The New Normal: Days 2 - 14

17th - 31st March 2020

Day two of keeping myself semi-isolated, apart from any necessary trips to shops or to pick up prescriptions, and already I have read two novels and watched (and laughed myself silly to) two Marx Brothers movies and spoken on the phone to a number of people I haven’t been in touch with for far too long. 

One of those was a wrong number. An old friend misdialled trying to reach an elderly relative he was checking in on, and it was a very pleasant surprise for us both when we recognised each other’s voices. 

I’ve also made several steps towards sorting out ways of surviving financially in the face of all work dropping off, and am surprised to discover I feel more alert and focused than I have in eight months. 

I have even begun to make lists of what needs doing around the house, and plans for how to tackle them; a habit I have for too long been unacquainted with. 

It’s time to get organised, to make the best (literally and metaphorically) of the space I’m in; of the space we’re in. Time to act intensely locally and yet still think globally. 

Here’s a toast, then, to family and friends: those as close as a hundred yards or a couple of miles away, and those spread across the globe from America to China, Italy to Australia, Germany to Jordan and everywhere else in between. 

Love, solidarity and comfort to you all.

Day 3 of the great hideaway, and I am cheered by the memory of a friend who phoned last night to read strange Inuit folk tales down the line and laugh about their extreme oddness with me, as well as the sight, from my bedroom window this morning, of a squirrel boxing a pheasant’s ears before running up the yew tree, chittering angrily all the way...

Day four of the long confinement came with a lot of sunshine and a non-stop Wagnerian cycle of bird song, plus a nip of whisky just after six. 

That’ll do. 

Yes, that’ll do.

Day five of the new routine, and I actually have a routine planned out. It involves cleaning, exercise, reading, cooking, watching one film a night and a goodly chunk of time set aside with a pen and paper, or a deinternetted laptop, to write. 

All it really lacks is someone else here to laugh at me sardonically when I inevitably spend half of the allotted cleaning time gazing out of the window. 

I spent a nice, languorous day planning it. 

It starts tomorrow.

Day six of the long emptiness, and have achieved most of what I set out to do on the first day of daily planned activities, though more reading than writing got done. Hey, it’s all part of the process, right? 

Now just waiting for the live broadcast to the nation, in which the Prime Minister will no doubt attempt to whip off the tablecloth while keeping the wine and the cutlery in place. 

Odds on that only the wine remains on the table...

Day seven of the new normal (which was yesterday, so I'm running late with it; the more things change, the more some things stay the same...). The attempts at self-organisation are mostly holding up, despite the sunshine. 

I realise that the films I am allowing myself to watch, at the rate of one a night (oh god, it is so good *not* to be caving in to the siren song of Netflix right now...) are all ones that my father took me to see in London at revival showings when I was a teenager: Marx Bros, Powell and Pressburger, with Jaques Tati and Will Hay to come. 

That which informed and enlivened his youth, and mine in turn, in other words. 

At a time when we are by necessity physically separated, it is good to realise how quite so connected we are.

Day eight of the international change of pace, and I have sent off the audiobook of The Soil Never Sleeps to my publisher (after several hiccups delayed it, such as discovering that I had forgotten to record one of the poems back in November). 

I couldn't have got to this position without help, from Emily and Lukas, who recorded it, and Becky, who has provided glorious fiddle tunes to go in the place of illustrations between the seasonal 'chapters' of the book. 

I now feel like I have achieved much today, though in truth it was the work of minutes, assembling the last necessary bits that friends had provided for me. So here's to friends; may we be free to meet in a pub or café some time in the near future!

Meanwhile, the cleaning and tidying is proceeding. Imagine a glacier moving its way down to the sea over a few centuries. Then imagine someone had filmed time-lapse of that process, once a week. Then imagine that someone had sped up the resultant film. Slightly. 

You now have a working idea of my approach to cleaning. Still, until now, I have been too often prone to operate in pre-time-lapse mode, so this is progress... 

Plus, I have nettles and wild garlic for a stir-fry tonight, and a mild sunburn...

Day nine of sunlight and solitude, and the pressures of living where I do are beginning to bite. 

Don’t get me wrong, I know how fortunate I am to live here. It’s unutterably beautiful in this remote-feeling thumb offshoot of Laurie Lee country, and largely quiet, apart from a few walkers (and, just now, the owls who took umbrage at my going outside to clap into the valley’s void for the NHS workers - they hooted indignantly for a good few minutes after I’d stopped). 

That said, living alone with only a few neighbours may be great when you can throw caution to the wind and bomb into town to sit outside the cafe with the best views of passing people (my office, as Jon Seagrave calls it) and hail them as they pass. After nine days of solitude, however, and with no end in sight, when the only human contact you’ve had is the strangers you’ve dashed past in the shop, even the prettiest valley begins to close in a little.

It’s not helping that the internet connection here is patchy at best. The exchange it comes from is super-fast, but that exchange is 7km of overhead cables distant and, if the wind picks up, the connection often falls over entirely. All the tests I’ve done have led me to conclude that attempting to work from home via Zoom, or whatever other video-conferencing software there may be out there, is liable to be an intensely frustrating experience for all concerned - even in the best of weather.

I am considering recording regular poetry workshops to put up on YouTube, free to use unless someone using it feels the urge to make a PayPal donation, but am all too aware of how much I rely on gauging people’s interest, and where to go next with them, by watching them as they write.  

I am also working on writing ideas to submit to various places, as well as slowly setting up a podcast with a friend, which it will be relatively easy to work on remotely but, in this new normal, I am feeling a little out at sea. So much of what I do relies on human contact, even if the initial writing part is done in isolation.

Despite all of this I am still fairly positive of outlook, and sure that something will come along eventually. It turns out that, in a crisis, I cheer up, even with the general bafflement about how exactly to make money sloshing at my feet like slurry from a cattle pen. 

I have had the good fortune to be granted a little breathing space by the Society of Authors’ hardship fund, too, so I intend to keep on working out the best ways to get by while I go about the humdrum necessities of cleaning, tidying, and howling at the... no, sorry, I mean getting exercise.

All strength to everyone coping with these extraordinary times, especially those at the front line fighting the disease. I am in awe of their fortitude.

Day ten of the slow creep into the future, and all the psychological benefits of the good work of the day - finding out that I can after all use Zoom, and then socialising merrily on it for several hours instead of doing useful things like cleaning (it’s Friday - I needed a break....) - have just been thrown up in the air by strange scrunching noises coming from the path outside my house. 

Logic tells me it is probably a badger eating some unfortunate rodent, or some other natural phenomena; but I have seen enough horror movies in my time to tell myself, instinctively, that the person alone and seemingly content in a house in the woods who hears scrunching sounds outside and does anything more adventurous than call “h...hallo?” worriedly out of the window, before shutting it and switching on all lights in the house, then heading to the kitchen for a restorative tea and ginger biscuit, is in for a world of pain. 

So the lights are on, the kettle’s boiling, I have a podcast on quite loud and I now know for certain where the big bread knife is. I am feeling suitably foolish enough about my sudden moment of “Erk!” that I am able to write this - yet still I am keeping half an ear off Kermode and Mayo wittering on about films to monitor what’s happening outside. 

I haven’t had this feeling, while in this house, in years. The last time it happened was nearly 30 years ago, watching Salem’s Lot on TV in the attic. At the exact moment the vampire scratched at the window in the movie, a tree branch caught a slight Westerly breeze and scratched the window behind me. I leapt from my chair and ran from the room. Slept with the lights on for three nights. 

Succumbing to it now has much to do with the lack of other humans around me, I suspect. Without regular contact with our own species, we start to jump at shadows in the dark. Same for lack of contact with the world around us, with that which we can’t control. Any barricades we put up become bars too quickly if we let them, and from behind those bars we become terrified.

So I am drinking tea in the general direction of all unnamed and invisible terrors, defiantly, and tomorrow I will go for a good stomp around the bounds of this valley and tell it I am here, and talk to friends and family on the phone, and keep on with calmly waiting the strangeness out...

Days eleven and twelve of the ongoing slog, and little has been achieved. This was largely deliberate. 

I have found myself, over the last few days, remembering the stillness and focus of my grandmother's house on a Friday night when my father and I turned up for the Shabbat meal, and relishing the idea of some sort of sabbath in which one did very little but reflect. So I took a day, from Friday night to Saturday night, to do almost nothing but think. 

Shabbat, of course, is very much about thinking in company: the rituals of song and silence, bread and wine. Not having been brought up in the religion, seeing as I am not religiously Jewish at all (as my mother wasn't), there was little I could do at my grandmother's house but politely don the kippal on entry and hum politely along to the old family tunes. 

Over the weekend, I found myself humming along to the silence in the valley, to the birdsong muted by cloud cover. The conversations I had, on Zoom and on the phone, were lovely but did not contain one ounce of the ritual, honed to simplicity over millennia of practice, I have been craving. 

That is something I will have to build myself, as I am very far from finding religion, however strenuously strange the times we live in may be. It is the people that matter to me, and the gentle rituals of the Friday night meal are, to my mind, a way of navigating with and around people. I remain cheerfully agnostic, while seeking a way back to people. 

The closest I come to the sense of a long narrative of learning is through poetry, and so it is fitting that the one thing I achieved over the weekend was the first major step towards completing the first episode of a poetry and music podcast I'm working on with my old fiddle playing friend Becky Dellow. 

We've worked on two live shows before; the first being 'The Apple's Rounded World: A Century of Slad in poetry and music' for Laurie Lee's centenary and, more recently, a show based on my book of farming poems, The Soil Never Sleeps, interlaced with folk tunes from the farmlands of Britain. The podcast will step further back in time and marry the time the tunes were written with a poet of the day. 

As it'll have to come out regularly, hopefully the process of making it will become enough of a ritual, laced as it is with poetry and music, to carry me through the intensely quiet, unpeopled days ahead.

Days thirteen and fourteen of the unceasing rinse and repeat, and the lack of the physical presence of people in my day to day life is really wearing thin.

If I hear walkers in the valley, I rush out into the garden to say hello. Some of them oblige, but some look alarmed and scuttle off.

I am always several metres away, do not have a cough and have not yet bounded out in naught but a dressing gown flapping open in the breeze, so maybe it’s just time to shave and to work on looking less fervidly eager for even the vaguest hint of human proximity when out in public.

This was all beginning to depress me, but then a friend sent me a video of her very small child attempting to sing 'You Are My Sunshine', by way of a virtual hug. The rendition ended abruptly when the child knocked her eye with the ukulele, which she was swinging around in a toddler’s best impersonation of true rock and roll style.

It was such an insufferably cute moment that it cheered me up no end (the singing, not the eye-knocking!), sentimental old goat that I am. Only much later does it begin to feel like I may have knocked myself in the eye with a ukulele too.

Ah well. Let’s see what tomorrow brings...