Deirdre pays as much attention to our calendars as she does to her enigmatic arrangements of Christmas cards, according to some mysterious categorisation system known only to her. So one windowsill might be robins, another glittery, a third landscape configuration, the string down one wall might be nativities and another string might be cards that have snow on them. One year we had a mantlepiece of cards from bishops. Thus the ritualistic transition from one month to the next involves a great ceremonial unveiling of new pictures on the various calendars we have around the house. It used to include an unveiling of holidays, medical appointments, meetings and birthdays, but only the birthdays appeared when we turned into June. This is the third opening of a new month since lockdown started and as we have little else to fascinate us, the coming of June was an occasion of extreme excitement and it was very difficult to resist a quick peep once we got into the late May twenties. As I’ve written elsewhere I measure the slow creep of time by wheelie bins, but Deirdre does it more conventionally by months on the calendar.
Moreover Deirdre believed this monthly rite worthy of a day’s blog. I wanted to write about the exhilaration of my much anticipated blood test – my first assay into the unknown world beyond our walls, the closest I’ve been to a human being and the first time I have been touched, apart from by my wife, for ten weeks. “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”. It was also my first experience of wearing a mask, which itself could constitute a riveting blog post. The mask caused my glasses to get tangled in the elastic and to steam up and my hearing aids to fall out. The blood test involved queuing in the rain before being allowed in. There was no pain, no gushing fountains of blood – it was all a bit disappointing really. Though a conversation with another masked figure in the queue was intriguing. He was a driving instructor who, when lessons are allowed to resume, will have to instruct with both windows open and not look directly at his pupil. Every sortie into other people’s lives seems to expose yet another absurdity. Apart from this revelation, then, this event was hardly worth the anticipation.
So calendars it is. Deirdre insists I can find a coherent motif, possibly by free association or stream of consciousness. Much like James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake, perhaps. This blog is beginning to feel as if it was written on an analyst’s couch under hypnosis. Prepare to be intoxicated by a guided excursion through our Gozo, Crich Standard, Country File and Family photo calendars in search of the common denominator. In reverse order June is Molly sitting in a grotto in Chatsworth Gardens and next a lone wild pony on the sand dunes of the Isle of Harris. Both pictures are gorgeous but depressing as they both record locations we have visited and should have been visiting this summer (Orkney anyway). The Crich Standard picture reminds us that though we have been deprived of the other three locations, we are supremely fortunate in having this one to walk over every day. It is the iconic view of the two towers of Crich taken from the top of the Tors at sunset. Here, if the circumstances of lockdown become too oppressive we can visit anytime to watch the clouds and the sun go down and digest the hugeness of the sky. Because of the two towers I always regard this scene as rather Tolkienesque with Crich as Hobbiton, though most of our inhabitants don’t have furry feet.
Now for the Gozo calendar, here, on an island off Malta, where my family has a history of visiting going back 50 years and where we still have an apartment. Here too, where for the first time in years we may not be able to visit. Here too where I am going to execute a stunning tour de force, a piece of literary light foot work and splice Homer’s 750 BC narrative of ‘The Odyssey’ with 2020 lockdown in Crich.
Gozo is reputed to be Ogygia, Calypso’s Island in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. Our calendar picture looks down on the fiery red sands of Ramla Bay from Calypso’s cave, a spot where tourists queue to step round a collapsed hole and stand on a viewing platform to take a picture. Re-reading my Homer Penguin translation, I see that the god Hermes must have walked along that beach to visit the ‘Lady of the Lovely Locks’ at home. I can identify with Odysseus, detained, constrained, locked down by a beautiful lady who saves him and cares for him,(and has just brought me tea and banana cake) but nevertheless “he sits disconsolate on the shore in his accustomed place, tormenting himself with tears and sighs and heartaches, and looking out across the barren sea with streaming eyes.” He dreams of places he wants to go to and things he wants to do. Each year we pay 10 Euros for two loungers and a parasol and sit in that same place on that beach but always in a very different frame of mind from that of Odysseus. And as the warm weather ends and the rain begins, that is where Deirdre and I would love to be!
This last point is particularly pertinent because Deirdre has left a lot of her summer clothes in Gozo expecting to use them there this Spring and then bring them home for the summer here. Foiled by Covid-19 she has ordered several summer items from Boden and they have just been delivered – who by? This is where the random threads of our wandering narrative suddenly weave themselves into a wonderfully coherent pattern. They were delivered to our 'Lady of the Lovely Locks' by Hermes Couriers. Then it started raining and turned cold.
And as the rain begins, how will we amuse ourselves? There’s a BBC ad in which all the news presenters assure us they will accompany us throughout the lockdown into the bright world beyond. One of them is Dan Walker, a football pundit who says something akin to, “And sport will be back, like it or not.” But meantime we have had no football (for this much thanks!), no finale to the Six Nations, no Wimbledon and no Olympics and so on. But following yesterday’s blog I have decided to sponsor an international Pease Pudding Hot (English version) Zoom championship. I also think Patter Cake Patter Cake Baker’s Man would work well on video. We could slap our hand against our grandchildren’s hands on the screen, one beat behind each other, and probably smash our computer monitors.
I personally think Dan Walker would find this more interesting than football.