Deirdre would not regard herself as an enthusiastic seamstress. One grandson waited several years for a promised cushion cover and one daughter, now in her mid forties, has been waiting for about 35 years for her cuddly bunny, Hazel, (remember ‘Watership Down’?) to have his full complement of body parts restored. So when, inspired no doubt by my poem of April 24th, she resolved today to make some protective face masks for some future expedition into human company, I did wonder if we were talking about this pandemic or one that might occur later in the century. The sewing machine had to be dusted off, charged, cranked and oiled. Every time it comes out Deirdre has forgotten how it works, so the equipment has to tolerate a long period of very confrontational interrogation before the needle can be threaded. Eventually a ‘necessary journey’ had to take place so that the wilful implement could be transported to a friend’s house and instructions given through the window.
I had experimented with my skiing snood but nearly suffocated so I waited with considerable excitement for the real professional job. I knew the internet would yield patterns for Zorro masks and Billy the Kid masks and, interestingly, plague masks. These were worn by doctors in the 17 Century and the peak was filled with special herbs so that the breath would pass through them on the way to the doctor’s lungs. These could serve a useful purpose in Sainsbury’s by causing customers to back off quickly leaving us to get at the mangos. Plague doctors also carried a rod that allowed them to maintain distance from their victims, or push them away - the medieval equivalent of physical distancing. Geared like this with a waxed coat and goat skin gloves, with luck the store would empty completely.
On You Tube a nice American lady with a brisk but re-assuring manner chaperoned Deirdre through the process. In the next room I was on You Tube being mentored through how to make a hanging basket. If the instructions had become confused I might have been sent out shopping with a trailing petunia draped around my ears, but, after one or two test drives, an extremely pretty item emerged nicely colour co-ordinated with a pleasing virus resistant pattern. The hanging baskets were also successful, equally colourful but more droopy.
A piece of information following my recent ponderings about hair on May 1st - after the lockdown is finished it is estimated that there will be 80% fewer blonds. Also connected to my past diatribes about pigeons there has been a very randy pair fluttering amok amongst my lilies. So before I got up this morning I penned in spite this profound piece of ornithological verse:
PIGEON LOVE
Once there were two pigeons sitting on a wire,
Cooing and cuddling for his passions were on fire.
Sun flower seeds he promised, corn and crumbly bread
And he ruffled at her feathers until her neck blushed red.
He pecked her and he crooned her, he couldn’t really sing,
And he stroked her and he flapped her with his stiff and heavy wing.
He mounted her, unbalanced her and left her all unstable
While he rose triumphant in the air and swooped to the bird table
To garner all the prizes that he had promised her,
The nutty things and sweet things, but something did occur,
A very aggressive robin, so our pigeon fled back and shivered
And his mate teased and scolded, “You’re all talk, you’ve not delivered,”
And left him glum upon the wire, pigeon toed and pigeon livered.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A ‘necessary journey’ today took me along Shustock Lane with that wonderful panorama to the east, guiding the eye across the flats of Nottinghamshire towards Lincolnshire. The low-lying lands were doused in a damp heavy blue haze that was rather beautiful, but to a 14th Century plague survivor would have been seen as ‘poisoned air’ carrying the infection into the hamlets that were dotted beneath it. Between a third and a half of the population died then, including in 1349 almost the entire family of William de Wakebridge. Significantly St. Mary’s had 6 vicars between 1340 and 1356. A ‘new normality’ followed with labour being in short supply, a clamouring for higher wages and landowners moving increasingly to less labour intensive sheep farming as a result.
Down there below us now, contaminating that view, lies the wreckage of 28,000 families in mourning. Their ‘new normality’ will include a suffocating emptiness.
The beaked masks were filled with theriac, a mixture of more than 55 herbs and other compounds including ingredients such as cinnamon, myrrh, and honey. The shape of the beak was supposedly designed to give the air enough time to be cleansed by the herbs before it reached the nose.