Is it to do with the long hours of darkness or the emptiness of the diary, but tiny actions are becoming magnified, minute decisions are taking on fateful significance and all that surplus time is being spent in tasks that once were completed without a second thought. As a result mundane chores have become works of art or feats of dazzling engineering. Take loading the dishwasher, once everything was stacked randomly in, the door closed and set and we rushed off to the next task. Now it is packed thoughtfully and efficaciously. Greasy plates are rinsed, tea cups with stains round the base are soaked and all is placed in a rational and pleasing order. Though there are those who still don’t see that stacking from the front is not an effective use of time or space.
The technique developed is coming in handy in church for planning provisional Christmas services. How many sizes of bubble, pairs and individuals can you fit into a pew to maintain social distancing? What about ratio of child to adult or making everyone stand sideways? Can we pile people on each others’ laps like a human Jenga? – Thinking out of the box in the blue sky laterally.
I once watched a group of German tourists seeing how many of them could fit into a traditional red British telephone kiosk. With the typical German engineering ingenuity that created Audi, “Vorsprung durch technik”, they developed a myriad of configurations and distortions to achieve their goal. However, they were all rather big and I can’t help thinking that if it had been an international competition the Japanese would have done better. I once saw another heap of Germans in a colourful pile near a ski lift on the Lauberhorn. Slowly they pealed themselves away and struggled to their feet, a bit like a large Teutonic onion, revealing Deirdre at the core. It seems they hadn’t realised that when Deirdre comes off a chair lift the entire region has to be evacuated.
So I am contemplating trivia which seem amplified in this vacuum of time in which we’re suspended. I’ve always been one of those people who can’t be bothered to read instructions or examine the small print, who will leave details undone that people won’t notice and who frequently completes a task with a shrug and an “It’ll do.” But now the barrenness of lockdown is turning me into someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it is at least a way of gripping and imposing upon time present.
W.B.Yeats wrote a poem called ‘The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water’ which included these lines:
I heard the old, old men say,
‘All that is beautiful drifts away
Like the waters’
When so much that is beautiful seems to be drifting away I want to arrange a few rocks in the waters that won’t float off over the weir, meanwhile my proxy activity will be the elegant placement of cups in a cupboard.