Both sides of my working life have, for the time being, fallen completely by the wayside, and I have therefore signed up as a drug carrier for the NHS this morning. For some reason, the adventurer in me rather fancies the idea of running drugs around the place, as the antithesis of what middle class 60 year olds are supposed to be doing.
If I get the necessary clearance, I will be a mule by the weekend.
Without over-egging it, these are quite extraordinary times, and I fluctuate wildly between the joy of having a full house at a lovely time of year, and the utter terror of listening a news recording of someone with Covid-19 struggling to breathe their last. We are living through an era where a 10% fall in the FTSE doesn’t even make it onto the BBC’s news homepage, and where the keystone of the architecture of the day is a televised conference from Downing Street. If you want to ask privately if my jaunty words mask a hidden anxiety, you bet they do. And not hidden. Anxiety for me, my family, the vulnerable, the health workers, society and for what we will be re-building on when it is over. Particularly the health workers.
We know nothing, other than, as it must have felt during this season 80 years ago, it is going to get worse before it gets better. I even thought I would comfort myself in Tillington Church at last Sunday’s matins before realising that, just when an infidel like me needed it, it had become paradoxically unavailable.
As always, it brings out the best of people, and the worst of them. And just when you think that there is no humour to be squeezed out of it, a friend sends a completely inappropriate joke that makes me chuckle.
So for now, it’s the little routines. At 8.30 on these gorgeous mornings, the five of us meet in the garden and we do yoga on the grass. What would have had me howling with derisive laughter a few short weeks ago now brings me comfort. In a world where even dog-walking is rationed, contorting my stiff body into ‘down dog’, ‘cat’, ‘cow’ or ‘warrior’ now counts as fun. Fun for me doing it, and hysterical for the others watching me doing it.
And we have agreed that, whatever distractions our working day may bring, we will sit together at breakfast, and at supper, and we will try to allocate a minute or two each day to discussing how we are feeling.
But it is food that has become the still point of our turning world. Food as the destination for all the conversational energy that can’t be allocated to the normal stuff, you know, holidays, plans, stories. Food in the sense of that which is effectively rationed for the first time in our lives, and food in the sense of the importance we attach to the coming evening’s meal. Food as the lantern on the moor that we look forward to all day. It is rather healthy for someone of relative privilege, like me, to have to return from a shopping trip with eight out of twelve things unbought.
On Monday, I made Rick Stein’s Alsace Tarte Flambe, by a yard the best thing I have ever cooked in my life. On Tuesday, I made a loaf of bread from scratch, and I have promised myself I will learn to bake properly by the end of it. I will also try to be a good vegetable gardener this year, starting with planting late-early spuds this evening.
Contrary to the received myths, the darkest days of the World War II produced more than its fair share of cheats, thieves, chancers, spivs, blackmailers and profiteers. It was just that society decided, in the dark days of the fifties, that the myth would be more useful than the truth in geeing people along. Being an optimist, I actually think that society will do better this time round. Oh, sure, you’ll get the normal crop of narcissists who won’t change their lives for anyone, the scaremongers and the seekers of a fast buck, but I am sure we will rediscover the hidden joys of community and simplicity. We have no choice.
So, for now, and in the tradition of people dedicating creative stuff to particular people, this is for the well-being of every health worker out there.
Thank you, all.
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