The north east winds have brought me fears as well as ice-cold blasts from the Arctic. Going out to protect pots and plants against this sudden unseasonal onslaught is relatively easy and unimportant compared with anxieties about what other unexpected and unwelcome changes might be afoot. As I wrote sometime ago, “Cast ne’er a clout e’re May is out,” and so we continue to cling onto our shelter and protection. All the talk is of Boris tonight making some slight shifts away from ‘Stay at Home’ to ‘Be Alert’. We oldies aren’t yet going to be kicked protesting out of our houses by the bailiffs or sent shuddering into the inclement cold as depicted in those dreadful illustrations of the Highland Clearances.
Today I feel particularly depressed and fearful. When children are in that state we encourage them to name their fears and so that’s what I intend to do in no particular order of priority.
· If we continue to stick to our isolation and abstain from joining the trolley pushing hordes of ancient shoppers getting in everybody’s way, will we be made to feel we are exploiting the system, being cowardly or pedantic and parasitic?
· If we are to be kept apart for a considerable time after the rest of the world has started moving will we understand the new procedures, make fools of ourselves or be patronised by the young?
· Two months ago we were perfectly compos mentis, responsible, physically active, independent, dynamic, self-sufficient and of some use to society. Are we now conditioned into a category where we are assumed to be vulnerable, at risk, passive, dependent and pathetic? This might lead to self-fulfilling prophecy as we slip into being a burden on the community and on ourselves because that’s what society expects of us.
· As people around us become more cavalier about the risks are we and those we love going to catch this wretched illness?
· We are in our seventies and one whole year of what’s left is being wasted, time we could be spending with our grandchildren and children. We will have missed entire stages in their development before we see some of them again.
· Will we be able to meet up with friends and have meals together, sit in each others’ gardens and drink chilled white wine, go for walks, drop into the pub, stop at the Loaf or Fuel for coffee and cake?
· Will it ever happen again that I will be able to wedge myself into a crowd at the Cliff, Jug and Glass or Nelson and jam together, joining in someone else’s song, harmonising, rather than just playing solo on a lonesome screen?
· Will I be able at last to do the poetry reading at the Luncheon Club I had prepared, or will such a gathering never resume?
· Will our choir once again cluster together in the room over the Fishpond pub and rehearse together, sit round a table downstairs afterwards and have a laugh (or moan), go out and do concerts, ram ourselves into a pub afterwards and sing along to sarnies and chips?
· Will we be able to set out on long journeys again, stopping at service stations and cafes en route?
· Will we be able to fly to our beloved Gozo again and rescue our sandals and summer clothes we left there last November in the expectation that we’d be there to collect them this May? Will our favourite bars and restaurants still be there? How will the place have been changed without tourists?
· During this lockdown we have been presented with so many compensatory opportunities that they have been overwhelming. Will I regret not having made the most of them?
· Are we going to have to spend years keeping our distances, afraid to shake hands, whisper a confidence, embrace, pass plates to one another, share a tapas?
· There will be plenty more to think of and you may have your own inventory.
· We’ve just discovered another one – the danger of losing both hearing aids when you remove the elastic of your mask from around your ears!
There’s a lot of documentary evidence about the trauma of emerging from a period of isolation back onto the world’s scene, from Terry Waite and John McCarthy to those hopeless Japanese soldiers who fought on in the Pacific Islands because they didn’t know the War had ended. I can hardly compare our experience with theirs, though the world will have changed fast for us. In many ways it will have changed for the better, we hope, maybe in ways which will have Laura Kuenssberg redeployed to Cbeebies.
Yesterday I recalled the crisis Rip Van Winkle had when he returned to American society after being asleep for twenty years. He had slept his own social isolation away so awoke unaware that the world had changed, but the problem was, he hadn’t, he continued in his old idle ways. I suspect we are all hoping to have changed a little.
“I wished to live deliberately” Thoreau said, as I have quoted before, when he went off into social isolation by Walden Pond. One of my purposes in writing this blog was to record my own sensations whilst doing that. I know all our moods are very changeable at present. My mental and emotional pathology has been like the weather today, 20 degrees colder than yesterday, paranoid, over-anxious, pessimistic, self-absorbed and generally depressed. That’s the record of just one resident of Fable Cottage. Still, it feels better having named it.