Those of us who have issues with our attention span, call it deficit if you must, have a strange but fundamental sadness in our lives, to the effect that we find it very difficult to live in the moment. Our bodies may be telling us that we are having fun, but our heads keep telling us to get up and move on to the next thing. It is a real downer, from time to time.
In a modestly long list of things that frustrate me about myself, this, along with a tendency to be an LBW bunny, is the most significant.
For reasons that I only slowly understood, but which are both related to sixteen months of Covid, the worm may have finally turned. Twice in the last two days, I have found myself temporarily lost in pleasure.
The first time was on Thursday morning, in a 500 acre meadow outside Tewkesbury. It is a ‘lammas’ meadow, where different farmers are responsible for long, narrow strips that are as old in ownership as the nearby Malvern Hills. Lammas, or ‘Loaf Mass’ is a reference to the quarter day on August 1, where the farmers were required to present themselves to their local church with a loaf of bread that proved that they had gathered the harvest. The grass was up to my knees, and I was surrounded by rarely seen flowers like meadow foxtail and sulphurwort, and by the piping, bubbling calls of pairs of breeding curlews. Many pairs. Among the different calls we were listening to were the sharp, barking calls, that indicate the presence of birds that are definitely protecting chicks, something that has become so vanishly rare in most of this country that they face extinction. To hear them, to watch them, and to know that they were here, was to breathe in for a brief moment the air of pure joy. And, for once, I didn’t just want to bookmark it and move on. I wanted to immerse myself in it, and hold it close to me.
Covid has largely kept me from my travels, as it has you, and I am profoundly grateful that it has thrown a moment like this into the sharpest of focus.
The following day, I was at Edgbaston with my sons, and with 17,000 other people. We were enjoying a birthday present they had given me a full eighteen months ago. The cricket, or at least England’s pitiful contribution to it, was not good, but it didn’t matter in the slightest, as to be there at all was a privilege of incalculable worth. In earlier years, I might have minded the endless chanting; today, I just joined in; previously, I might have sighed at the long beer-snakes, and the cries of ‘Feed The Snake!’ as disturbing my cricket; today, I just loved it, and wished the snakes well, and the circling stewards who were trying to confiscate them, ill. A few seasons ago, I might have grumbled at the long queues at the bars, and the comically high prices; today, I was just happy to be queuing and paying at all. The more the better. Behind us and in front of us were people who had drunk in the sun with energy and ambition, if not with wisdom, but they were making me laugh, rather than cross, and we were swapping food and sun-cream as if we had been neighbours for years.
Covid has completely kept me from crowds, as it has you, and I am profoundly grateful that it has allowed me back with them. I am happy to be a lesser part of myself, if they can be a greater part of my life.
Covid has been a shitty visitation of mankind’s folly on mankind itself, but one of the great strengths of our species is to adapt, and move on.
For getting me this far, for giving me two vaccines and for allowing me moments like this, I am hugely grateful.
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