ISOLATION DIARIES PART 49: HOW TO SOCIAL

To be honest, I was never excellent at social, even before lockdown. I used to get anxious on the way to people's houses, knowing often that the first few seconds would define the entire evening, not just what happened, but also how I felt about myself, before, during and after.

It's easier if it's just me as a guest, certainly, and whether consciously or not, I cultivated those smaller moments more often. It feels much more like family that way, and I've loved that.

But one day, big parties might be back, and I might be super anxious again, treading that fine line of wishing I were more extrovert, while also wishing I were at home, being completely introverted.

All of that being said, I went round to my friends' house yesterday for pizza in the garden. It was lovely - nice food in the beautiful big sky with the sun sinking over the houses, amazing friends and great company.

And yet, it still took me ages to feel sociable - a surprisingly long time. Was I talking at the right volume? Would my eye movements be too rapid, my face too expressive? Would I do the right thing, say the right thing? Would I remember how to 'social'?

As it happened, I needn't have worried; they made it easy by being lovely. As with all my friends, they're experts at that, even when I'm not feeling quite like myself. And it didn't take a huge time to adapt back into the smoothness of lovely friendship.

Perhaps this is how it is now: small, informal gatherings, learning how to social again, plus larger zooms, reminding ourselves that no more than two households can be together at once.

I won't miss the big parties. The thought of a crowded room filled me with dread long before a virus made it dangerous - I need no help to avoid the terrors of mingling. If the world really is to become smaller and more intimate, more hygge and less huge, I can cope with that, I think. I can cope with that well.

A SYNCHRONISING OF HEARTBEATS

It’s nearly 2am: another late one. Maybe an early one if you like to be pedantic. Although if you really like to be pedantic I’m late for my appointment with sleep, so it actually is another late one. As you were.

I’m awake because I felt a need to pray. I know: it sounds so super-spiritual doesn’t it? In some circles maybe I could have said I felt a ‘real burden in my spirit’ or that I was ‘moved to seek the Lord’ or something. But I don’t speak like that. And that isn’t what I mean anyway.

What I mean is that I just wanted to. In much the same way as I might stay up doing a jigsaw puzzle or watching a film, I found myself wanting to do some praying. So I did. And I think that’s okay. And now it’s super late.

I’m not saying either, that ‘just wanting to’ is how you should do it. Heavens above. I can’t tell anybody that; you should figure out that joy yourself. And I’m not trying to give you clues about how special I think my relationship with God is; that would be a weird way to fish for a compliment! No, if you know him, your relationship with him is already forged in the shared experiences of your life with him - so of course that will be unique to you. You flow with that and I’ll flow with mine.

Neither do I think there’s anything special about the time of day! Actually, I should have been asleep - it’s not ‘holy-hour’ just because the believers in this particular time zone are snoozing. If you’re a morning person, talk to him then! If you’re not a morning person, find a time when you’re alive: don’t fall for that More-Spiritual-If-You-Get-Up-Early claptrap. It’s not in the Bible. You pray when you want to. And if it happens to be in the middle of the night like me, then listen, I know how you feel. Tired, mostly:

I’m not belittling the burden, by the way. And I’m not trying to be irreverent. I too have gears for prayer, and sometimes I can flip into different modes. I think tonight, as I sat alone in my flat, I just needed someone to talk to very deeply, and the Friend of Sinners was up and listening, ready to laugh and love with me.

That to me feels like what prayer should be like actually - a sort of synchronising of heartbeats until you laugh and love with the one who set your funny heart in motion in the first place. If you’ve never tried it, give it a go. It’s worth being real. Though if he tells you to go to sleep as you have work in the morning, it is probably best to listen. He’s not wrong.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 48: MONET'S GARDEN

It seems the cracks are starting to show. A lot of people seem thoroughly frustrated, and while we sit at home stewing about it, we're painting pictures in our own heads, using the colours from the assumption palette.

-

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Claude Monet only painted in the evenings towards the end of his life - a lot of his pictures from around 1912 onward look like it - yellowy browns, faded lily pads, shadowy Japanese bridge. Was he captivated by sunset? No, not really; in truth, his eyesight was failing due to cataracts, and he could no longer see all the colours in front of him. All that was left in his eyes were those browns, yellow ochres, and burnt umbers of old age.

I guess he assumed that the world was a certain hue, and then chose those tones from his own assumption palette. It's easily done when you're looking through faulty lenses.

It feels strangely familiar at this end of lockdown with very little face-to-face contact. We're used to protracted zooms and teams chats, and emails and flipflopbook.

Well I am; I'm sitting here making assumptions about people from the assumption palette, just like Monet did.

Perhaps what we need is to recognise the difference between an impressionist painting and a photograph. Impressionism gives you a simile: a photo shows you the real thing. Monet used brush strokes to create the feeling of a thing without specifically defining it in the paint - but it isn't real; it's just the perception of what was actually there. While the camera, as they say, never lies.

Social media, emails, whatsapps... even this blog... only ever give you brushstrokes of a person, leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps about whether you're reading the work of a nerd, a showoff, a precocious, kind, thoughtful, whatever... you get to decide that. Knock yourself out.

Whereas meeting me face-to-face, getting to know me a bit better - that would help you fill in those blanks, just like seeing a real photograph would help show you the real colours in Monet's garden.

So that's my thought today, amidst the murky waters of trying to analyse everyone. It's always good to remember that we don't have the most complete picture of where we're at, and we won't for a while. So it's sensible to be patient and kind and nice, and not to leap to the assumption palette too quickly. 

EIGHTEEN

So my niece just turned 18 and it's turning out to be a scary thing. I mean who, for goodness' sake, was born in 2002... after 9/11, after the Y2K bug and yes, after Opal Fruits got renamed as Starburst... and gets to call themselves an adult?

Well, a whole bunch of people now! Including my niece, whom I still think, is way too young for such a thing as growing up.

This is one of the great mysteries of time, isn't it?

When I look back on my own childhood, I can't help feeling it lasted longer - summers stretched out, school went on forever, learning was slow-speed, and Christmases were far apart enough to recapture the wonder in between. In my mind's eye now, those eighteen years expand into an ocean of time, far longer than the next eighteen years went: far deeper, far more meaningful. It felt like I had been a child forever.

And relatively speaking, I guess I actually had - all my life, in fact. But to others observing, those who were older, wiser - it must have flown by just as quickly as my niece's has. For me, it was only a few years ago I was pushing her around in the wheelie bin for a fun dare from a weird uncle. For her, that is simply a lifetime. Time plays tricks on us.

We celebrated her birthday in the park, where, in between rain showers, she blew out a candle in a Domino's pizza (she doesn't like cake) and opened a bottle of passion-fruit flavoured cider. I'll always be a fan of her, but I'm not sure I like time so much.

THE WATER CYCLE

Well it did rain today. Noisy, sweepy, bouncy rain that washed out the park and thundered on the windows.

I was thinking about how rain was here before us. Millions of years ago it rained in exactly the same way: on leaves and plants, dripping musically from branches under grey skies, pouring and pounding into the mud and the ocean, the grass and the rivers.

We’re lucky to be blessed with water. On other planets it rains liquid methane. Titan, a moon of Saturn, has rocks and mountains, and rivers of CH4 that flow under gassy orange skies. Meanwhile, Venus features rain made out of sulphuric acid (which you’ve got to admit would be unpleasant), and on Neptune and Uranus, the carbon ice crystallises into diamond rain.

Anyway it really did chuck it down today. I wasn’t out in it, thankfully. I was watching inside, grateful for its familiarity and its music.

You may of course, believe that rain followed Noah. The theory goes that antediluvian Earth was a sort of humid hothouse where huge animals and plants grew, and men lived to be hundreds of years old. Above the sky, like a sort of refractive greenhouse-roof was the layer of water that would eventually come crashing and cooling down onto a world of sinful people. As Noah shut the door on the ark, the first rain fell, and the world has never quite been the same since.

All I know is that it’s been raining on and off for a very long time. And probably, all this water has been recycled so many times that what comes out of our taps was once passing through the likes of Henry VIII, John the Baptist, the Blue Whale, and the Brachiosaur.

It won’t corrode my umbrella, or pound through my raincoat like chunks of diamond. It won’t smell like flatulence (as it might on Titan) and it won’t precede an apocalyptic flood that wipes out everyone except an elderly zookeeper. It’ll just trickle and tumble like it always does, rolling and rumbling and durbling and dripping its way back to the sea - growing plants along the way, feeding animals, filling reservoirs and keeping us all very much alive and hopeful on this dusty old rock.

When it was over, I looked up above the shimmering roof tiles opposite my study window. There, as clear as one has ever been, was a gigantic rainbow, arching majestically, hopefully, brilliantly, between the clouds.

There it is, I thought. My favourite bit of the water cycle, however long this whole thing’s been going on.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 47: HIDDEN

There's really not much to write about these days. I'm just sitting here at home, working away, watching the weather, feeling more and more disjointed; the world out there continues to slide into partisan misery, and all of us start to wonder whether our future looks much like this for good.

Amazingly, there are still people bleating about having to wear masks in shops and enclosed spaces. They cite their 'personal freedom' as evidence that they can choose not to - which is fine, so long as they're also expressing their freedom to choose to catch the disease. Most people though are quite sensible about it. Better still, most of us don't want to be responsible for spreading it, even if, as in our town, there are currently only 11 confirmed cases. However, it's just good citizenship to look after each other.

I went food-shopping yesterday, and for the first time, felt a bit wobbly about it. It's so daft - a thing I've done hundreds of times before, and yet I felt quite lonely, pushing a trolley round the half-empty store of masked shoppers. You can't see smiles behind a mask. They can't see you. For some reason it felt apocalyptic and scary, and I had a wave of nostalgia for the days when this might just have been an enjoyable thing to do, instead of a perfunctory task in purgatory.

"You got a nectars card?" snapped the lady on the checkout as I tumbled the last few bits into my bag-for-life. I slipped the 'nectars' card out of my wallet and swiped it, while she stared at me. She barked the total, I paid, then pushed my trolley on the squeaky route back to the car. She'd wished me a nice day, but to be honest, I'm not sure she meant it.

I hope the world gets a bit nicer again. It's tough to see, given the waves of fear and division that ripple across the globe. How long do we have to hide our smiles behind these masks, I wonder?

UNDER THE PLOUGH

I was up late the other night, out in the park after sun-down. I was looking for the comet.

They said you could see it about 10 degrees below The Plough. I found The Plough, its stars twinkling brightly. It was elevated high above the horizon, way over the trees. But there was no comet; there wasn't even a smudge of a comet, splashed across the night.

It was dark. The sun had left a band of orange, spiked with the silhouetted shapes of trees and rooftops. Above the thin remnant, light blue turned to deep blue; deep blue turned to velvet, and velvet to black.

I wondered whether it was still too bright - perhaps that light pollution was hiding the comet from view? It certainly wasn't as clear as the photographs I'd seen of it sparking over Stonehenge and Durdle Door. It should be as bright as the moon, if Instagram is to be believed.

The wind blew gently in the dark trees, rushing soft across a park of shadows. I was the only one there - quite safe beneath The Plough.

What's the point of a harbinger of doom, if nobody can see it? You'd think, wouldn't you, that if God were going to send a disaster-warning, He'd make it a little more obvious? How did all those medieval people see it and not mistake it for a cloud, or just eye-wobble? After a while, even my eyes were playing tricks on me from looking up into the sky too long. I could easily have seen circles and dots up there.

There was one point actually, when I had to remind myself that comets don't flash regularly on the starboard side or leave double vapour trails; pretty sure that one had a more man-made explanation.

I went home and did a bit more work. About an hour later, when it was fully dark, I decided I would switch all the lights out, open the curtains and look north once again to search for the comet.

I threw open the bedroom window. After my eyes had adjusted and I could make out the ends of the gardens, I looked up and saw The Plough - now a little brighter, but half-hidden by the trees it had moved behind. I rubbed my eyes. There, underneath that glittering constellation, was a little smudge of cloud, barely visible, like a whisper of a nebula, or a strand of candyfloss. If I'd had a telescope, I'd perhaps have taken it out to the park to make sure, but all I had were tired eyes.

There was a cool breeze. Jupiter was sparkling in orange, just behind some trees as they waved. I yawned and shut the window, ready for bed.

No comet, no doom then. The rest of the universe seemed entirely in keeping, safe and pleasant. And with that, I thought, I'm probably quite happy. 

HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO HAVE A RIOT?

I went for a night drive tonight; it's a thing I do sometimes to clear my head.

My car radio is stuck on Radio 4, which I'd forgotten, so instead of the sports and politics news, I was treated to a quiz between university lecturers and their students.

"In maritime and map-making," read the quiz master, "What is the significance of the Cornish town of Newlynn?"

I didn't know. Neither did the students or lecturers. Apparently it's the place where they define what 'sea level' is for the rest of the UK.

I drove on a bit. The quiz droned on about linguistics and the original name for Burkina Faso. Then, in a weird bit of synchronicity, I happened upon a scene by the pub.

There were three police cars, flashing. A crowd of young-ish people were milling across the road.

"According to English law," asked the quiz master, "How many people are required for an altercation to be considered a riot?"

The pub garden was full still. I saw faces illuminated in the blue light, amidst the bright yellow high-vis jackets of several police officers. A riot van, in perfect simultaneity, was parked further up the street beyond the hubbub.

"Is it three?" asked one of the professors.

"Three?" scoffed the quizmaster, "No, no, it's not three. Over to the students..."

On the other side of the road, a female police officer was remonstrating a small circle of what looked like very young people. There was a boy sitting upright on the floor, hands behind his back.

"21?" said one of the students.

"Oh too many," replied the host, "It's twelve. You need twelve people to start a riot."

I rumbled slowly over the mini-roundabout, while the crowd dispersed. I caught the eye of the young man sitting on the concrete, just a short way from the WPC. His face, even in that short split-second, was a mixture of remorse, fear, and defiance - just a kid really, who'd had no intention of being arrested, and was now in handcuffs on a balmy summer night.

There was a mum somewhere whose heart was about to be broken, maybe a dad who's going to feel more angry and helpless and ashamed than he knows how to handle. That's a heavy thought. It was all very heavy.

The quizmaster made some lame joke about politics and rioting that I can't remember, and then moved on to the next round on latin phraseology.

But the face of that boy was still in my mind, perhaps now being shuffled into the riot van. I didn't particularly think any of it was funny.   

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 46: MASKS

More fun on the VCB. I've been in two minds about writing about it, as it's tough to do so without identifying people and the funny idiosyncrasies they have on there, with their green screens and backdrops. I can't tell you without breaking the THINK test - and although it's neither untrue (T), unhelpful (H), nor uninformative (I), it is perhaps unnecessary (N)... and I do worry about it being unkind (K).

They're all keen on masks though. And they're all keen to point out that they've all been wearing masks out to the shops since lockdown began. Very keen.

This is the new rule now - in a couple of weeks we'll be fined for going to the shop without a face mask. Fined and shamed with each glance across the aisles.

It's reminded me how much the advice and the science have changed. At the beginning, there was some inconclusive discussion about whether masks did anything at all; now they're the law of the land. 

Similarly, there was a thing about the virus taking a toll on the over 70s - still true of course, but there are many many more cases of younger people contracting it, and having a rough time. A few months ago, I think most youngsters imagined themselves pretty much asymptomatic at worst.

There are also people who've recovered but still have ongoing issues - that wasn't known at the beginning. It's a pretty horrible thing this virus. And there's much more we didn't know, and still don't know, that might change our behaviour again. It's always good to keep up with the latest.

One thing that did emerge on the Virtual Coffee Break today though, was the point about wearing masks to protect others. It occurred to me that this lights up a subtle difference between the whiners who believe it infringes their rights, and the wearers, who don't want to accidentally spread a deadly contagion. The VCBers agreed.

By the way, did this happen with seatbelts? Were there people who refused to wear them back in the early 80s because they were so restrictive of their liberty?

The subtlety is in the art of putting your fellow humans ahead of yourself. I don't want to catch it, not just because it's horrible and I might die, but also because I might not know I've got it, and I could so easily pass it on to someone. The mask is for your protection first, mine second. I found myself resolving to think that way from now on.

I wonder what the world would be like if we all thought like that?

HARBINGER

I don't know who looked at 2020 and thought, "Hmm. You know what this year could do with... a medieval harbinger of doom!" ... but brilliant, thanks.

Yes, we have a comet. Foe of soothsayers, emperors, and tapestry-makers alike, this unpredictable plume of disaster streaks the night, as terrible and foreboding as it could be, in a year that's already had its fair share of glum tidings.

Except it's not though, is it really? It's a chunk of space-ice that's broken off from the edge of the solar system. It's spinning around the sun on its own spiralling journey into disintegration, and its elliptical path just happens to have brought it into view from here. It can no more affect the cause of men than a Martian can move a molehill.

I suppose if you believed that the sky was a backdrop on which the planets rolled around the flat world, if you thought perhaps the stars were holes in the fabric that let the light of heaven through, all in that predictable, clockwork fashion that describes the seasons, then you might be forgiven for assuming that a random 'star', falling through the night sky with a fiery tail, might be a sudden sign of great change or disruption. You might even assume that your deity of choice had given you a bit of a heads-up on all the evil coming your way, for some reason.

Perhaps the comet even did precede something terrible from time to time. There's one in the Bayeux Tapestry for example, just before William the Conqueror set sail for England in 1066! Looking back, it would have seemed ominous - especially if you believed in that kind of thing; oh and if you didn't before, you'd be much more likely to afterwards - even if it were simple coincidence. Perhaps great and terrible things happened all the time, and it just so happened that people were on the lookout for those woeful things around the time they saw the 'long-haired star'. Sometimes, after all, we do see only what we expect to see.

Well, unless we're living in Deep Impact, I'd quite like to see it too, doom-bringer or not. It's cloudy today so quite unlikely, and getting up early is not my strength at the moment, so there's every chance that Comet NEOWISE will go sailing by without me.

If I could choose it to be a bringer of anything though, then why not unexpected joy, freedom, relief and celebration for the world, in the second half of this year? I'm not sure we can take much more darkness; perhaps things could balance out?

Well. It really is just a lump of ice, tumbling through the solar system, burned into a coma by the sun. If I really want to change the world, I have a feeling I need to look a little further, a little deeper, and maybe a little closer to home, than to a stray comet.

I MISS HUGS

I Miss Hugs

Bear hugs, prayer hugs

Saw-you-over-there hugs

Side hugs, wide hugs

I miss hugs

Deep hugs, sweep hugs

You're-the-one-I-keep hugs

Gift hugs, swift hugs

I miss hugs

Clear hugs, tear hugs

You-are-always-near hugs

Sad hugs, Dad hugs

I miss hugs

I miss, you miss

Falling in completeness

Sobbing in the sweetness

Safe and true

One day, some day:

We'll have overcome day

I pray, we'll say:

I missed you

THE PHISHER FOLK

So someone at Phishers Anonymous Dot Com is working overtime... I've had half a dozen emails this week from "Amazon" and "Paypal" warning me that my "account" has been "locked" following "unusual activity".

The unusual activity in Amazon's case is probably me browsing for Manual Garden Handpush Mowers, having not previously been interested in much garden stuff until my discovery of the peach-leaf bellflower the other day. And I can only guess in Paypal's case, the activity is me imagining I have an account - which I don't, actually, so you know... pretty unusual.

It's the grammar I can't cope with. Whoever's doing this is beavering away, resizing the Amazon logo, spoofing a Paypal support email address, carefully crafting fonts and scripted buttons and colours, so that unsuspecting panickers will click the link and enter their details... you'd think the spoofers would check the easy bit:

'We advise you to resolving as quickly as possible'

'Thanks your account with us'

'Emregency action is required...'

As well as checking the actual email address (usually a string of garbled characters separated by an @) I think it's always a good idea to proof read emails like that. Whether attempting English from a foreign land, or running it through Google Translate and hoping for the best, the Phisher Folk typically mess up something.

I deleted them all.

A while ago I was sending them to each company's dedicating anti-phishing mail address, but as you might know if you've done the same, they never respond. Then I logged into Amazon and changed my password. Had there been any unusual activity, I suspect they'd have not let me do that.

Instead the browser just threw up a whole load of hand push lawnmowers and gardening equipment.

I NEED MORE COWBELL

You know how magicians are able to convince you that they've done a thing they really haven't done, while simultaneously doing a thing you haven't seen them do?

Yes. Well that's how I feel today; I've been asked to do an online gig. The samba band I played with in October think I can play piano a certain way after that magical night, and they haven't clocked that I basically bluffed and improvised my way through the entire set - just like I've been (expertly) bluffing everything I've ever played at.

The music was so difficult, so ingloriously tricky, that much of my act was describable by the phrase: 'holding one note down and reverting to the cowbell'.

So when it comes to recording, on video, my piano part, from the score... from actual music, written down! ... well, daunting isn't the half of it. That's like asking a magician to really vanish a woman.

Okay it's not quite like that, but you get the drift. I'm going to have to work quite hard to get it right, in isolation from the band, and unable to play by ear. Then someone's going to hear each excruciating note in a soundproof room and work out how to cut me out of the edit. And I told them! I told them I wasn't good enough.

And do you know the worst of it? I haven't even got a cowbell to use.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 45: OFFICE CHAIR

There was a fine rain today - the stuff you can barely see unless you squint at the trees. It was bright and overcast too this morning, making this feel very much like 'holiday rain'.

That's what happens if you grow up holidaying in the UK: your childhood memories are drizzly traipses through glistening, wet, seaside towns, interspersed with uncomfortable beaches and windy cliffs, and the odd steamed-up cafe. It's more charming and delightful than it sounds.

And it's certainly more charming than being squished up indoors for a hundred days and more.

I think I'm going to have sort out my working space. I've been getting cramp and indigestion from this sedentary life, and without meaningful exercise it feels a bit like my body's forgotten how to stretch out. Worse still, my brain has tricked itself into believing that the solution to all this, is cake. And it clearly isn't.

I thought about adjusting my office chair, something I perhaps should have done a while ago. The trouble is that I'm unqualified to know how to use it.

On the first yank, I dropped six inches with a hydraulic whooshing sound and a thud. I couldn't pump it back up again. My second attempt locked the whole thing rigid, which meant for a while I was sitting like a child at a desk that's too big, rocking backwards and forwards as though possessed by something malevolent.

Spinning around didn't seem to do anything. I had a vague idea that a few counterclockwise rotations would 'up-screw' the chair back to its normal height, but all that actually happened was that I got dizzy. In the end, I grabbed another lever, took my weight off the seat and watched as the chair rose slowly to its previous height. At which point, I realised I needed a little sit-down. And the chair collapsed again.

I went out in the rain in the end. I listened to the sopping leaves and felt the damp in the air. It felt autumnal somehow, like those first few nights of university after a long, hot summer. That was of course, an illusion; it's still July. And I'm 42 years old - if anything, a kind of extra mature student, and not quite fresh-faced in a cathedral city.

Imagine! Another degree! Maybe I could take it in office-chair configuration. Though I doubt I'm clever enough.

PEACH-LEAF BELLFLOWER

I made the mistake of ‘applying updates’ at 23:45. My computer is churning through 45% after three quarters of an hour.

“Don’t turn off your PC,” says Windows. “This will take a while.”

So then, just enough time to tell you I found campanula persicifolia in my garden today. Peach-leaf bellflower. Don’t worry, I didn’t know what it was so I looked it up. It’s a delightful little purple hooded flower with yellowish stamen, wistfully spouting from a green stem at a rather handsome height of around 30cm. There it was, bobbing in the long grass.

Nature’s amazing. A single example of one of those flowers on Mars and it would be front page news for days; here, in my garden (and cosmically speaking that really isn’t all that far from Mars in the grand scheme of things) they’re happily ordinary, waving in the July sunshine, anonymous, amidst a planet of infinite natural variety and colour.

I was less successful with the little black and orange bug I saw crawling up my raincoat the other day. Whatever it was, whichever of the millions of insect species it was will remain a mystery. I couldn’t photo it either - too small for the lens to focus on. All that’s certain is that these little crawlers are quite unique to our lovely planet, just like the campanula persicifolia. Nowhere else has them.

It’s wild of course. It’s just grown there without design - much like everything else in my jungle-like garden. Wildflowers, long grass, weeds that once were uprootable and now are taller than me; it’s a regular labyrinth of wilderness.

But I don’t feel shame. Some would; maybe my neighbours think I ought to bend closer to embarrassment at letting nature take its course. I’m not flexing that way though, but then neither am I intending to go on keeping it so untameable. Someone’s coming over soon with power tools and a box full of patience.

But not now. For now, I’m waiting for Windows to do its own weeding and strimming, through all the files and cookies and libraries that need attention. I have left it late.

Persici - peach. Folia - leaf. Campanula - little bell. Makes sense. Happy little flower, blossoming in an overgrown and wild garden, on a planet where that kind of thing is, on the whole, enormously encouraged. I’m glad I live here.

THE RIVER

For some reason, Sundays are turning into good days to write poems. I'm not sure why. I do appreciate though, as I've said many times before, that poetry isn't everybody's cup of tea. So if you're more of a coffee-person, you shouldn't feel under any compunction to read this or any other here, nor should I be to stop writing them. And it's lovely having a choice isn't it?

That being said, this one feels a bit like a moment. Sometimes life gives you those points where you've got to decide whether you're going to stay safe on the side of the river, or risk it all for the adventure of trying to cross it. There's no way to predict what will happen - other than the conviction that you're doing the right thing. And it takes courage to trust that conviction, whichever choice you make -  courage is a thing I've spent a long time trying to learn, and to trust...

The River

The river rushes
Wide and deep
Untameable and free
And on the bank
My soul should seek
A voice to speak to me

I cannot cross
Its churning veil
Nor sweep the torrent wide
No foot will pass
Nor heart prevail
To reach its other side

And yet I read of
Men of old, who
Stood upon this shore;
Who saw the waters
Fast and cold,
And heard the river roar

With truest heart
And courage bare
They slipped their shaking feet
And standing by
The river there,
They stepped into the deep

Each forward move
The river eased
And thin the water grew
On glinting stones
With gentle breeze
They made their journey through

The presence deeper
River wide
They crossed upon the word
For there they knew
You would provide
As those who walked had heard

The river rushes
Wide and deep
Where fear and courage swim
Your promise echoes
Strong and sweet
But still,.will I step in?

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Well it's the USA's birthday again. How old are you now? 244, is it? Congrats to you all.

Now then. I watched the President give a speech from Mount Rushmore last night. He seems quite adamant that those pulling your statues down are not part of 'The American People' - which is interesting, don't you think? Because they certainly think they are. And if he doesn't, then what does he think they are? What does he think America is?

Meanwhile, he's also quite sure that:

'Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom'.

That is what he said. But you know, America, don't you, that in 1868, you signed a treaty that gave the Lakota Sioux ownership of that exact land - until you discovered it was rich with gold, and snatched it back from them in 1890. So 'forever' seems like an odd word to use for thousands-of-years-old sacred rocks and ripped up treaties.

I say snatched... what I mean is something more vulgar. You stripped the Lakota of their guns and then you massacred them, taking their land and their gold for yourselves. Within a few years, Charles Rushmore was eyeing the Six Grandfathers mountain, and sizing it up for the four fathers - Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln.

And there they are: presiding over an America that's just a short 244-year scintillation in the long history of your continent.

Well. Happy birthday.

Over here of course, we're celebrating a slightly different moment of history: an independence day all of our own, as, after four months, the restaurants, the cafes, and the pubs are now open.

I went on a wander through the village tonight. There was the Butcher's Arms, lights on, windows wide, beer garden singing. There was the Himalayan Hotspot, wafting Nepalese aroma across the junction with a full-house and an inviting glow. There was the crowd of hooded young people outside The Plough, and there were the slow-rolling police cars passing by. It was the most normal things have felt for a long time, even if, in their normalcy, those things now looked slightly surreal. The world has changed.

I used to say there'd be a WATIO point, When All This Is Over, but these days, I'm not sure; I'm not sure any of us believe there is a distinct moment to look out for. The virus is still out there, still infectious, still killing real people. Gradually, we're easing out of the lockdown, slowly phasing ourselves back into life - but now, in that life, we wear masks that hide our smiles; we're served by people behind perspex screens, our waiters and hairdressers are in plastic visors, and we're no longer tactile, connected, nor together. Things have changed and they may never be back to normal.

And that's why, in amongst the great English cheer for beer, there's a whole load of us who are just not quite bothered, or ready, or even willing to celebrate by cramming into our locals. It just doesn't feel like we're anywhere near letting off fireworks yet; we are not independent of the virus.

If 'The American People' are anyone, you've got to admit, they're probably the Lakota. They're the Cherokee, the Apache, the Sioux and the Navajo, the Pawnee, the Shawnee and the Iroquois - and countless others who were once spread across the continent from 'sea to shining sea'. And when they look at the land of their ancestors, and see the descendants of us sweaty Europeans, singing about a 'land of the free, and the home of the brave', I do wonder what they make of it.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 44: GREEN SCREEN

So we're at home for another few months (October apparently), and it's prompted a few of the Virtual Coffee Breakers to talk about buying actual green screens so that they can properly project fancy, fun stuff behind them.

"So I ordered one, and it came," said one person, "But I didn't realise it doesn't come with a stand, and I had nothing to hang it up with."

I couldn't help wondering what he's done with his carpet of green fabric. Picnic blanket? Maybe a table cloth for an impromptu game of billiards?

Another VCBer has ordered a 'pop-up' green screen, which is much like a pop-up tent. Let's hope it doesn't suffer from creases! And also that he's able to pop it down again! ...which anyone who's ever tackled a pop-up tent might know, is rather like trying to pack an octopus into a duvet cover.

So there's that to look forward to I guess - colleagues pretending they're in Back to The Future, or chatting to you from the crest of a rollercoaster... or the set of Blackadder. And you can bet that they'll keep on one-upping each other in the never ending quest for approval and laughs.

Hard to blame them really - it's like a microcosm of social media, and I'm not immune to that stage.

Anyway, regardless of me attention-seeking this way instead of that, I do keep my camera switched off, and I join the VCB mostly on mute, like a lurker in the background. Besides, I don't know what I would project behind me? I can't think of anywhere I want my colleagues to think I am other than where I actually am, which would be in front of a bit of green fabric, suspended on coathangers in my spare room. I don't need that kind of attention.