Grey, grey day – empty, featureless, soggy. An anonymous day. A pyjama day, a duvet day, a snuggle down day to sleep and wake up in time for bed when it’s over day. A day when the light seems to have drained down on us like dirty washing-up water down a plug hole. Mud beneath our feet and a grubby dishcloth sky above us. A day when the sun tried to come through but only succeeded for a few moments to look like a greasy thumbprint of melted margarine in the clouds. A day for re-reading the first chapter of ‘Bleak House’. A stagnant day without much weather and described without much grammar! Is that enough to set the atmosphere?
It’s also a guilty day, a day for looking out of the window and seeing that other people are out there, busy, harassed, focused, pumping the blood of life through the village arteries, rushing the children up to school, school-kids chatting at the bus-stop, dog-walkers, shoppers, cars weaving in and out of the parked vehicles, tractors loaded with muck. It’s a day when people might read this and think grumpily, “Well it’s alright for him. I’ve got plenty to do, even though it’s lockdown.”
This morning I read a quotation from Virginia Woolf, written about wartime London. Incidentally, I’m not a Virginia Woolf reader, she’s far down my reading wish-list. “Everybody is feeling the same thing, therefore no one is feeling anything in particular.” That’s why I’m unlikely to become a Virginia Woolf reader anytime soon – that claim to speak for everyone and homogenise several million people in difficult circumstances. In this small village at this moment I know there are people who have just done their Joe Wicks exercises online and are feeling invigorated, there are those frantic with worry and fear, those determined and planning ways to do Christmas, those creating, those laughing, those serene, those raging, those celebrating.
I took this picture to illustrate how mired in gloom the outlook is from our front garden,
but then the photo comes out looking vibrant and colourful and pushing the fog into the background. Can’t even be depressed properly.
I’m the one who is feeling nothing in particular – bad vibes and good vibes neutralising each other – especially as they’re not particularly bad or particularly good. Bad – someone pointing out that in my Facebook post yesterday commenting on the lack of ceremony at Remembrance, I had lamented the lack of bulges, not bugles. Soon corrected. Very bad – a graph on our Covid-19 App showing local Covid cases rising almost vertically, creeping up Bullbridge Hill unremittingly through the fog towards us. Good and Bad – someone posting marvellous video of us and lots of people we care about at the Miners Standard in Winster at Christmas singing the Derbyshire carols. Good because it evoked snugness and warmth, intimacy, elbows into each other’s ribs, apologies for clambering over the laps of strangers, pushing through crowds to get pints, embracing people we don’t know, deeply inhaling each other’s breath as we roared out ‘Bradda’ in four glorious beer fuelled parts, sharing the same air, companionable, hugging and kissing. Bad because that bar will be quiet and empty this year and we’ll just hum feebly to ourselves.
But tomorrow we’re having the chimney swept! Good! I do love to see that brush popping up out of the chimney pot.