In the first half of this year, each week I published my beloved’s diaries from the covid lockdown of two years earlier. The diaries covered February 2020, when the word “coronavirus” first entered our consciousness, to July 2020, when we could finally go to a café or get our hair cut.
After July we stopped publishing the diaries. The succeeding weeks were a time of increasing normality. Life got easier and we felt that we had been through the fire and survived. But there were clouds on the horizon. On 13 September, we had a new rule that we could only meet six people out of doors. By October, London was placed in “Tier 2”, meaning no indoor mixing. In November we got a “circuit breaker”. But there was still Christmas to look forward to.
This is the story of the Christmas that wasn’t and how miserable people were. It covers the time when there were regular parties in Downing Street. Since then, apologists for the party-goers have suggested that their behaviour was not different from what everyone else was doing. It’s possible that, two years on, we will see more re-writing of history. Time, I think, to remind ourselves what really happened.
Saturday 19 December 2020
London is now back in Tier 3. The main difference is that the café outside tables have gone. So I’m perched on this bench in York House Gardens, with a take away coffee. The bench is actually too wet to be comfortable, but needs must.
The news is bad. Lots and lots of stuff about the dangers of family gatherings at Christmas. I’ve had it pretty good, with my large flat and longstanding marriage and secure income. I like to think of myself as strong, resilient. Suddenly, I feel sorry for myself. The prospect of seeing Mike [my son] for Christmas is what has kept us going. Tom took to Facebook to mention the days and days he hasn’t left the house. On not seeing people for Christmas, the words “fuck right off” featured.
This unexpected rant actually garnered a lot of support. Dozens of comments expressing sympathy and telling him, in clear terms, to get out more. Last Tuesday, I dragged him out at 8.30pm, to walk around the block admiring our neighbour’s Christmas lights. People have put a lot of effort into lights this year, to ward off the evil spirits.
Sunday 20 December 2020
Saturday morning now seems a different world, when I was wondering about what to pack for going to Mike’s and wrapping the last of the presents.
The first indication that something was wrong was when I came out of Tesco at 3.40 pm on Saturday, to hear someone exclaim excitedly into their phone: “Have you heard the news?”
When I stepped into the house, Tom was grim faced. “Come and listen to the announcement. It was meant to have started at 4pm”. What?? London is now in Tier 4, and we’re not allowed to leave. No one is allowed into your home at Christmas, unless they are in your support bubble. And absolutely don’t go to the Cotswolds to see your son.
Massive googling, to find the gov.uk website and all possible loopholes. Mike could come to London and could go around the park with us (not advised, but permitted). Otherwise?
As always in these circumstances, there is a tendency to fixate on the details. What should we do about the £200 of meat we had ordered from our local butcher – the goose, the beef, the chipolatas, the bacon. We had planned to pick it up on Christmas Eve and take it with us, for three days of feasting.
Many hurried inconclusive calls. Should we drive up straight away? Or find a pub somewhere between us for a (cold, outdoor) meal on Tuesday or Wednesday? Or could he come to London for a socially distanced walk in the park. Or – shock horror – come to our house, come inside and eat a meal with us?
Yesterday, these options narrowed to three: all drive to a pub in Wiltshire (Mike’s Option 1); or Mike to drive to us for a socially distanced walk (Mike’s Option 2); or Mike to drive to us and eat a meal with us (Tom’s option).
Tom didn’t really want to go to a pub, as he doesn’t much like pubs at the best of times, and he would be constantly worrying that a policeman was putting his car number plate into a computer. To tell the truth, I wasn’t that keen either, as finding a suitable pub was beyond me, and even if we did, the patio heater would be not only immoral but inadequate. Mike, meanwhile, worried that coming into our house would fail the Sun test (what would look bad if it were in the Sun). Army officer drives from low infection area to Plague City and does what we have been specifically told not to do (have a meal with family).
God, life is bad enough without a family argument. I put my foot down. Mike and G are driving up to us on Tuesday (which is against advice, but actually legal). They will pick up the goose and presents. We are going for a walk – me with Mike; Tom with G – and then we’ll swap. If they want to come in the house to have a cup of tea and warm up, that’s fine. I’ve bought a Christmas log, just in case. But if they decide not to, we’ll respect their decision. End of.
I phoned Jenny, who also has a story of family rows. The original plan was that her two sons, and her sons’ girlfriends, would all come to hers. When I rang, Jenny was trying to decide which son would be in her support bubble. Christmas 2020 – choose your favourite child.
By 6pm yesterday, Tom and I were exhausted by the stress of it all. I cooked a stew, which we wolfed down, without tasting it. We plonked ourselves down in front of Prom, which shut out reality for a blessed 1 hour 30 minutes. Unfortunately, reality returned once I was in bed. I took a valerian and slept – adequately.
Today has flashes of sunlight. Tom and I walked to Syon House along the river, including a stretch we didn’t know. After all this time, we are still finding new places. Perhaps we are stronger than we think, and can cope with three more months of no contact?
Thames near Syon House, December 2020
Have just heard news that France has closed the Dover-Calais crossing, even to trucks. My original plan was to stock up on fruit and veg next week. Will bring that forward.
Monday 21 December
Today my first task was to go the butchers. Our ultra-cheerful butcher was almost in tears. “I’ve had 75 people cancel so far this morning, and they are being such dicks about it. I’ve got several thousand pounds of unsold meat and it is only 9am”. He was so grateful that I paid for and took away the goose, he let me off the beef.
Then to Richmond, which was deserted. Closed shops – depression everywhere. A homeless guy asked me what was going on. Walked straight into Tesco, and bought fruit and veg.
Jenny has been full of suggestions for a Christmas roast. “Why don’t you cook the beef yourself? Or have a duck? That’s small.” The butcher said I could have my pick. But I haven’t the energy to roast meat. That says special occasion, company, family. And I’ll need to do all the trimmings, which will look sad and inadequate. All I want right now is something comforting and familiar and full of winter vegetables.
If Covid is spread by tears, it’s had a lot of opportunities. Friends of ours are cut off from their children. And children are cut off from their parents – particularly awful for one friend whose mother has gone into hospital to remove a brain tumour. She hasn’t come out – complications apparently. “I might never see her again,” she said.
Tuesday 22 December 2020
Fantastic news. Yesterday Mike, Gilly and Morley (their dog) drove to see us. We walked along the river, up through the terrace gardens to King Henry’s Mound. I walked with Mike; Tom and Gilly walked behind us. At the view point, Tom and I sat on one bench, Mike and Gilly on another, and I handed round paté paninis and smoked salmon bagels. On the way back, we swapped. I talked to Gilly and Tom talked to Mike.
Then, when we got to the park, Tom brought out two chairs and a table, which we put up by a bench. I supplied best china, tea and chocolate log. Mike brought homemade mince pies. He has been making mince meat and overdid the quantities. “I’ve got enough for 75 pies – I’ll take them round the patch [garrison housing where he works]ninstead of a Christmas card”. They were delicious and we polished off eight. They were quite small.
I asked Tom to take a picture: our Christmas tea, in the park, with mud and wellies. The defining image of Xmas 2020. “For God’s sake, don’t put it on Facebook”, Mike worried. “We could get into trouble”.
Criminal behaviour
We were lucky, hitting a window in the normal rain and cold. Even glimmerings of sunlight. The saddest bit was saying goodbye. The official line is – see you at Easter. I even looked up when Easter is: 4 April. Seems like a long time.
Wednesday 23 December 2020
I spent this morning ringing friends. Laura talked about her son and his wife who will declare bankruptcy in the New Year. Dan talked about cancelling his trip to South Africa: “My father’s quite upset about not seeing me”. I mentioned my steps towards retirement. “It’s important to have plans,” Dan told me, “or you can lose your sense of self.” Well, my plans were staying with Mike for Christmas and going to an exhibition on 20 January. Look what happened there. Otherwise, Tom has booked for the ballet on our wedding anniversary: 24 June. That is the date to watch.
Boxing Day, Saturday 26 December 2020
“How are you?” people ask each other on the phone. To which the usual answer is “up and down”.
Let’s start with the Christmas ups. Breakfast of scrambled egg and smoked salmon. Opening our presents over a Whatsapp video call, which worked much, much better than I thought it would. So lots of ooing and aahing over heated coasters, dulce de leche etc. The theme of the day was warm, fluffy and squishy. Tom gave me a matching cashmere scarf and beret and a microwave hot water bottle. I gave him sheepskin slippers and a super deluxe pillow.
Following Jenny’s instructions to “make an effort with Christmas dinner”, I felt I’d made just the right amount of effort: avocado orange; lamb tagine; and Christmas pudding (which was no effort at all – three minutes in the microwave). So full did we feel that all we had for supper was the rest of the Christmas pudding, with a satsuma.
Three minutes in the microwave
Before dinner we had a short walk in the park, where lots of people were sharing flasks of coffee. This did not used to be a Christmas tradition. Then afterwards, we read our new books and Tom suggested listening to the Queen’s Speech. This is Tom we are talking about, committed Republican. The broadcast was pure schmaltz, in a “we are all in it together and will get through it” sort of way (cue: picture of NHS choir, holding candles). And somehow it made us feel better. Then a film Mike recommended, from Pixar – Arthur Christmas. We laughed a lot.
I phoned Beth, who like us, had a present opening video call. But unlike us, the presents were still with her parents. They had to open them for her.
The down bits? Mainly at night. I slept badly Christmas Eve night. And by 9pm I was falling asleep in front of the telly. I only just managed the cheery Christmas video call with Mike, which involved more upbeat energy than I could quite muster. I took our three existing hot water bottles, plus the new one, to bed and zonked out almost immediately.
Nor could I bear to look at the news. I told Tom that if Johnson finally got an EU deal I would be so relieved that I would be prepared to say “Well done Boris”. So there, I’ve said. Well done. Chaos averted, if rather late and with so little preparation.
Tuesday 29 December 2020
Usually, I love the empty days after Christmas, when nothing is expected and it’s socially acceptable to lounge on the sofa eating too much Christmas cake. I’ve been following the traditions – reading round ups of 2020; going for undemanding walks; watching Christmas films. But I haven’t sunk into the experience with the same abandon. There is a hollow feeling. Is this all there is? Will real life sweep us along in its tide, as before – or are we stuck in this muddy eddy forever?
Yesterday I took my bike to Richmond Park to see Dan – despite warnings from Tom that we should now be staying in and seeing no-one. Somewhere, in the mud before the Bog Gate, my pedal jammed – making me late, and anxious, as I kept dropping phone, and key, and gloves and helmet, and failing to get it together. In the end it was fine. I met Dan by the Sheen Gate, wrapped up in full ski gear, as we gazed over muddy tracks and icy muddles into the bleak midwinter.
Dan had recovered from the shock of cancelling his trip and was back to phlegmatism. We sat at opposite ends of a bench which had been icy but was now turning damp, trying to keep our feet out of the puddle. At least in my disorganisation, I had had managed a flask of coffee.
“People shouldn’t be afraid of staying with their own thoughts”, Dan said. “A fast-paced life is great, but you can embrace a slow life too. Don’t be frightened of slow.” We talked about failures in Government. I squeaked, at fast pace, about how the state should do more, quicker. Dan shrugged and suggested that it would all come around in the end. He then gave my bike a hard stare, at which it started working just fine. I got home only six minutes late.
The Thames was definitely running high
I have never seen the Crane with so much water in it. And the Thames is running faster than at any time since the floods. Mike keeps sending me pictures of the Cotswold Water Park, where ditches have become streams and streams are rapidly turning into lakes. Yesterday they woke to snow and today is a blizzard. Covid, floods, lorry queues: which to worry about first? Or should I take Dan’s advice and assume it will all work out in the end?
There was no ‘Journal of the Covid Years’ this week – the first week since February that it hasn’t appeared. The diaries covered February 2020, when the word “coronavirus” first entered our consciousness to July 2020, when we could finally go to a café and get our hair cut. That seems a sensible point to pause. From July to September, the world opened up. It was a time of picnics, socialising and plans. It became our social duty to eat as many restaurant meals as possible: “eat out to help out”.
It wasn’t over, of course, however often we assured each other than things would get better. On 13 September, we had a new rule that we could only meet six people out of doors. By October, London was placed in “Tier 2”, meaning no indoor mixing. In November we got a “circuit breaker”. And then the low point, announced on 19 December. Effectively, Christmas was cancelled. No-one in London could allow someone outside their support bubble to enter their home.
So how do we remember these experiences? Our time sense becomes mushed, in the face of ever-changing rules. What were they? Did we obey them? Our memories can’t cope with the complexities. Instead, we have a mash-up of blue skies, bird song, isolation, broken nights, changed plans and endless zoom meetings.
When the nights are longer and there is less to do, my plan is it edit the whole two years, setting the diary entries against the official “history” of what was going on. I’m trying to get hold of the complexity of the whole experience: some path between lockdown nostalgia, recalling the blue, empty days of May, and visceral anger over the restrictions.
Was my experience typical, in any way? It would have been different if I’d been on my own or with a large family. It would have been massively harder in a one-room flat, or without a job, or if I’d been shielding. Other than that, it is difficult to say. There were so many people we didn’t see – so how can we know? Someday, enterprising historians will analyse a lot of lockdown diaries to produce a social history of the period. This will be one small perspective.
Did we abide by “the rules”? Yes, by and large we tried to do the right thing. And when we didn’t know what the right thing was, we did what we were told. But not always. Don’t judge. [Ed: what we weren’t doing was having large boozy parties and pretending they were ‘work events’. So maybe we can judge a little.]
Did the UK Government get the “big calls right”? It got some calls right, particularly in 2021, over vaccination. But like all Governments, it got lots of calls wrong. We were too slow going into lockdown; we should have gone for masks earlier; the Tiers system was impossible to understand; the return to schools and universities in September 2020 was mishandled. Did it make a huge difference? Probably not. The Scottish and Welsh Governments may have been more cautious but suffered similar deaths in the end.
In retrospect, one of the biggest mistakes may have been to try to reconcile lockdowns with economic activity. In 2021, the greatest prohibitions were on seeing friends and family. It was a world in which a lover or parent could not enter your home, but an estate agent or cleaner could. The dichotomy was a false one. Why would we buy clothes, if we didn’t meet people? Why would we go to pub, without company? Social bonds and economic activity turned out to be linked.
And finally, how did the experience change us? I hesitate to answer this question – perhaps it is just too early to say. It has certainly changed our relationship to work. Work is now about tasks. It is something you do – not someone you are. Without the whole rigmarole of getting dressed up, and going to the office, and getting into an office mindset, employers have less power to get inside our heads. And I’ve slowed down and travel less. We have booked a trip to Argentina later this year, on the grounds that if we don’t go now we never will. We suspect it may be the last big intercontinental trip we ever make. The world is changing and becoming smaller.
Of course, social changes aren’t all about the pandemic. If the tide of ever-expanding globalisation turned with the Brexit referendum in 2016, the war in Ukraine is now causing a rip-current, leaving a lot of old certainties stranded on the beach.
I’ll let you know how I get on, when I’ve finished the edit. Meanwhile – please leave comments with the answers to any of these question.
‘Independence Day’, when we could finally go to a café or a hairdresser, was on 4 July, so, strictly speaking, I should have posted this extract last week. But it was such a big thing at the time that I felt it needed its own space.
Saturday 4 July 2020
This is “Independence Day” – the reopening of cafes, pubs and hairdressers. And I’m wandering around on a café crawl, to soak up the atmosphere. First, the good news. The hairdressers are heaving. The shops and cafes not so much.
“I don’t get it,” said Tom, planning a long bath as his morning’s entertainment. “Why would anyone want to go out? We’ve all learnt to eat cheaply and well at home.”
Well, I’m doing my best to save independent cafés, even if it’s just me. As I left the house, I found my feet taking me straight to Zoran’s, where the outside tables definitely needed an occupant. Zoran welcomed me as a long-lost friend and I had my first proper café cappuccino for 4 months.
Then walked into Richmond, where if there are going to be crowds, excitement, riots and superspreading, it will be later in the day. The owner of this café looked so desperate I stopped for a single espresso. It’s too windy to sit outside, so I’m just inside an open door (which at least is well ventilated). There are two other customers.
Yesterday, the shadowing didn’t happen. Slack let us down. All I got was a few blurry frozen image and occasional noises. Will try again on Monday.
Tuesday 7 July 2020
I’ve done it. I took my mask and oyster card, got the 10.30 train to Vauxhall, and walked over the bridge to my hairdresser. Back in BC land, a normal activity. But it doesn’t feel normal. London is much too empty. I’m sitting at a pavement table, looking at three other empty tables. There are people – I can see four – but the buzz has gone. It feels like a sleepy town in Mid-Wales when it isn’t market day; not one of the world’s great cities.
This isn’t bounce back. It’s barely crawl back.
The good news is that yesterday the technology worked. I shadowed another adviser on slack and have a better idea of the systems. I also learnt that there is a lot of human misery out there. One woman spent 50 minutes on the phone, crying about the noise from her neighbour, caused by loose floorboards, zero sound insulation and a large dog. But as the call unfolded it was about so much more: racism, lack of respect and flashbacks to earlier trauma.
On Sunday, Mike came over for Tom’s postponed Father’s Day treat – a skate around Bushy Park. So plenty of exercise – and after three hours, I was completely knackered. Luckily Mike stopped and bought us mango sorbet cones, which we enjoyed in the sunshine.
Afterwards, Mike entered our house for the first time, for a pizza. He waxed lyrical about the new place they are buying: a Grade II listed Wiltshire toll house, which will give them a home office each, and is a short cycle ride from their new workplace. Mike even ran through his plans to entertain us in his new house on Christmas Day. “We’ll see how it goes,” I said morosely, mentioning the possibility of a new lockdown.
Mike and G have taken their van around the South Coast – staying in Salisbury, visiting G’s family, working the South Down Way. They are positively bubbling with enthusiasm.
Friday 10 July 2020
“Have you come in specially for a haircut” the stylist asked the guy next to me. “Oh no,” came the reply, “I’m going to the bank as well.”
We’ve all slowed down. Once going into town, visiting the hairdresser and seeing D were all fitted around the edges of work. Now it’s a full and exciting day. And with the work picnic on Wednesday, it’s almost too much. On Wednesday evening, I fell asleep in front of Netflix, knackered.
My hairdresser, M., was trying hard to maintain her chat rate behind her mask. “How did you spend your lockdown?” now replaces “How was your holiday?” M. went for walks and did zoom sessions on meditating and de-toxing. Otherwise? M. shrugged. She missed her family. Her aim is to get the first plane to Slovakia and possible stay there. “I came to London for 3 months and stayed 14 years. Can I just leave?” Another shrug.
The good news is that my hair now looks great. It’s back to brown.
I wandered past the old office and paused to take photos of the empty street. Considerable effort had been put into flower-pots, even though there is no-one to appreciate them.
I met D at our erstwhile favourite café. The owner has been an NHS volunteer, helping out in a hospital, which he clearly enjoyed. Standing in his empty café, less so. “The barracks are closed. The Ministry of Justice is closed. All the offices are closed. This building is owned by the Qatari Royal Family, and I just hope they don’t really want rent”.
D and I sat at a pavement table and ate as much as we could, as we talked about our kids’ youthful optimism. The dry cleaner’s opposite had a hopeful “open” sign. No-one went near it.
Wednesday started wet – surely too wet for our work picnic in Gray’s Inn. Then at 11 am the skies cleared and I risked it. I strode and ran for the train, in 7 minutes, as I’ve done so often before. I felt very odd. No-one does that anymore. People walk slower – much slower. But I caught the (almost empty) train and had plenty of time to stroll past Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Holborn.
B. had organised the picnic. She has a scholarship from Gray’s Inn, which allows her to live there until August, in what was once a tiny room. Now that all her fellow scholars have fled the city, she has a large flat all to herself – plus the garden.
Once everyone had arrived there were 7 of us – exceeding the current guideline of 6. We promised to stay in two separate groups, which happened quite naturally: 3 researchers at one end, and 4 lawyers at the other. We had lots to say to each other, and conversation was much easier in person.
After the work stuff, we talked about universities. L’s daughter has come home from Cambridge, which has kept going pretty well. She still produces essays and has supervision on Skype. Her friend at Birmingham, though, has had no real teaching at all.
Also this week I’ve had video chats with two previous Team Manager colleagues. Both independently said how difficult it was to manage a team in lockdown. The problem is new people, when you can’t build trust through face-to-face transactions, or observe people interact with other people. “I’ve got a new lawyer”, one said, “And I just don’t know what they’re doing”. Good thing I’ve retired.
Today I’ve done more shadowing on the advice line. I only have to answer a couple of test questions. Then someone delivers an internet phone to my door and I’m told to get on with it.
So that’s all for now. I’ll be signing off with a final (for the moment) blog post next Friday (22nd) looking back over the entries so far and considering ways I might move forward. I’ll be asking you for your thoughts too.
Another short entry this week as we visit my beloved’s journal entries from two years back. Next week’s will be a long one — marking ‘Independence Day’ a little late. It will also be the last of these regular posts. After Independence Day there was too much going on, too may arguments about what was and what wasn’t legal, and just too much confusion to fit neatly into weekly chunks. Tammy is thinking about writing a memoir and there may be the odd post when something leaps out at us, but for now this series is coming to an end. Enjoy the last two episodes!
Wednesday 1 July 2020
I have now officially retired, ceasing to be a civil servant and reduced to the status of a consultant, two days a week.
Yesterday I was invited to a “talk” which turned out to be the online equivalent of my retirement party. J had clearly been organising it for weeks, alongside a huge hamper from Fortnum and Masons – so big it could have contained a stripogram. As online events to, it was about as good as it gets. J is particularly able at handling this stuff, with all the technical gizmos (hands up, chat, screen share). She kept it strictly to time and involved everyone. S even dug up one of our old tango videos, which she showed to assembled colleagues.
And yet…. In some ways, it was nothing like a retirement party. No reactions, no small group chats, no shared food and drink. There is an exercise in self-help circles about imagining your own funeral. This was lovely, in that I received a great obituary. But in the absence of any real human contact, I did feel a bit like a corpse. I had to hit the F&M salted caramel biscuits and go for a walk around the park.
So today is the first day of (sort of) retirement. I watched a 45 minute lecture on universal credit, to prepare for my new role helping out on an advice line. I unpacked the hamper and went through junk, putting aside boxes of charity shop stuff, for when charity shops finally open. Tom found the dead body of one of the fox cubs lying in our garden. “We can’t take it away if it’s on private land”, the council said. So I carried it out and left it in the gutter.
Yes, I can hack this retirement idea, but right now I feel scrabbly, unfocused, apprehensive. New stuff is scary.
Friday 3 July 2020
Shadowing for advice line starts today, so I’m grabbing a quick coffee in York House Gardens. It will be on “Slack” apparently, so I’ve got a new message system to learn.
The weather changes by the minute. Brilliantly warm just now – though the rain forecast for this afternoon means I’ll probably cancel my vague plans to meet F. As with the weather, so with my mood. Good bits of yesterday – got stuff done; productive work meeting; took parcel to the post-office, coming back the long way, in an attempt to find new streets; chatted to a neighbour (“I still can’t see my grand-daughter in Cornwall: they’re bracing for a second wave”); cooked Chinese cabbage; watched crime series; and ended the day with a dance to Entros Guitares.
Actually, there were a lot of good bits. But I still feel that this easing of lockdown should provide more excitement than it is delivering.
D once said that one of the most difficult aspects of retirement is that if you want to see someone or do something you have to make the effort. And sometimes that effort is too much. At one level, I know that there are people to see, things to do. But right now I can’t quite summon the energy to organise it.
Here’s the latest instalment of my beloved’s covid diaries. We’ve both been pleasantly surprised at the positive comments we’ve had about them, but we won’t be able to keep up the weekly posts much longer. As life opened up, there was more going on and keeping the excerpts at a sensible length gets trickier. Also as more and more people are mentioned, privacy issues get more significant and keeping track of the alphabet soup that she has used to anonymise people gets silly.
Tammy is wondering about producing a proper memoir and we will likely still posts diary excerpts that cover some particularly important times (like the cancellation of Christmas which, for those of us not enjoying parties in Downing Street, was a particularly grim period).
For the next few weeks we’ll carry on. This week’s entry is actually very short. Enjoy.
Saturday 27 June 2020
It’s raining. I’ve just come back from the shops by bus wearing a face mask for the first time. Maybe “face mask” is overly grand. It was an old sock Tom cut up, as instructed by an online video. I don’t think masks work by filtering stuff. They work by encouraging people to sit quietly and shut up.
Last Sunday was Father’s Day. Mike and G came over to walk Morley in the park, followed by afternoon tea in our front (and only) garden. For the first time ever, we put out four chairs and a table, and scones and jam and cream. It was all very civilised.
Wednesday – midsummer – was our wedding anniversary. Mike and G sent a good quality champagne. So we had supper in the garden, drinking champagne from our best flutes and eating smoked salmon and cheese cake and cherries, feeing that life was actually OK. More than OK, pretty good. And, after the second glass, very good indeed. Watched a silly rom-com and danced to Vera Lynn’s Anniversary Walz.
On Thursday, for some unaccountable reason, felt muzzy and dehydrated. It must have been the heat.
On Friday, it was (a tiny bit) cooler. Tom and I cycled up the hill (low gear, kept going, just) to meet J at the Roehampton Gate of Richmond Park at 3.30pm. J arrived by Uber at the Sheen Gate at 3.50pm. No matter. Got back on our bikes and met her there. We walked through the park with ice creams, which I’ve been so looking forward to, as another step towards normality.
J has spent much, much too long alone in her flat with her kittens, with only the occasional trip to the vet to take her outside. She made excited coos when she saw a deer or a tree. “It’s amazing,” she kept saying, “It’s green”. J worried about leaving the kittens, even for a walk in the park. She had set up cameras in each room in her flat, and went online a couple of time to check the feeds. She showed me live coverage of a kitten climbing onto her bed and stretching out as though he owned it. J talked about her family, and the (uncertain) future. I even gave her a potted version of my theory of the crisis of capitalism. And on the way back, I found a new route – over Sheen Common – which brought me back home with no hills at all.
