THE HAPPENING OF A SUNDAY

So Sunday happened. I had a tech failure at church when my phone slid out of its stand and accidentally fell on the keyboard controls. For a while I was at risk of playing everything out-of-key, to the sound of the hurdy-gurdy transposed up by a semi-tone.

I styled it out. In fact I’m pretty sure nobody would have noticed, unless they were looking at my face (anguished and embarrassed) and they really shouldn’t have been.

What else happened? I overreacted to a thing. I really don’t like that I do that; it feels like a furious sort of weakness. I’ve worked it out though - it’s a reaction to being bypassed or ignored, and it’s pretty typical. I think in some ways, we all fear insignificance and we all boil up if someone tries to take our feeling of mattering away.

I tried taking the heat out by switching glasses - I mean, choosing to see it through the most gracious lenses. It sort of worked but I’ve got a long way to go.

“Always choose to believe the most generous explanation,” I reminded myself, exhaling. Got to remember that. But then I’m pretty sure I said that last time.

Not much else happened. I went to the supermarket this afternoon to get butter, and found a store full of people trying not to panic-buy. It had the air of a Christmas Eve about it - polite, full, fast-moving, but also the pace accelerates the closer the store gets to closing time. The queues were long and angsty.

The reason of course is that we go back into lockdown on Thursday. Lockdown 2.0. I think most people know it’s the right thing to do, but also like the comfort of having thirty two spare toilet rolls in the cupboard.

Then later I logged into the poetry slam. It’s nice to meet different people, even if it has to be by zoom. We had the usual mix of deep and meaningful poems tonight, the head-scratchers, and the expressive topical explosions. Poetry, as the leader pointed out today, seems to be ‘anything written down with deliberately chosen line breaks’.

I don’t know

Whether I truly agree

Or whether that

Is nonsense

Either way, it occurred to me that when you’re online reading them out, it’s up to you to make the words flow. And kudos to my fellow expressive poetry slammers; we did all do exactly that.

And then a Sunday morphs imperceptibly into a Monday, even though they’re quite a different species. This will be Week 34 of working from home - a number unbelievable in March or April! Outside, the wind rushes noisily through the trees. I’ll probably still be here next March and April, watching the season change to Spring again.

Well, one step at a time. You can’t live tomorrow today so you may as well get on with it. Right now I need to sleep across the ‘evolution of species’ and let last week morph into next like a caterpillar to a butterfly, hopefully. Anyway, that at least is how Sunday happened.