The New Normal: Days 15 - 29
1st - 15th April 2020
Day fifteen and sixteen of the lack-of-foresight saga. Woke up yesterday morning with a bad arm, which got steadily worse. Tried to haul the motorbike out of the house this morning, but the arm was having none of it.
Turns out I most likely tore a muscle in my shoulder in my sleep and can now barely move my arm without pain. Heavy duty painkillers to come, and I'm wearing a sling. Would be quite mournful, but a slew of excellent advice from friends and family - much of it related to breathing exercises and physio after it's been rested for a day or two - has helped hugely.
Still, the farm shop delivers, neighbours will pick up stuff that's been ordered and another friend is going to pick up the brain-frying codeine and paracetamol - hopefully tomorrow.
All grand plans for the new routine have gone out of the window - "out the window with the window" as Gregory Corso put it.
I'm typing this one handed while a cool breeze comes up the valley from Wales. Annoying as all this is, it really could be worse.
Plus, having spent a fortnight writing hackneyed rubbish which got hissed at then binned, two poems have come that seem to work. I'll take that and run with it. On second thoughts, perhaps no running with anything. Not just yet. So I'll take that and saunter vaguely bedward with it...
Day seventeen of the lost vagueness has mostly been spent in a giddy fug of codeine indolence, watching cherry blossom flickering pink and pinker in the sun and reflecting on the kindness of friends and neighbours who have variously dropped off or posted medication, bread and wine (the last of which will have to wait until I’m off the prescription grog, alas).
I’ve had more face-to-face conversations today (at a safe and sensible distance, of course) than I’ve had in days and, brief though they were, they have pushed back the walls of the valley, which is pricked all over with the possibilities of green. Add to that some calming breathing exercises, and the achievement of a near-meditative state (thanks in no small part to Duke Ellington) and the day has generally slipped by in a most relaxed fashion.
The pain in my arm has reduced to a dull ache, though movement is still limited. A little worryingly, the same could be said of the world beyond the codeine, so I rectified that by watching A Matter of Life and Death. Its hallucinatory Arcadian stillness and gentle insistence on the powers of life and love never fail to stir me out of even the lowest ebb.
So here’s to tomorrow, and to kind people, to sunshine and spring.
“This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?”
Day eighteen of the great looped tape has been balmy, and filled with the faces of nice people, either passing through at a safe distance or on the internet.
On top of that, I have worked out what the weird scrunching noises I heard last week, and slightly freaked myself out about, are. I heard them again, just before dusk and, in a shiny coat of codeine armour, went out and looked.
What I saw was stags in the field below, testing their new antlers on one another. They were grinding and rasping and scruching away, and those not competing were frisking about excitedly.
It turns out that I have a nightclub for stags below my house, where all the young testosterone-addled bucks come to test their worth. And if they freak me out in the process, so much the better for their status, I suspect.
Certainly, when I laughed, they looked up insouciantly and then just carried on, instead of slipping away into the copse by the stream as they usually do.
That’s one less thing to lie awake boggling about, anyway…
Days nineteen and twenty of the long fog have mostly passed in a daze, waking intermittently to the hammer of a woodpecker echoing through the valley. In the quiet of evening, I have begun editing a video, which is, happily, relatively easy one handed. My shoulder is on the mend, and I'll be easing off the meds from tomorrow.
The world outside the valley goes by in the distance like a poorly edited disaster movie, full of soundbites and fury, in which most of the poor players are being forced to stop strutting, and merely fret their hour upon the stage.
I'll welcome the return of clarity, the other side of the codeine. It has built an extra wall around the world, makes me too giddy to walk far and has instilled a distracted vacancy in me that is no help to anyone, fun as it is to experience for a day or two. Focus is needed now.
Day twenty one of the long flight over the cuckoo’s nest. The neighbourhood woodpecker has been doing its level best to convince me there’s someone knocking urgently at the door all afternoon while I put the finishing touches to a little something I have been cooking up to alleviate codeine-enfrazzlement.
It’s amazing what one can do one-handed at a computer nowadays (NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK! YES, I DO MEAN YOU, SIMPKINS. SIMMER DOWN BOY!) and I now have a film to prove it, edited from footage taken by the owners of one of the farms I visited for my book The Soil Never Sleeps.
It’s a plug for the audiobook, due out very soon now, but also a window into the beautiful British landscape which we will all, with luck, be able to share without worry again soon.
So if you’re up for a short tour of Kentish farmland around lambing time, do take a look. There’s a poem, lambs, a fiddle tune from Becky Dellow, more lambs and the wonders of a valley Samuel Palmer used to walk from London to paint.
Day twenty two of the slow but inexorable rise in the water's temperature and the frogs are beginning to notice something is amiss.
I've managed to to swap a bad arm for a bad tooth. A bit of physio will fix the arm and a call to the dentist in the morning will hopefully get some antibiotics my way. Misfortune tends to come in threes, the saying goes; I'm hoping that this is it for me, for the moment.
I am profoundly aware that I am lucky to be where I am, and for my misfortunes during lockdown to be mere annoyances, and profoundly grateful to everyone on the front line trying to keep society ticking over. The few I've seen, in my brief and cautious forays to smaller shops, are looking frazzled and overworked and a little grim-eyed even when they smile.
It almost doesn't bear thinking about how supermarket staff and NHS workers are coping, so I was glad to see Emily Maitlis's decisive takedown, on Newsnight, of the idea that you can escape this by being a fighter, and the idea that Covid19 is a 'great leveller’.
We aren't, as a nation, much given to the idea that it's the small, almost invisible narratives of kindness and conciliation that will see us through, locked as we are into the grand narrative of facing down a large threat with a larger response, driven by large personalities who tend to have access to large reserves of the best of everything, including treatment. Stiff upper lip be damned - now is the time to be a little softer and slower and gentler to each other, and to the world at large.
The trees on the other side of the valley are beginning to fill out to green at last, and the moon will no longer be rising through their stems at the eastern end of the valley like a leaded light by the end of next week. I have been enjoying that vision while I still can.
Days twenty three and twenty four of the lingering miasma, and for the most part the last two days have merged into each other in a cloud of heat and dust.
I managed to get my prescription for antibiotics, but not before a stern lecture from the dentist, after I offered to come in and pick it up. I should not be going out at all, he told me, for though I’m not on the shielded list I am at higher risk.
I didn’t tell him that it was virtually impossible for me to stop going to the shops, as I can’t get listed for vulnerable status (there are, after all, many people with far more pressing underlying health conditions than mine) which would allow me access to supermarket deliveries, and anyway live in a fairly remote place where only a very few supermarkets are willing to deliver, thanks to an absolutely hair-raising alpine-style hairpin bend, but thankfully a friend was able to collect them on my behalf.
I look at New Zealand’s response to Covid19, which seems to have been incredibly effective, and wish the British government had responded even half so coherently. I hate being locked down, but worry about people on the front line faced not only with the risk of disease but with incompetence at the highest level, casts that personal loathing aside immediately.
I’m caught between fairly vague directives and the risk of Covid19. Obviously I’m being as cautious as I can, but what really can I do? Well, for starters, I can get back to tidying now my arm’s largely recovered.
I began again yesterday, and was almost immediately rewarded with the discovery of series three of Twin Peaks, which I bought when it came out then promptly buried. Watching the first episodes on the computer last night, sleepy in the cool evening with the attic window open to passing breezes, the aftermath of the day’s heat overcame me.
I dozed off in my office chair at one point, tipped backwards and awoke arse over tit, unhurt but bewildered, on the spare mattress. I laughed myself silly and went to bed after that. It seemed the wisest course of action…
No further mishaps today, though I came close on the road home from the shop, taking a corner with my heel accidentally pressed on the gear pedal of the Honda 90, so that I coasted faster than anticipated. I leaned hard, so missed going into the other lane and the oncoming car, and was rewarded with a very welcome friendly face waving at me excitedly from the next car coming down the hill.
And now I am doing nothing but walking and cleaning and basking in the heat for the next few days…
Days twenty five and twenty six of the long ride on Pandora’s boxcar, and the bank holiday has slowed the slowness down further, to a treacly crawl. Windows of concentration come at a premium, and have been used to make one room in the house more comfortable, to remember to hang out laundry, and to cook, and little else. Phone calls to and from family and friends have been genial, if a little aimless; tender variations on a single theme. I find myself missing my friend Rick Vick, who would have been 72 on Easter Day. There were few better people to cheerfully grumble at the madness with.
There have been times when this valley has felt like the garden in the spaceship from Silent Running, an empty oasis drifting in space. Life has felt increasingly frictionless without the regular presence of people to spark off, argue with, agree with, laugh at and be laughed at by. It is of course necessary to keep going, especially when so many people are living through far harder times than I am, and fortunately there are things I have agreed to do that I am now behind on. Deadlines help, and to now be behind on a couple will hopefully sharpen my focus, as will simply admitting that I have fallen behind…
Days twenty seven, twenty eight and twenty nine of the great not-waving-not-drowning-but-just-treading-water have been a muddle of many small kindnesses sprinkled liberally onto a landscape of melting clocks.
Watching Twin Peaks: The Return was, in hindsight, perhaps not the best way to spend much of the Bank Holiday (an even more locked down weekend in the middle of a lockdown). The metaphysical psychoses of small-town America (or anywhere else, for that matter) are not a helpful or healing place to visit at the moment.
Although much of it is Lynch at his eerie best, too few of the kitsch tics that grounded the weirdness of the original series made it through the Black Lodge for the experience to be anything but deeply unsettling.
That is especially true at a time when it is all too easy to accept the idea of Agent Cooper being trapped in a dimension of curtains for twenty five years (while everyone asks him, with stilted tongues, if this is the future or the past) as documentary fact.
It would have been an untenable headspace to remain in had not friends appeared over the horizon at irregular intervals with provisions and time for brief, good-humoured conversations at the requisite safe distance.
I spent the Bank Holiday Monday avoiding podcast-editing by writing local limericks, and yesterday wrestling with a recalcitrant computer while failing miserably to get Garageband to lower the volume of tracks for my audiobook (a problem that will be fixed thanks to the generosity of friends).
Today, however, I overcame the first pressing deadline that has been hanging over my head - I have edited the first episode of the John Clare podcast I have been working on remotely with Becky Dellow; it should be ready to go live soon.
There are, of course, more things still needing doing, but I feel like I'm out of the woods, and that the owls are more or less what they seem…
