Sometime last year I bought a lounge suit from M&S. I don’t mean a lounge suit as in ’lounge-suit’, an item of matching jacket and trousers to wear at semi-respectable functions, but a lounge suit in which to lounge – loose slobby baggy trousers and a comfy T-shirt. I bought it because I always had a fantasy of empty days by the log stove with a book, a bag of crisps and no commitments. Too much of a good thing, it transpires, as we’re faced with rather too many of such days. To put on the lounge suit is a half-way point between staying in my pyjamas all day or getting properly and purposefully dressed to do something constructive, like manicuring the lawn, turning the compost or composing a symphony. Donning my baggy tie-up trousers and comfy T-shirt is a statement that I’m not intending to empty the bin or go out to the freezer today – though of course, I will by just slipping a pair of my regulation trousers over the baggy ones. I may therefore, venture out into the rain looking a bit like a stack of crumpets on a wobbly plate, but no one is supposed to see me. I am reminded of Ignatius J Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s, ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ which is apparently Billy Connolly’s favourite book. I’ve lost my copy but its sales pitch on Amazon describes Ignatius as:
A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern
It’s a celebration of the pleasures of wallowing in porcine splendour in one’s lounge suit and at least sets me a target to achieve during this next lockdown.
However, preparing for these next few sequestered weeks smart pin-stripes are more apt because we’re all turning into lawyers, trying to deconstruct the new rules to work out what can be legally and safely done to retain what is good in our community and what strategies can we employ to keep them going. Never have so many people been close reading obscure clauses and sub clauses. I am reminded of the lawyers as in this Punch illustration, in the opening of my favourite Dickens novel, ‘Bleak House’...”mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warden heads against walls of words...with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions,
affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.” All because we are trying to work out whether we can sing a duet in a public park or whether condoms are an essential item. Or more significantly can we have a wreathe laying ceremony for Remembrance or sing carols round the tree in the Market Place?
LOCKDOWN - INTERPRETING THE RULES
Mass choirs exhaling anthems and oratorios
Shrunk to septets, a cappella, al fresco, pianissimo,
Diminuen-doing to remote karaoke.
Brass sections sectioned, solitarily confined,
Outlawed euphonium players with muted sound
Pumping out alone in unventilated basements.
We’ve become loop-hole seekers, rule benders,
Terms and conditions dredgers, small print delvers,
Equivocators, clause interrogators.
Pin-striped as accountants or dodgy lawyers,
Categorising worship and weddings, toddler groups and takeaways
As tax deductibles, charitable trusts, off-shore accounts.
The pub singers are miming Wild Rover in the empty yard
And this Christmas the angels will perform a charade
Of Hark the Herald to spaced-out shepherds.
And the bugle is silent at Remembrance.