I could spend half this blog reasoning about the apostrophe in the title of this day, but I’m short of time today, having vouchsafed my children a certain amount of attention so that they could pay due homage. The day started with Zoom Sunday Service with the usual amount of confession about not being able to get various functions to work and prayer that everything would work alright. Even then Di was left in the waiting room, giving the lie to the promise of “Knock and it shall be opened.”
Picnic on Abaigh’s decking proved again how easily you can slide from 2 metres to one or less if you’re not concentrating. You tend to overlook such niceties when the food has all been carefully and safely laid out and then it rains furiously whilst a cluster of panic-stricken picnickers are trying to rescue everything. We were allowed to sit just inside the patio door and then the wind blew the parasols over. Then the sun came out and beat down fiercely so out went picnic, picnickers and all. Certain entertainments required meticulous and inventive sanitary interventions. Boules required extreme attention to ensure you only touch your own boules. The jack must be wiped or hands cleansed. We did permit balls to touch on the ground, because that is the point of the game. I have a magnet on a string so can lift my boules without having to bend, but did not offer my magnet to anyone else in case it was contaminated. Throwing the ball for the dog necessitated the dog being trained to not take the ball back to different throwers. There was some controversy as to whether a soggy tennis ball being liberally irrigated with dog saliva might be virus-free. We are awaiting a report from the World Health Organisation on that.
Deirdre made me a Fathers' Day card with an old photo of the girls and me on the Giant’s Causeway. Giant’s with the singular apostrophe form though there are in fact two giants in the story. There was an analysis of clothes and hair to ascertain which year it might have been. My hair was dark and plentiful so I knew it was a long time ago and I barely recognised myself. Such old family photos always elicit a little gulp of all those feelings you can never quite define, but it is that mixed stew of emotions parents are prone to: nostalgia, guilt, regret, disbelief, self-doubt, bewilderment. I could have done it so much better. Where has the time gone? Life seemed so simple then. If only we had known! Are we any better at being grandparents than we were as parents?
One big difference, of course, is energy. I can’t imagine how we had the stamina and resilience and where has it all gone. Today, when we look at comparable families, they seem to have the stamina and resilience as well, in more complex and convoluted circumstances. It seems nature equips most people with the resources and then, when they’re no longer needed whips them away.
This has got me wondering whether we have aged significantly during lockdown – going into it in the first half of our 70s and coming out of it twenty years older a. The categorisation of ‘At risk and Vulnerable’ at first meant it was a bit like having a birthday – a few hours sitting back and being waited on. But it soon became a label that was de-skilling and having been isolated, going back into the world with its changed procedures, we quickly realise how our confidence has been sapped. Having to get an attendant out of her kiosk because the garage had changed its fuel pumps and payment methods, added years to me. The prospect of going into a supermarket appears tantamount to using a car-wash for the first time, or how much to tip a porter in a foreign hotel or sitting in the staffroom of an American School with no one telling me what to do next. The answer, incidentally is pledge allegiance to the flag.
I believe I grunt more when I get up out of a chair. I find I have to swing my legs round to climb out of the car in much the same way as the Queen Mother did. My first steps after climbing out of bed are more of a hobble with a couple of lurches and a groan. Most frightening of all is having developed a penchant for the quiet unruffled life and lost the adventurous spirit that carried us to Peru last year and transported me to the top of a very wobbly tree to hang the Christmas lights.
Tomorrow will be the last of my daily blogs, after that if I have anything to say that will simply blast you away with excitement and fascination, I will do so, but not every day. I have scraped every last particle of sediment of material from the bottom of the barrel of our lockdown lives, and added one or two that weren’t there. Twelve weeks is up, but I’m not sure what has changed, whether we have surmounted any great hurdles or transitioned into any new era. Monday will simply fuse into Tuesday, but Deirdre and I are standing hesitantly on the shoreline of the world considering paddling in. We hope the world will be patient, welcoming, have a place for us, not expecting too much and safe.