How people react

Crab Apple Tree, April 2019

I’ve remarked on this before. Under the stress and strain of this weird situation people are moving backwards in time.  That’s partly because they can’t access all the pleasures, tools, facilities, shops, gadgets, conveniences they are used to (and those almost by definition are going to be modern and up to date), and partly because there is some sort of security and satisfaction in going back to the old ways of doing things.

So, you can’t buy bread (well, you can now, again, but there was a shortage for a while)… so you make some. The internet is awash with people talking about making sourdough, or no-mix methods, Dutch ovens, the shortage of flour and yeast, etc. and posting photos of their loaves and buns all over the place.   How long is it since people routinely made bread? Before the last world war?  

This had been evident in fashionable urban areas for about ten years in a milder, premonitionary guise in the cult of cupcakes, or muffin shops…. where vast amounts of carbohydrate were sold as inedibly large over-sweetened iced or glazed buns…. I thought (and I think talked about ) how this was an unconscious attempt to deal with the rising sense of menace in the financial and political world. It went alongside a similar fashion for knitting - a craze which has swept over the western world - with yarn shops, knitting classes, Etsy accounts selling very pretty patterns etc.   Now, I love a good bit of knitting, but my childhood memories of home-made school cardigans, and even swimming costumes, and my mother (all hopeful and optimistic) buying a knitting machine (!), all these things tie up into a slightly less glamorous bundle.  Knitting is remarkable, and can be wonderful, but it can also be itchy, baggy, uncomfortable, unforgiving, and ugly.    The cupcake thing is similarly sold as one idea but actually is something different - expensive, fattening, unhealthy, non-productive and sort of mentally small in some way.

(How these times can make me ratty!)

So, we have bread making as a new craze. Like the astonishing and totally unexpected obsession with having enough toilet paper (which led to mass, international shortages of bogroll in all the shops, for weeks), I think these things point to the underlying fears and shame which we have, or share.  We are hoping not to be hungry. We are hoping not to be ill (die). We are hoping we are not found out in public with shitty arses. (What was it like, really, on those trains taking people to Auschwitz? No wonder they all thought going for a shower was a good idea).

Out in the world, the PM has been admitted to hospital with CV, leading to a flurry of people saying they have no wish to see him recover, and another flurry doing the decent thing and saying they hope he gets better.  Keir Starmer has been elected leader of the Labour Party and so a lot of people have resigned their membership. Some others recommend hanging on in there to see how things pan out, and some say that socialists should either join the Working Party, or the Greens.   Truly all our parties are in a total state of disarray. I think the internet + computer + dark data + plutocratic powers unknown have combined to trash the whole historic cultural system.  The streets are mostly empty.  There are outraged reports of people still ganging together, far too proximate, and the threat that ALL outings from the home will be banned unless people shape up.  There is a strange crevasse opening up… that Brexiters are accusing Remainers of trying to kill people by arguing for less regulation of ‘going out for a walk’.    The rage and scorn is still there… And of course, that is still unfinished business. Though the UK govt has accepted funds from the EU to repatriate Britons who were trapped abroad when all this happened.  

As for me - I have done some more seed planting, tidied the garden cupboard, given away a mass of old veg and flower seeds, felt a bit better. Done some pastel drawings of the apple tree in blossom, and started to do a painting of a pear blossom in close-up (spoke of that before).  I have also now ordered some new pastels from Cowling and Wilcox online.... I have a limited range of colours in this old biscuit tin. Too chalky, I think..  I will use the internet to learn some new techniques.  Nicole comes to eat with us once a day now, on a fairly routine basis - she sat in the warn sunny garden to work yesterday.  She made a very helpful suggestion that I should spray/fix the drawings in order to layer more colour on... which I have done. I used hairspray left over from Lulu's wedding, or maybe the party which David and Jo had here after they got married.  

We took some grass cuttings from Margaret and Vincent yesterday, to put into our compost bin.  I think I will grow herbs in the planters out in the alley this year… can’t get bedding plants anyway… feel very sorry for the thousands of nurseries whose entire spring output will have to be trashed.  At what point do they dare start planting again?  The point is, when will this all end?

Crab Apple Tree April morning, 2020

Grey skies, April 2020

 A German virologist says they scanned a house where shopping had been brought in - and there was not one single CV virus in the whole house. The supermarkets are now calm places, heavily policed with HiViz attendants, and hardly anyone in there.  The shelves are slowly being restocked.  The queues are managed with 2m distancing between trollies.  I take my own bag and don’t use their baskets or trollies… and today, for the first time I had my scarf up over my mouth and nose as some sort of protection. (Of course, scientifically, it offers none at all, probably, but I felt I was doing ‘something’).

We have this strange sense of wrapping ourselves in virtue: both to keep ourselves safe, and to keep others safe in case we have inadvertently got this dangerous infection and might pass it on.  A tiger in an American zoo has it - so inter-species transmission is now possible.   My scrubs friend Ji Sun is almost demented with anxiety describing the working conditions in the theatre in the Kent and Canterbury hospital - the layers of masks, how long they must keep them on, the lack of air ventilation in the suites, the equipment all being kept outside with gofers having to run back and forth getting what’s needed, the heat under the clothing layers and protections and lights… She is usually pretty calm and sensible but now she’s getting really wound up.  And she’s not even in a CV part of the hospital… just normal surgery procedures. But they have to guard against it.