Separation

For a long time now, long before this epidemic transfixed us and changed everything, I had been aware of a deep change in myself.  Actually, on a daily physical basis I feel brilliant - flexible, strong, energetic, positive, lucky, well, healthy in every way. I take no medicines, feel supplied with just about everything anyone could want, and surrounded by beautiful and beloved things and people.  

And yet, something has been changing…   I have been aware of getting older.  It’s easier to relate this to things, possessions, than to people.  Things I have loved, owned, kept, maintained, saved up for, cherished for years, decades, have begun to look different to me.   This has been not only a logical process of thought, but a more inchoate one.. to do with feeling, response, emotion.    I can see that when I die, my management of all these things will suddenly cease. They will no longer be mine, but someone else’s.  That person or people may have no interest in them, or much knowledge if any of their story, provenance or significance.  Seeing myself as being surrounded by all these objects has changed, over the last year or so, from being a sort of self-congratulatory song into a different drama altogether.  They are mine, and I know them, now. But when I die, they will become something quite other.   

This sense of change in my attachment to things has also deeply affected the way I think about our house. I do truly love it. I love its weird quirky awkwardness. I love the history of how our family has grown up inside it, and all the social events which have happened here. I love its position, the street it’s in. I love how adaptable it is, and strong. It’s a shame the views tend to be a little truncated, but it is in an urban location, and so other buildings are nearby, and we have few if any distant views.    It could even be tending towards a claustrophobic tone,  but all I have to do is walk out into the street to find some distance, or go upstairs and look out of the bathroom window, or Andrew’s bedroom window. Those two rooms have the best views.    But, you know, thinking about how long we may have left in our lives, I have been thinking that perhaps if we are ever going to do anything different, then we could consider giving all this up, and moving somewhere else.  That may be Ireland, to be near the grandsons as they grow up, or maybe the west country, away from the increasing congestion and build-up which is inexorably strangling the outskirts of the town and bringing more and more traffic problems to the centre.

I should say, all this was well before the coronavirus struck.  It has been a steady deepening change in how I think about my life and future.  I have been detaching. Getting ready for a move.   

This has been enhanced by the daily experience of  living - just the two of us (plus the lodger Nicole who is in the attic) - just us two in this great 12-room house. There must surely be other larger families who could make use of it, the way we did.  We don’t really need all this space.    I sometimes make a list of what I think we would LIKE if we started again somewhere else - somewhere with more storage space, workshops, a bigger garden…. Yes, a large kitchen. Yes two or three rooms for living (including the music). Yes, to cellars (blessed - why do not all new houses have them as they do in France?)   

Now everything is locked down. We cannot move, travel, prospect, take a holiday, visit, go anywhere. Not camping, not B&B, not with family or friends. Not hotels or self-catering. And maybe not for a year, or more. Who knows how long this will go on.    I am filled with gratitude at the facilities and space this house gives us. We can get away from each other. We can live quite easily, and I know that is with so many more facilities than many other people have. I don’t feel guilty. It is as it is.  We did what we did. (The house was empty for ten years before we bought it!)    Andrew has been working so hard on modernising the downstairs loo - just about the smallest room in the house, and needing such extensive works (plumbing, wiring, carpentry, brickwork, plastering, flooring, lighting, you name it), and he has done it all so carefully and with repeats to get each stage right…. It will be wonderful. Not all the things which used to live on the dusty shelves will fit into the new wall cupboards, but the excess things can go into the cellar (which also needs a huge clear out). We have more than enough to do.   

But for me, there is this sense of who I am, where I am, where I am living, what exactly my house is.  Here we have to stay. For now. Maybe for months. What a strange situation. Medieval. Like a slow-motion version of the end of the world.    

The news is all about the shortage of protection for doctors and nurses, and the big morgues and hospitals being made in London and elsewhere. It’s like a dream, a nightmare.  Slow mo, for sure.  They say the numbers of deaths have been edited, could be 4 times more than reported…. the government is shown over and again to be duplicitous, but still has people cheering it on.  That could be all faked of course….. there was a planned street-clapping event planned and nothing happened, though the internet said it was great.   The middle classes, the literate and thinking classes, are all in a sort of peasant situation, working on allotments, keeping their heads below the parapets still, though some are vocal online.  But no protests, no strikes.   The police are exceeding their remit - coloured a lake in Derbyshire to try to deter walkers.     We have invited Nicole to eat with us for some meals - I think she’d go bonkers being on her own all the time… and that makes me think of Lucie in London, living alone, trying to keep herself merry.  She filed for her divorce absolute yesterday. So sad.