The five pound note was in an envelope in the bottom of the bag of music I use for choir. It was money I had collected for the after concert chips and sandwiches that didn’t happen after the concert that didn’t happen. Another envelope contained ticket money for the concert that didn’t happen and the audience members, who never came to the concert that didn’t happen, had to be contacted and arrangements made about their money. The other day the upholsterer contacted us about the reupholstering that didn’t happen. Thankfully, foreseeing what would, or wouldn’t happen, we had decided not to send the settees away for reupholstering, because that would have left us with nothing to sit on throughout the lockdown. In fact, it was the right decision because the factory had ceased reupholstering and gone over to making scrubs for the NHS.
We’ve all been left with unfinished business, plans abandoned midway, projects forgotten about. Because our minds were so suddenly and dramatically jerked into another direction we’ve forgotten about business that was pre-occupying us a couple of months ago. Now little reminders pop up. It reminds me how I would bring work to finish at home in my brief case at the start of the summer holidays, throw the case into the bottom of the wardrobe and then find the urgent papers or lists several weeks later when they had ceased to be urgent. Another example is the trail of mysterious configurations of toys left by the grandchildren after they’d departed and we were clearing up. We might have that little gulp of emotion recognising that they had devised some strange project that we would never understand and that would never now come to fruition.
All over the country factories and offices, churches, theatres, stadia, pubs and restaurants, libraries, schools and shops were suddenly closed with plates left on tables, books left open, coffee left in cups on desks. Lives and actions were suddenly interrupted and abandoned and only recorded in the detritus of ordinary daily business. No doubt someone has been in and cleared up otherwise people would be coming back and trying to remember what were they doing when they left that file open on the desk and the coffee undrunk. Simple objects suddenly become infused with memory, regrets or anxiety. The five pound note suddenly reminds me that a great night we had been planning never happened because time became frozen and the world stopped. We have been held like the victims of Pompeii, calcified in an embrace or removing bread from the oven, or like the Ice Maiden mummified in the ice of the high Andes frozen in the moment of sacrifice. Now we are beginning to thaw out, shake ourselves a little, and trying to remember what were we doing, what do we need to get on with and complete, what can we now abandon, how can we continue?
So much hasn’t happened or won’t happen that the nullity of it is quite overwhelming. There were anniversaries that committees were planning and working for years to celebrate: 400 years since the sailing of the Mayflower, 200 years since the birth of Florence Nightingale, 250 since the birth of Beethoven. The Six Nations and Football League incomplete, no Wimbledon, no Proms. Even life in Ambridge has gone into suspended animation. Olympics and Oberammergau and Crich well dressing postponed.
Some of us are getting back into gear while others of us remain in this petrified time zone, helpless and ambivalent – our abandoned plans in fragments. What were we about to do? Many of us read Wilfred Wilson Gibson’s ‘Flannan Isle’ at school. Remember the searchers coming to the deserted lighthouse wondering where the lighthouse keepers have gone:
Yet, as we crowded through the door, We only saw a table, spread For dinner, meat and cheese and bread; But, all untouched; and no one there: As though, when they sat down to eat, Ere they could even taste, Alarm had come; and they in haste Had risen and left the bread and meat: For at the table-head a chair Lay tumbled on the floor.
Soon we are going to have to pick up the tumbled chair and clear the table and get on.
Meanwhile a game of Pictionary and Hangman was had on-line with all the family. The sky cleared and the sun came out inspiring a walk and a G&T in the garden. And then real drama. Deirdre cleared out the cutlery drawer and put some things back in the wrong order. Now surely you’ll agree with me you can’t have forks, knives and spoons reading from the left. It has to be knives, forks and spoons. Some aspects of the old normality have to be retained.