June 5th Gone Some Time

We’re busy doin’ nothin’ Workin’ the whole day through Tryin’ to find lots of things not to do We’re busy goin’ nowhere Isn’t it just a crime We’d like to be unhappy, but We never do have the time

In one of her very thoughtful comments Di quoted the above. Bing Crosby sings it in ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ and I agree with Di that it could be the Lockdown Anthem. It certainly sums up yesterday and probably will tomorrow but today felt extraordinarily busy because as I’ve remarked before each day needs a few beacons to guide us through and today we had several. Val has also made a wonderful comment, that she prefers my blogs when I have nothing to say to those in which I have something to say. Actually that’s not quite how she put it but there’s a lot of truth in it!

10 am home schooling with Mollie, who sat out on the patio under a parasol to keep the rain off, collected leaves and learned all

about photosynthesis and chloroform. 11 am singing with the Popalong children and, as part of the new normal, a new song – I can barely express the bravado of it - Horsey Horsey Don’t You Stop. 1.30pm Antarctic Explorers with Sammie. We had to find out what equipment they needed and the first website we looked at was what to pack for an Antarctic Cruise. Poor old Captain Oates wandering off starving in a blizzard, when a buffet lunch of crushed avocadoes and wild rocket on ciabatta was waiting for him on board. Then up to the churchyard to rake up the cut grass in the area we intend to re-wild.

The church was commissioned in 1135 and the churchyard filled up and bursting with bones years ago. In places the ground sinks and sags and your footsteps echo in the holes underground among the resting dead. When in or around the church on my own I always think of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’ in which he explores the destiny of church buildings once religion ceases, and finds:

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

I find I can’t be among the long dead without questioning them. So though busy I was conscious that I was raking a few feet above a 12 year old girl, much beloved who died nearly 200 years ago. Her pallor, her wasted consumptive body, much beloved. Would she not prefer wild flowers to wave over her rather than tight mown grass? Maybe she used to wander in this very churchyard and pick ox-eye daisies. In a neighbouring plot I drove a stake in to mark out the area we were intending to re-wild. At first the stake resisted, clinking on rock and gravel, then suddenly it sunk right down into what felt like a void. Somehow I had violated the small space allowed someone in which to rest, two centuries ago. The long spring grass has not been cut further off where the ancient graves crowd, lopsided and toppling. Some of the finer sepulchres have rusted wrought iron railings through which nettles grow. With the long grass waving in the wind it looked like a rocking sea of graves engulfing grief, young lives shortened, long lives celebrated, war, illness, forgotten epidemics. Love, life all beyond memory now. Deirdre and I were walking by the canal the other day and stopped at a picnic table. The plaque informed us that Ken and Mary Heywood had met and fallen in love there, and we remembered the time they had told us that story themselves.

Today I joined my first queue, feeling as bold as Captain Oates of the doomed Scott Antarctic Expedition, but intending to come home afterwards. Crich’s Cardale Fish and Chip Shop. His last words were “I may be some time,” and I was.

But while we are festering in our homes making a very poor job of being at risk and vulnerable, there are the young people for whom Covid-19 is an event they will one day look back on and remember how it curtailed plans and changed expectations and diverted the way they lived. It may be university in a bubble or a wedding that will be very much diminished from the one originally envisaged.

We have a wedding invitation here that needs answering – and typically I shall probably blog about it but not get round to sending in our answer this evening. Some years ago we expected that the only invitations to happy occasions we were likely to get would be Golden Weddings and Memorial Services, but we are delighted that the children of our contemporaries invite us to their weddings. Of course we always wonder if they really want us or whether there has been a row at home of the “they always remember your birthday” and “they’ve known you since you were a baby” type. You can hardly be surprised that the bride-to-be will be appalled at having to pack the pews with dribbling old dotards whose only memory of her will be in nappies or blowing bubbles in the bath. What a waste of a good disco or band when all these ancient reminders of a best forgotten past sit around drinking Milk of Magnesia and lamenting that there’s no ABBA. Then they attempt a few misguided dance steps and have to be ambulanced away with pulled muscles or chest pains. Actually, while Deirdre cavorts and shimmies under some benighted delusion that this is still 1968, I have worked out that you can look as if you’re dancing by rocking the shoulders a bit and shifting the weight slightly from foot to foot. You can attempt to turn round as long as you don’t get dizzy. Then we all go home at 9 exhausted, leaving empty spaces at the bar that could have been occupied by all the happy couple’s friends.

That’s our worst fantasy. Actually the brides or grooms of recent weddings have always been extremely gracious, affectionate and re-assuring and that gives us a real connection and investment in the next generation. So I will now reply to the invitation, full of hope for them that the ceremony will be everything they wanted, despite current circumstances.

And we will be everything they would like guests to be – as long as they play some ABBA.