Transmutations

Things move on every day, with changes in mood, resolution, emotional temperature.   All week the wind has been blowing really strongly. The weather was originally brilliantly sunny, then we had a day or two of darkness when the cold was more insistent, and the great organ-pipe chimneys in this house roared (and are still roaring), and then today it started dark and chill, with a dash of sleet for reminder that winter is barely past,… and now we have bright sun again. But that wind - dashing the blossom-laden trees to-and-fro.  The birds are frantic to find food on the feeders in the garden.

I note that the ditty I wrote on 19th, logging the blatant feeling of hostility between the uber-rich and the rest of us, is already out of date. 

   Oh you can’t take it with you when you go

   When you drop in your hole and go below

   There are worms and rot and mildew

   You can think about what killed you

   But you can't take it with you when you go....

   

That hostility has faded away, as concerns about testing, support for and concern about hard-pressed staff in the hospitals, and a community-led watchfulness about people maintaining public order … all these things have come to dominate the spirit.   No-one much is talking about or worrying about the billionaires - save for yesterday’s resentment about Dyson snaffling a contract to build ventilators (nice payback for his donations to the Tory party), while rumours and official reports surface about how the UK govt were actually in meetings discussing bulk-purchase of these bits of kit, via the EU.   Companies around the land say they have (had) them in stock, approached the DoHealth to offer them, but had no reply.  We are left wondering why, why, would the government actually avoid getting the test kits and ventilators in? What do they want to achieve?  Dominic Cummings’ reputation as a supporter of eugenics surfaces again….   I have already mentioned the convenience of the timing of the PM’s diagnosis…. 

My own mood is of dissatisfaction. I had two vivid dreams towards morning…. That a church agreed to publish my book when I told them on the spur of the moment that it was about a vicar who became a revolutionary.    Then another dream, that Andrew and I went out for a walk and came back to find the house had been burgled - everything taken, all the paintings, furnitures, family photos, the pianos, fridge, …. everything.  The neighbours had noticed nothing. This seems like a more realistic dream to me, that all my things, my life, may be snatched away from me, by an invisible thief. 

My health is good. Still have a slight sore throat but feel fine.  

I wake up wanting to do some art, but the day gets frittered away with more or less important tasks…. I have thrown out more clutter from the studio and cleared part of the work-surface. I have thrown away a big pile of old pens.  

I hosted an online Al-Anon meeting, where some people expressed their deep anxiety about the whole situation and particularly being locked down into their homes with their drinking spouses getting drunker and drunker. I can barely bring myself to think about the many children in that situation…  The abuse in alcoholic households need not be physical violence, but corrosive anyway, and heading towards full-blown gas lighting.   A powerful meeting. The zoom thing worked very well.

I dashed to the shop - for Bramley apples and a few other  things. Tesco has got itself more organised now, with chicanes in and out, and they’re wiping down the baskets and trolley handles after each use.  The drink shelves (beer) were empty… didn’t notice much else - toilet paper still low, and no flour, no pointy cabbage….   Lunch, a piece of pork bought a week or so ago from Macknade and frozen the while, cooked very very slowly, was really wonderful…. Ate too much, which is definitely becoming a feature of life under lockdown.  Eating is a comfort.  What else to do? (Loads, of course, but cooking and eating is instantly gratifying and creative).      Then another zoom with Steve and Chris Rayner, very amusing as usual.  We talk about how the world cannot ever be the same again - partly that we don’t want it to go back to how it was  (climate change etc), and partly that it cannot.  He had bad sciatica a a few weeks ago but is now walking a bit.   He says editing the Sunday Times is interesting… the staff are all working from home - Wales, London, Norfolk, etc.     He sent a link to an Isolation song written and performed by his legal friends the Pritchards who live in Stalsifield.. .John is a judge.     https://youtu.be/peNhuWYg0V8

Still no art made apart from pen-sorting scribbles and a sort of colouring in sketch.  

    

But I go and start to put back into the new wall cupboards all the stuff which used to be on open shelves in the downstairs loo. Too many items - won’t all fit.  Some can be thrown away, or we must find other places to keep them.  I want to make a painting of birds, free to fly.  We are grounded.   The politicians are playing their games.  

Does this disease confer immunity? They say they don't know.  I wonder if they DO know (that it won't!) and are not saying so.  What they are saying is that this lockdown must go on for longer than they originally said. Twelve weeks? I say it will be a year.   I think of those children, penned up in small apartments, with drunken parents. The mental health outcomes of all this are incalculable.