Late in the afternoon of Good Friday, I drove over to
Giselle's barn to buy whatever vegetables she had on offer. There wasn't very
much, but she'd saved me half a dozen eggs, so the journey wasn't wasted. Snail
Woman was there, her face half-covered in the kind of bandana I used to wear
when I was a cowboy. Giselle admits us one at a time into her 'shop', so I
dutifully waited my turn outside and joined in the conversation, which was
predictably dominated by coronavirus. Last summer in the height of the heat
wave, I would ask Snail Woman about the health of the molluscs she breeds for
eating. The poor creatures suffered as we all did from the relentless heat.
When she emerged and I prepared to go in, the
conversation turned to traffic. On the way there, I hadn't passed a single car
on the main road, which can be a little busy at that time of day – just as
well, because my indicator has packed up again. My Noddy car suffers terribly
from condensation in damp weather, which affects the little metal contacts that
make the lights flash. I haven't had to swab down the windscreen from the
inside for weeks, but the humidity has done its damage. Anyway, I learnt that
two people aren't allowed in the same car at the same time. Debs and I had
speculated about driving to Brive if the Airbnb enquiry turned into a booking.
It didn't. We'd have been fined by the gendarmes, it seems, if they had stopped
us. It's OK in the current climate to sleep with your partner, but not to drive
with him or her.
Is that not utterly ridiculous? As indeed are many things
right now. In Paris, for example, the poor citizens are not allowed out between
10am and 6 or 7pm, I forget which, but it surely means that everyone will
emerge at around the same time, thereby running a far greater risk of contact
with their fellow cell mates. I've subsequently heard on the grapevine that
it's aimed at 'le jogging', but it's
still enough to make you believe that my friend the tree surgeon is right when
he says that 'its total bullshit, man!' He's a big-time conspiracy theorist,
who sees all this brouhaha as a man-made plot to establish a new world order of
fearful, compliant citizens who'll be too scared to protest any more. Who
knows? He may just be proved right. I didn't stop to ask him about the absence
of 'chem-trails' in the sky and what it signifies.
Who comes up with such decisions? Perhaps a committee –
with panic on the agenda. Not, I would imagine, an individual who has taken the
time to think it all through. Time is what we have on our hands at present, even
if ultimately perhaps not. Nevertheless, the Good Wife and I still find there
aren't enough hours in the day. She asked me over lunch on the front porch the
other day how my perception of life has changed after a month of incarceration.
Well... not a great deal in some respects. Perhaps I'm using the hours
available to me in a more measured way, not trying to get everything done in a
single day as before. Probably in recognition that tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow will predictably offer more of the same.
Deprived of my bicycle by parliamentary decree, I'm now
walking the dog on alternate mornings. Walking her through the woods, which generally
don't accommodate ageing cyclists, gives me the chance to commune more with
nature. Even with headphones on to catch up on music promos, I still feel in
the thick of the natural world. Today the eerie bark or mating call of a deer
infiltrated the big brassy sound of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80. I've seen and
derived encouragement from nature's remarkable ability to heal itself – the
photos of clear skies over hellholes like Delhi and Bangkok are remarkable –
but I'm not convinced that this strange state of stasis will morph into some
kind of environmental golden age (unlike a certain eternal optimist on the
other side of the marital bed). Any long-term recovery depends on mankind
allowing it, and while commercial interests are at loose in a world governed by
despots, with humans continuing to reproduce like rabbits, I don't give Mother
Nature much chance of any kind of long-term recovery.
The longer we've been locked down, the better the
resident optimist has been coping. She confessed that going out to work four
days a week gave her a chance to escape from de-stabilising thoughts of the
garden and her paper work, both of which she believed herself incapable of
negotiating. Without the escape route, she's had to confront her demons. Just lately,
she's spent many a happy hour toiling in our concrete garden (after a month
without rain), and she's pretty well up to date now with her admin. Every
morning, she finds time to practise the piano and her yoga sessions are apparently
more 'meditative' than ever they were before. Despite the freeze on work, she's
still been tapping away like there's no tomorrow – on Zoom rather than
face-to-face and mainly for free, doing her bit to allay the fears and distress
of individuals and groups. She is the very model of a modern miracle-worker.
As to how others are coping in these hard times, I can
only comment on the family across the water. Our daughter's got herself an app
for her phone and she and her housemate walk five or six kilometres in an
attempt to clock up however many thousand steps it takes to satisfy the youth
of today and fitness fanatics in this digital era. Her other housemate – the
one who managed to get back to the family home in time for confinement – sent
them a care package for Easter: a loaf of homemade sourdough bread, some
cookies she made and some chocolate rabbits.
Easter came and went here without so much as a chocolate
egg or a hot cross bun (two-a-penny,
two-a-penny – but not alas in France), although we enjoyed pancakes with a
melted square of dark chocolate on the morning of Easter Sunday – and very nice
they were, too. Back in Cumbria, my mother-in-law made herself a batch of buns
for Easter, decided that they needed a glaze, then burnt her saucepan to death
in attempting one. Apparently, the buns weren't particularly nice in any case.
Now her sorely tried daughter has had to find and order her a new stainless
steel two-litre saucepan online.
Meanwhile, down south in Hampshire, one sister is in
splendid isolation because of health issues, still carrying out her part-time
work from home three days per week and busy at other times indulging her
passion for genealogy. I haven't asked her whether she opens her window each
week to clap for NHS workers. My other sister is allowed out. Instead of
spending two or three hours per day with our father, she meets him for a
quarter of an hour or so each day in 'The Exercise Yard', three times around
the flats in which he's self-isolating for a longer life. I've been busy taking
up the slack on Skype, generally now two sessions per day. My old man, love him
as I do, is not to be confused with the 99-year old war veteran who has raised several
million pounds for the NHS by walking up and down his garden with a Zimmer
frame.
With more time on her hands, my sister is re-discovering
married life because my brother-in-law can't go off on business travels.
They're taking long walks together and it's possible that their new plague
routine will dampen their desire for foreign travel. My brother, meanwhile, has
made a wardrobe and may be drinking rather less each evening, now that he's not
getting back at the end of each day, worn out by the life of a plumber. But
it's not guaranteed.
