June 4th The Knell of Passing Day

Today I heard an impatient father shouting and swearing at a toddler in the garden. The scenario seemed to be child wanted out, when out wanted in, when in wanted out. In other words the child was in much the same mental condition as we are, and probably the same with the father.

For me today has been a Nothing day, a day of paralysis, standing wondering what to do and not doing it, fiddling, retracting, starting, stopping, lingering, withdrawing. It dawned, (kind of), hours passed and then slunk on towards the afternoon. It started with low grey clouds which preluded a coma of a day, wet, cold and forgettable. A day unworthy of a blog. There were some pleasant moments such as an hour and half Zoom with my brother and his wife and a nervous sun peering out this evening. For a time I sat in the grave-yard (inevitably) looking down across the long seeding grass to where a late afternoon sun lay in the valley. The weather managed to rain even as the sun shone – but there were no rainbows. Rooks and jackdaws cawed and chattered and a blackbird sang, but it was a day for rooks not blackbirds.

Graveyards are wont to provoke contemplation. Many of us once read Thomas Gray’s frequently anthologised ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ with its famous

opening line, “The curfew tolls the knell of passing day,” and its even more famous line, “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife”, borrowed later by Thomas Hardy. However, I wasn’t thinking of “The rude forefathers of the hamlet,” (we still have some of them) but instead I remembered the day in early February when the Bishop had shepherded the infant children around the new graveyard as she consecrated it. It was a bright day then with a cheerful low winter sun and the youngsters solemn but comfortable with the assurance Bishop Jan gave them about the peacefulness of death. This was the day one child reported to his mother that they had been resurrecting bodies. None of us knew then that the children would have to learn new words like ’pandemic’ and ‘Coronavirus’.

Mollie’s word of the week for her home schooling was ‘awe-inspiring’. In the last few days in various communications we have had a few other words invading conversation. I’ve heard ‘lassitude’ and ‘ennui’, or even more expressive, ‘fed-up’. A couple of days ago I listed some of the symptoms for a condition known as ‘cabin fever’: Restlessness, Lethargy, Sadness or depression, Trouble concentrating, Lack of patience, Food cravings, Decreased motivation, Social Isolation. If I am to be honest I have felt all of these today and honesty is something we need.

I made a bad mistake this morning of reading a long article about Trump’s reactions to the virus: denial, lies, paranoia, self-delusion etc. It was utterly depressing to think that his psychological dysfunctions were determining policy and behaviour. At the same time I was watching very busy great tits racing about collecting food and shoving it down the throat of a fat, lazy fledgling that just sat there with its beak wide open.

I often try to tie together disparate strands of this blog – but tonight I’ll leave the reader to decide what Trump and a

big baby great tit have in common.