END OF MONTH PERSPECTIVE

So ends January, the first month of the Year of our Lord, Two Thousand and Twenty Oneth.

Sammy and I went to the meadows today to see the flood. It was full - where the gentle, flat grass had been, a lake had expanded, lapping round the trees and the benches. The Thames had burst its banks. It’s hard to believe that in the summer that meadow is full of frisbee-playing picnickers, canoeists, and sunbathers. Beyond the lonely shape of the stranded park benches today, the white river rushed along, under the bridge and on to its journey to London and the sea.

There were two girls out there, laughing as they waded in their wellingtons. It must have seemed fun to them, splashing around in the cold, damp afternoon. It occurred to me though, that not being able to see the riverbank might prove hazardous, but thankfully they had the sense to stay the better side of the benches.

It’s been a drizzly old month altogether then. It’s rained and snowed, and there have been sunny days interspersing the wet ones. It has however, been locked down, and I don’t think that’s helped the mood.

We got back to the bubble, and I phoned my Mum. She told me of a lady who’s had to have a toe amputated, a nephew who’s been forced to get up and log in to school by his teacher, and a teenager who threw a strop and spent hours sulking in the car. I laughed at that last one, though it probably wasn’t all that funny.

Meanwhile my Mum said that she’d seen snowdrops - and, believe it or not, that’s a reminder that the flowers are already starting to stir. Perhaps February will have some warm days and the occasional daffodil?

Maybe it’s all about how you look at things. Teenagers risk their lives splashing by the river. Others lock themselves in a cold damp car to spite their parents, who have warm tea and toast and a central-heated view of the street from the bay window. Meanwhile the lady who lost a toe is free of the pain it was causing her and ‘wishes she’d done it sooner’ so she said. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Which is a good way to kick off February, I guess: the second month of the Year Two Thousand and Twenty Oneth, anno domini.

Hopefully it’ll be a great one.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 75: HUMOUR

I logged onto the company meeting webex. The screen was taken up with the larger than life faces of the bigwigs, ready to launch into their presentations of graphs and motivational powerpoint slides. The second thing I saw was a chat message pop up to everyone, all 715 people, in the bottom right hand corner. It said:

"Matt, are you going to start with a joke?"

For a brief moment, my heart was in my mouth. Different Matt. The CFO, a guy called Matt who lives in a large kitchen in Minnesota has a habit of starting his presentations off with 'humour'. Nobody was asking me to unmute and ask the entire workforce what's orange and sounds like a parrot. So, it's a good job I didn't.

Anyway, it got me thinking about humour. I think I miss those shared moments. On zoom or teams or webex, all you get is an awkward silence, even if everyone's chuckling behind their mute buttons. Oh what I wouldn't give to be part of a group chortle, even a collective groan! These are the moments that bind us somehow and make talks a whole lot easier for audience and speaker.

In fact, I think we tend to find things a lot funnier when those around us do. There's a subconscious microsecond for processing how funny a thing is and how to fit in with the laughing crowd. Perhaps comedians know this and spend hours trying to build waves of laughter around the room - it gets infectious, a sort of ocean of laughs that sweeps us along on the tide. It certainly can be uplifting. It's a bit of shared humanity I think is important.

Matt didn't start with a joke in the end. He just launched into his 'super-awesome' pree-zentation. It's remarkable how we're all adapting to online speaking and online listening - it definitely feels as though the dynamic is different. Perhaps when we come back to the world of group meetings, of live heckles and collective chuckles, we'll find a new joy in those moments all over again. Together.

If not, we'll all just have to drop our terrible new jokes into the mix and let the tide wash over us, online or not.

NIGHT RAIN

The rooftops shimmer

In the light

And gentle the refrain

Of every singing gutter pipe

And softly stirring drain

The street lamps flicker

With the night

And inky puddles gleam

And caught within the pool of light

Where some of us still dream

The empty street that

Sings aloud

Yet for a world asleep

The rain within its velvet cloud

Is shrouded with the deep

The night rain falls through

Blackest skies

And gently, finds its way

To fall and sing in lullabies

And wash the dust of day

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 74: MISSING PEOPLE

I listened to the radio as the news came through. More than 100,000 gone in the UK now. It's a grim milestone, and one that seems just so  absurd given where we were a year ago.

And it was only a year ago - reports that it was spreading through China, that Wuhan was in lockdown, that the Chinese State machine was bulldozing people's houses to build more hospitals. The virus had yet to make it to Europe, and it was still a distant rumble in Washington.

I'm starting to greatly miss my family. Last week, my eldest sister had a big birthday, and instead of the usual hilarity and hijinks of a family get together, I had to push a feeble card through her letterbox. It felt so wrong.

Then two days ago, my Mum had to go to her friend's funeral - a lady who hadn't died from COVID but had had complications from a different problem. It would have been so nice to have been able to drive her to the crematorium, or perhaps better yet, just put an arm around her to let her know that everything's going to be okay. I miss her.

But there's missing people, and then there are missing people: folks who aren't coming back to normal life with us; people who were taken before their time, by this hellish virus. And in this country, there are now more of those than could pack into Wembley Stadium.

Being stuck here, writing about classification of URLs and message management and release notes hasn't exactly given me the feeling that I'm helping very much. At best, my greatest contribution to the battle is simply to stay at home - though I wish I could do more.

Do you remember when 20,000 was a 'worst case scenario'? It seems so long ago, that first wave.

But let's be positive. As it stands, nearly seven million people have been vaccinated in the UK. That's great; forget Wembley, that's the whole of London.

And the more that number goes up, the closer we get to winning this war. The beach might seem full of stranded starfish, but it matters that we make a start. That's a lot of people, and someone somewhere has done a phenomenal job to get that many people protected.

I miss my people. I miss the niblings and my sisters; I miss my mum and my dad, and I miss all the people who light up my world like sunlamps. These are my missing people, but my desperate hope, and I'm so aware how sad this might be if you've lost someone in that terrible hundred thousand, is that they won't be missing forever.

NOT TOTALLY TROPICAL

I started several blogs over the weekend. One was about how I had a weird craving for Lilt - a drink I don't think I've had for a decade. I was disappointed to learn that it's neither made nor sold in the Caribbean. Ha! It turns out it's the 'totally tropical taste' of West Yorkshire.

Anyway, I don't know why I was craving it.

Then it snowed. I woke up yesterday morning to see giant flakes of white drifting from the pale grey sky. A quick look out of the window showed a row of excited people, out with toboggans, standing at the top of the hill. The park was thick and white.

There's not much to say about snow that hasn't already been said. Soon social media was all a-flurry with pictures of snowmen and kids throwing snowballs. The UK usually has a contradictory relationship with snow, but on a Sunday in the middle of lockdown, when nobody particularly has to be anywhere, there was only joy.

Today then, a thin layer remains. It's brilliantly sunny in that way that only cold, January days can be: pale blue sky, bright yellow sunshine, rooftops gleaming with snow-melt. The road is white where the shadows fall, but soon it'll all be puddles, I imagine.

It doesn't look slushy. That's the worst, when the snow turns brown and gets heaped up on the side of the road. It doesn't look frozen either - there's no fun in slipping over frozen snow! It still looks quite pristine, like a layer of icing sugar, and in the sun it's bright white - it could almost be the Alps... without the pure air, the fresh smell of pine, the clear views or... er, the mountains.

Well, anyway, it's very nice-looking out there. I might go for a walk to the shops later, and see if they have any Lilt. 

THE COUNTRY OF THE HOPEFUL

I watched the inauguration today. I remembered a drizzly January afternoon four years ago when I stayed behind after work, watching it in the office. Washington is of course, five hours behind us.

You know how I feel about expressing political opinion: I don’t want to do it. Either you believe today was the beginning of a wonderful new era in America, or you believe it’s the terrible start of its godless end. Amazingly, the experience of the last few years has shown us that it’s possible to see exactly the same events with our own eyes, and still take opposite views on that. Well. I’m not here to criticise one view or another, only as ever, to observe.

And I observed something fascinating today. Misplaced or not, deceived by a trap of Satan or inspired by the presence of Christ (and a lot of people would have you believe that those are the only two available options) there was actually hope in the air. And America really needs that, I’m sure you’ll agree, whichever side you’re on. There was something symbolic about the dark clouds lifting and the US Capitol being lit by the sunlight of a cool January morning.

That spirit is what I observed. And then, when the new President paused and asked the nation to pray, I felt it rise in me too; a Brit on the other side of the pond! So, I turned my observation, as well as I saw it anyway, into a poem. Because that feels like what I do.

The Country of the Hopeful

Blue skies and white clouds

One January day

A cool wind of difference

That took our breath away

The Potomac would glisten

The stones would shimmer white

The rising of the sun that seemed

Still new, and soft, and bright

Trumpets and fanfares,

Banners in the breeze

A gentle hint of summer

Through the silhouette of trees

The city stops to listen

To flags that fluttered high

And birds that find a melody

And sing it through the sky

Shadows and sunlight

Heavy hearts that ring

The anthems of tradition

Their religion made them bring

The country of the hopeful

So brave and fair and new

United in one moment

Beneath those skies of blue

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 73: MOODBEAMS

Week 45 and it's starting to look like Lockdown 3.0 is just about working. There's a lot of lag on the data, but infection rates are starting to drop in England.

The number of hospitalizations is going up - this is still serious - but there is a quite logical lag-time there. In a few weeks, we'd expect to see that number drop too.

Meanwhile, we the people (I work with), have been told we're to work from home until the end of June.

That seems a long way off. I'm going to need a lot of courage to get through it, I think. I'm kind of fed up with this whole arrangement.

-

There's an inventor out there who's come up with an idea: she's invented the Moodbeam, a device that managers can use to track whether their employees are happy or not. It's a wristband. Feeling good about life? Press the yellow button. Not doing so well today? Push blue. All the data is sent to an app that a manager can track to tell what the 'mood' is in their team.

I'm not sure it'll catch on. For one thing, most managers happen to be middle managers - mine certainly is; I'm five layers below the Big Cheese. If that is the case, an ocean of blue responses won't exactly persuade a mid-level manager to click a yellow themselves.

Secondly, half-decent managers ought to know that info anyway. You can tell from one-to-ones and checkins can't you? You can tell from the tone of an email, or the look on someone's face when they log into Microsoft Teams or Zoom. And you can probably tell a dozen other ways too - I'm not sure a colour-coded wristband is going to help.

I also like how it assumes there are only two moods: happy or sad. If there's any learning from lockdowns, it's that life can take you through complex emotions which are not resolvable into neat little categories. For example, right now, I really don't know whether I'd push yellow or blue. Come to think of it, I don't even know whether the wristband is asking me how I specifically feel about work. My life might be a yellow - it might not have anything to do with the very blue portion of time I spend answering emails and organizing the tech writing backlog.

The wristband itself would point me towards blue, and I bet I'm not alone. Who likes being monitored?

What they could do is show a sort of anonymised map of the Moodbeam results, but not just to the managers - I mean to everyone. That might do it. Would it look like an ocean of blue with spots of yellow, as I predicted? Perhaps. But then maybe if we all saw it, we'd realise we had an opportunity to start turning each other's blue responses into yellow ones? Would it prompt us to try to make the world happier? Or would it just show us that most of us are... fed up?

And if I believe that is the case anyway, moodbeam or not, shouldn't I be doing something about that, regardless of how I feel?

CLOSE TO TEARS

This one will take a little explaining. Not by me perhaps, but for me, as I don't really understand it. I know some people can't cry; I know others can and pretend they can't. I also know that some of you cry a lot, and like me, live very close to the edge of tears... perhaps all the time, and often for no obvious reason. This then, is for you, and for me.

Close To Tears

Heart that beats a little faster
Quivers to the bone
Skin as clear as alabaster
Colder than the stone

Eyes that sting with fire and thunder
Red the river runs
Clouded with the fear and wonder
Born of many suns

Blink away the burning ocean
Wipe away its trace
Hold inside this raw emotion
Running down this face

Here I live, and here I wander
Broken with the spheres
Deep the sea breaks me asunder
Spilling with the tears

FAR AWAY FEET

I’ve just been looking at my feet at the end of the bed. They seem very far away today.

I doubt I’ve got taller, but somehow those wiggling toes are sticking out at the end of my jeans, and they do seem a long way off.

I get this sometimes - either a perception that I’m longer than I thought, or, more often, the opposite: that I’m a very small person. I buy M sized jumpers and they’re baggy like tents. Then I search for trousers with an inside leg of 30 inches and wonder why the waist size is a waif-like 28 and won’t do up around my 33 inch waist. Then it doesn’t seem right that my waist circumference is longer than my actual legs - like a sort of garden gnome, or a weeble. It’s easy to do yourself down.

But not today. Today, my toes look like they’re six feet away. My femurs are marvellously longer than two outstretched hand-lengths and the tibias float off towards my bare feet in the hazy distance. I could outshank Longshanks, glower over Goliath, and bolt past Usain tonight, given half the chance. In my dreams perhaps.

Is this is a common thing, losing perception of your dimensions? I had this when I was young: I’d sometimes feel as though my fingers were enormous and my nose could rub the ceiling, especially if I closed my eyes. If I lay down, the room would spin, often as though the stars  were far far away; often as though I could reach out and pop them in like sweeties.

Well anyway. There’s no real way to prove my feet aren’t as far away as ever. The more important thing is that they’re still attached to the rest of me. And that they are.

THE BURNING SHIP

It's raining today, which is surprisingly welcome. There's something so familiar about a rainy day, especially in Britain. I'd miss it if I lived somewhere sunny.

Given the drizzly beautiful weather, it was tough to get up and get going this morning. In the end I made the lengthy commute from the bedroom to the study (stopping off at the bathroom) and wrote a poem I wasn't expecting.

This one's all about letting go, especially of the most beautiful things. The older I get the more I realise how difficult and how necessary that is. Everything, every thing, should be held lightly. Some years ago, my friend captured this idea by burning a wooden ship in the hearth and photographing it. I thought I'd write something to go along with that thought:

The Burning Ship

The waters turned in darkness
The billows burned with light
Where timbers snapped with fire
In the darkness of the night
The wooden ship abandoned to
The spitting hull and deck, where
Flames around the bowsprit
Carried glory to its wreck

The splintered masts were cracking
And the flames were leaping high
The fire along the wooden beams
Licked thirsty through the sky
The sails curled ever tighter
As the starboard wind took flight
And pushed the lantern vessel
Through the watches of the night

I saw the smoke ball upward
I watched the ship ablaze
I saw its former beauty
Through a dark and dreadful haze
A trail of fire consuming
All the glories it had seen
Now a craft of fire and ember
Where its splendour should have been

And I saw the waters turning
Under fire, wind, and stars
Where forgotten things are burning
In this changing world of ours
And the ship upon the ocean
For the bold, and by the brave
Was the heart of my surrender
Sinking soft beneath the waves

TIME ELVES

We're in that weird part of the year now, when it's awkward saying 'Happy New Year' to people we haven't seen yet. I have a meeting with someone in a bit, and I'm pondering how to kick it off. To me it seems like the year is old enough not to be 'new' any more, though I do still wish it to be 'happy'. 

In fact, I can barely believe it's the middle of January already. Someone at the North Pole has been ratcheting up the dial I reckon, making us spin inexorably faster. Well, hands off the dial, Time Elves - it's getting harder to enjoy things when they fly by so quickly.

Also, there are a lot of pictures going up on social media at the moment of people's kids when they were younger.

"Look how tiny! Look how sweet!"

An inevitable pause.

"What happened? LOL."

An inevitable comment.

I'll tell you what happened: the Time Elves messed with the planet and now children grow up about 500 times faster than we did. There are toddlers taller than me these days. You should see them - they tower over me with headphones and smartphones and a half-smile of derision. All it takes is a couple more nudges of the dial, and they'll be parents themselves, pushing their own toddlers around in the park.

Well anyway. Back to the middle of January. I think I might go with the evergreen "Hey how are you?" and let the year slide into what the church for one calls 'Ordinary Time'. If he says 'Happy new year' to me though, I'm absolutely going to return it with, "And also to you!"

Because actually, I think everyone needs to be wished happiness regardless of when the year of talking to them begins.

Except you, Time Elves. You don't get a happy new year. You leave that time dial alone. 

WHEN CYMBALS RESOUNDED

When cymbals resounded
And prophecy proved,
Where tongues were declared
And the mountains were moved
When fire descended
From heaven above?
The people of God, they
Forgot how to love

When patience and kindness
Were words on a page
And pious the people
Would read it, yet rage
When eagles were boasting
And gone was the dove?
The pew and the pulpit
Forgot how to love

When faith was a banner
Of red, blue and white
That shouted in daylight
And burned in the night
When shattered the window
With fist and with glove?
The children of promise
Forgot how to love

When men and the angels
Have uttered their last
And mysteries fathomed
Since long ages past,
The king of all sorrow
Whose joy yet prevails
Will stand on this truth that
His love never fails 

 

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 72: THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE ON EARTH

"You know, Matt, I wouldn't be surprised if all of our mental healths are suffering," said a friend of mine today on the phone.

Agreed. The 2020 blast hit us when the weather was turning warmer, and for that first wave, we had spirit and courage, resolve and resilience.

Today, the numbers look similar to then (the new variant has seen to that) and we're in a foggy, freezing, January lockdown.

I've found myself longing for a little slice of normal today. You know: going for a cup of tea with my parents, booking a table for dinner in a restaurant with soft music and glistening wine, maybe taking in a movie, or going for a stroll by the river with the contentedness of good friends in high spirits; travelling - flying on planes, booking holidays, catching trains, or just hopping on a bus without the need for a facemask.

To be honest though, it's just the exhaustion of it all that's getting into my bones. I'm so tired, and there's still so far to go. How do you hold on when you already feel like you can't do much more holding on?

My friend was referring to church people, but it is wider and truer than just us. I reckon a lot of people are feeling the chill and the sink of lockdown-just-after-Christmas. The difference with Christians is that we tend to heap guilt on ourselves on the top of the low mood, because all of us have been taught that we should be the 'Happiest people on Earth'. And honestly? We're not.

So how do we go easy on ourselves? What do we do? Positive self-talk? Regular fresh air and good food? Better sleep cycles? Exercise?

Yeah probably. But also, admitting that we're in need of a little help sometimes. We're not designed for isolation, after all.

EPIPHANY

Through desert wind
And blinding sun
Through torrent, rain and flood 
Through fire and ice
The Magi come
To find the heart of God

Through stranger town
And darkened street
Through forest, green and fair
On sunlit road
With endless feet
To find a saviour there

Through ancient doors
The pilgrims go
Through loss and joy and pain
Where those upon this journey know
The beauty of the same

Through frankincense
And myrrh and gold
Such bitter scent, and sweet
Beneath the starlight bright and bold
We lay them at his feet

Through this, our worship
We have come
Where all our sorrows flee
This God incarnate, Holy One
Is our Epiphany

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 71: RETURN OF THE LOCKDOWN

 I see the new year hasn't stopped the Phisher Folk. I just had an email to tell me that my "Apple is locked."

So. I went to check the fruit basket, and happily all my apples remain accessible, not to mention my fully authenticated satsumas, unencrypted bananas, and my last password-protected pear, which no-one else has any use for.

Meanwhile in the UK, we're in Lockdown 3.0 as expected. After going on TV and saying the schools are safe, the Prime Minister then changed his mind, followed the Scots, and did the right thing by putting us all back at home. It's scheduled to last for six weeks, but I don't think anyone's holding their breath for mid-February.

This feels so different to the first time. It's winter for one thing, so our daily permitted exercise is a freezing excursion. Also, the virus is more transmissible now so the danger is higher than it was in the spring, plus it seems we're all a lot less stringent, probably due to the utter tedium of it all and desperation for this poxy thing to all be over.

But we can't force a way back to a free world by pretending it's not happening.

--

"Short of taking his car keys off him, there's not much more I can do," sighed a lady on the radio this morning. Her son had packed his things and was determined to head back to university to 'see his mates'. I crackled with fury.

But honestly, that young man was probably thinking with a different head on his shoulders to me. For one thing, these students pay through the nose for their accommodation and tuition - their contracts are probably not reversible, and they're currently paying for rooms and resources they're simply not allowed to use. To a young person who's pretty sure that they won't be affected by the virus, that they won't pass it on to people who could be... to someone whose life and identity are definitely not enhanced by living out of their childhood bedroom... the equation is probably quite a simple one. I might crackle with fury about it, but who knows- maybe I would have done exactly the same thing aged 19?

This situation has really wedged open some of the tensions in the way we all see the world, hasn't it? Cracks have opened up that we didn't even know were there. It kind of makes you wonder what other cracks there are between us that have yet to be seen.

Anyway, that's all very negative. I'm trying to be much more positive this year, so I'll not keep going on about how depressing a third national lockdown looks as we embark upon it. There is another difference - this time we have vaccines, and every day more and more people are shielding behind them. That's a good start.

What's more, those of us who have a faith have the access to prayer, and so far I've been believing that the virus will not come near my tent. Perhaps that's an interesting prayer, one that lodges me in the tricky gap that's opened up between faith and wisdom. I think life can be lived in the tension. That's why I'm still washing my hands. But I'm also on my knees.

HELLO, 21

Well hello there, 2021. None of us know quite how to welcome you, given that your predecessor was a bit of a handful. You'll forgive us if we're all a little... wary.

I'm going for hopeful optimism; I think it'll be alright.

Back to work and not too much has changed over the break. There's still the same stuff to do and still the same people who'll be cross if it doesn't get done. We're still working from home, and I'm still feeling disconnected. It's almost been ten months now, and I think I do miss the office.

Meanwhile, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine joins the Pfizer candidate in the rollout. At the same time, the government are clearly struggling to get the new variant under control and it's become clear to everyone that Lockdown 3.0 is on its way. In fact, it was always inevitable, whatever they did about Christmas.

I went out for a walk this morning. The cold wind blasted me in the face as I pushed against it; it was as though the park had put up a force-field. I did my usual check around my favourite trees.

The Rogue Oak has finally lost its leaves. It stood stark against the sky. The Pagoda Tree, so glorious in Autumn, was looking majesterial today, like a wood sculpture with its cold, bare branches. Meanwhile the Falling Tree has lost another branch. It stood there in shock, as though it had just been splintered with lightning.

Hopeful optimism is the bit that knows Spring is coming, isn't it. I don't know whether we'll be back to the office by then, or whether this will stretch on, but there's a part of me that can't wait for bluebells and dragonflies, warm sunshine and fresh leaves. That's what those trees are waiting for too, I suppose.

So hello, year. I doubt we'll have forgotten about lockdowns and virus strains and R numbers by the time you're done, but while you're here, I reckon we can get along. Under the earth, the world is sleeping, and already the ground moves with life, ready to burst through when the time comes. There's always hope.