your face (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't bring everybody down like this
don't worry (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) it will soon pass, whatever it is (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy (Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) I'm not worried, I'm happy
:
Bess of Hardwick was a very busy woman and managed to build Hardwick Hall
and Chatsworth in her spare time, but still never entertained Queen Elizabeth.
As well as this disappointment she had to accept her limitations – she couldn’t make scones.