Outside, the air is loud with birdsong and the sounds of
spring. There's so much blossom on the quince trees that it looks as if we've
had a significant fall of snow. All might be normal. Inside, there's the gentle
tintinnabulation of the Bechstein upright that has come down the line from my
irritable father-in-law. The Good Wife – or the Dame, as my father calls her in
ironic recognition of her former acting career – has taken up the piano again. Once
more, the sound of the piano fills the house with something light and magical –
like a sun-shower in May.
She's done some work on herself and is getting over the
fear of practising in earshot. And a good thing, too. I keep reassuring her
that I love the sound of the eighty-eights in the morning. I tell her, too, not
to despair about the occasional wrong note, not to drop her hands into her lap
and hang her head in shame. It's why I love Thelonious Monk so much: those
unexpected discords that open up sudden new vistas and keep you on your toes.
Just recently, she's gone from a bit of Beethoven to the
spiritual, 'Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen'. I like to think that she's
done it for me, since it's one of the saddest and most beautiful songs ever
written. In her previous incarnation, she tackled 'Tico Tico' because she knew
how much I love the version by Charlie Parker, but it proved a musical bridge
too far. She's on safer ground with the slower stuff.
I certainly didn't mean to put her off her stride the
other evening, but I thought she might like to watch a video of McCoy Tyner
playing 'Walk Spirit,Talk Spirit' with his quartet at the Montreux festival back in the '70s.
The great man died earlier this month of reasonably old age. He was 81 or 82,
which is not bad for a jazz musician who has spent his life touring and playing
concerts. A gentle giant of a man, he served his apprenticeship with John
Coltrane before leaving the great man to form his own groups in which to seek
similar spiritual horizons as his former employer. I count myself privileged to
have seen him in his prime at the North Sea jazz festival back in the '80s and
thought that Debs would like to put a face to the name that has been so often
bandied about in this household.
Alas, I think it depressed her somewhat, because she
knows that she will never be able to play with such confidence and fluency.
Nevertheless, she'll have plenty of time to practise in the coming weeks and,
God help us, months of confinement ahead. Now that we're under house arrest.
I'll have plenty of time, too, to catch up on music videos on YouTube –
something which has always been near the bottom of my to-do list. I certainly never
wished for this kind of opportunity.
After our dapper, diminutive president announced his
emergency measures, I stole a march on the gendarmes recruited to fine any
transgressions in order to pay for all the extra recruited gendarmes by dashing
to Brive and back before the 12 'clock deadline to ensure that everything in
the clinic was locked up and turned off. Now, any sorties have to be
accompanied by an excuse-me note – an attestation
sur l'honneur – to show the agents of the law when they catch you abroad.
We need one even for walking Daphne locally. Thus far, no one has stopped us,
but we're wary of Quislings. The other day, I chanced upon the overweight
daughter of a local family, out walking her yet more overweight Labrador. I
said a cheery bonjour and she looked
at me as if I were holding a hand grenade. She took the poor waddling creature
the 200 metres or so back to the family house, while I continued on my way,
wondering whether she might be the type to snitch to the authorities. I saw that Englishman out walking his dog at
15:00 hours this afternoon...
So we both take our forms (filled in and signed in pencil
to avoid waste, which some pedantic policeman will no doubt use one day as a
pretence for a spot-fine), along with our identity cards, whenever we venture
out with the Terrierdor. However, we both realise how incredibly lucky we are
to be living in the countryside rather than, God forbid, a 50m2
apartment in a block of flats. The parks are closed in Paris and probably most
other cities, so humans and dogs are being denied even a postage stamp of
greenery. I reckon by the time this all blows over, just as many people will
have died of depression and suicide as of Covid-19.
Strangely, my eternally optimistic wife is maybe not
coping as well as I am – even with my fresh burdens of resisting the lure of my
fingernails, and cutting down on my coffee intake in an effort to rid myself of
mouth ulcers. She has been waking up in the middle of the night with some specific
or even general anxiety. The gentle glow of an LED light bulb tends to wake me
momentarily, but poor girl has to toss and turn, read and/or meditate to try to
get back to sleep. Anxiety, it is my middle name, so I am accustomed to shut
down my reactor at night and not wake until either the call of nature or my
phone's hideous alarm forces me out of the best place on earth.
It's as if this current scenario has turned her entire
sunny world-view upside down. By contrast, it's what I have been mentally
preparing myself for most of my life. The Darkness is upon us – and why not?
Throughout history, we've had to cope with periodic plagues in some form or
another. It's arrogant of current generations to believe that we should be
exempt just because of improvements in technology and medical science. I am not
now nor ever was religious, but there sure seems to be something biblical about
these last nine months or so: apocalyptic fires, devastating floods, swarms of
locusts in East Africa and now plague throughout the world. If there is a God,
he's definitely an Old Testament version – an old bearded geezer with wild hair
and a deranged look in his eye – who's decided to visit destruction on the
human race for all their transgressions. An eye for an eye...
Now that the worst is upon us, I am in some respects
quite calm. We've got a pack of loo rolls and plenty of seeds and pulses. I'm
finding space in the darker recesses of my head for the next worst-case
scenarios. Just when you thought it was
grim enough... Next up, a financial crisis to make 2008 look like a
rehearsal. Then cometh hyper inflation on the back of all the inevitable money
printing, followed by social collapse and even more extreme political
extremism. Oh, shut the fork up and get
the dog far hence that's foe to man!
Right now, we're fiddling about in the garden while the
sun shines. My 25-year old strimmer fired up on the second pull of the cord
after a winter in the cave. So at
least the pampas-length grass has been tamed for now. One more item to tick off
the to-do list. The worst thing in some respects is the waiting and the
wondering. It's the phoney war before the bombers let fly. We've both
acknowledged a grievous thought that we half-wish the plague upon us and fie
upon all this waiting, but that seems a drastic way of testing our auto-immune
systems and future-proofing our bodies' resistance.
Well, there's plenty of time at least for reading, sometimes
with the perfect accompaniment of piano practice. I've just finished a rather
good and very quirky novel by a Polish writer who apparently won the Nobel
Prize for Fiction. Olga Tokarczuk. I'd never 'eard of 'er. Given that the
current crisis could be seen as the revenge of Mother Nature and particularly
her beasts of the field and forest, its theme – the revenge of animals on the
hunting community in a wooded part of Poland that reminded me very much of this
part of France – struck many a chord. Her rousing attacks on the hypocrisy of
organized religion apparently kicked up a real stink in her country. I shall
leave you with this thought-provoking and rather apposite passage from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:
'I view the world in the same way as others look at the
Sun in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like May bugs
trapped in a box by a cruel child. It's easy to harm and injure us, to smash up
our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as
abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes. But as the
Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower?'
