Ways of communicating

The days of the week melt into each other. It is hard to know when we are.  There are regular zoom meetings set up but they arrive almost unheralded because we have so little fix on anything. Last night we went out into the street at 8pm and made a charivari for the NHS. It was a strange, distributed, echoing sound. I enjoyed clashing a big saucepan lid with a wooden spoon. It felt properly medieval. I could see small clusters of people on their doorsteps, joining in. No-one wants to get close to anyone else. Ostensibly this is to be virtuous - not to pass the infection on to anyone else, but of course more powerfully, it’s because we don’t want to get the damned thing ourselves.

Out for a walk just now we happened to see Harold Goodwin, chairman of the FavSoc, who has famously actually HAD the coronavirus and is now recovering. He says he picked it up in London, ‘that shit hole’, and never wants to go there again. He says, ‘it’s really nasty. You don’t want to get it!’.  But he looks ok, says he is sleeping a lot.  

Contact with friends and family is sporadic via Zoom and email etc.  I played forts with Alex this morning, sending a selfie from under my duvet, while he sent audio messages explaining that his fort had an upstairs and downstairs (vastly superior), and asking if mine did too?  No.  He says he doesn’t have enough room for friends or heroes to join him in his fort. 

I have deep thoughts about 'all this' from time to time. But they have escaped me at this very moment. I woke this morning with a dream about the death of my grandmother, and there was something about whether I could wear her shoes.. I think this was about me (a grandmother), and the mood of the dream was sombre but not terrifying. I thought I would be able to remember it properly but alas it has fled.  

The garden is slowly being tidied by small increments. I bring my seedlings out of their little greenhouse each day to put into the sun, but today it’s turned cold again (and there is rain further west), so I put them back early today.  Rain would be welcome, as it’s practically a drought now.  I have expected the social police to come and stop me if I get the garden hose out.  Out in the world, the self-appointed stasi are causing pain, telling people they shouldn’t be out, and even the uniformed police are (as you might expect) sometimes over-enthusiastic … scary. You have to be brave to stand up to uniforms, people with jack boots, tasers, radios, loudspeakers, authoritative voices, a whole crew around them.  We may all have to get used to that.  That fear is one of the terrible underlying anxieties… and who knows if or when or how widely it will come to pass.  Four weeks ago, none of this was happening in England.   (Though Malta was gearing up exactly one month ago, far in advance of the UK).

 My bro rang last night. I was amazed to hear him say he had voted for the Conservatives but is appalled at what they’ve done.  

He advises me to click onto a website for Conservative Women, says they are in the vanguard of being appalled at the government. It sickened my heart to start to think about it, and I terminated the conversation to his slight disappointment. We disagree so profoundly I just don’t want to get into a discussion about any of it, because I love him even though I hate so much of what he expounds. 

Meanwhile I have started to write real letters to people - one so far, to Sally Diplock and Wendy in Shropshire.  I have a small lot of second-class stamps.  It seems unlikely that the social police will be able to track postal letters, while they are clearly intent on tracking every other single movement, act, idea, message, note, communication that we all make.  Forget drones. Nothing will be private, ever again. This is one the ways in which the world has utterly changed.  Let alone the ‘damage’ or changes to what we have come to rely on in ‘the economy’.  Travel, money, education, family, leisure, work, everything… all changed.  It is really hard to begin to get a measure of it, especially as it’s so hard to pin anything down as to meaning.  Who to trust?  One way to get through is to concentrate on real small things - cooking, cleaning (not much, so far), gossiping online, making art, gardening.  As if the world was the same. Pretending. Maybe this will also be alright, a way through. No-one knows.  But I think the maniac Cummings, that social misfit, really could not have predicted this. 

I have today enrolled on an online course about Etruscan Women. Not sure why - just that it seems to possibly offer some illumination into my Neolithic women… £400.  Ish.