A Stopped Clock and a Fat Robin

Wednesday, 15^th April 2020

Remember when you could touch things without dying? Those were the days…

Do you recall how we used to meet people who weren’t blood relations for a drink or a spa weekend? That was pretty good, too.

And I have a distant memory of seeing the sun shining and thinking ‘Beach!’ instead of ‘You arrogant ball of gas! It’s alright for you, up there, isn’t it, giving heat and light to the free animals and plants of planet Earth but what about us in lockdown, eh?’

Lockdown is starting to live up to its name. As the government pats us on the head for being good and staying home (the equivalent to giving compliments to those in the electric chair for ‘sitting nicely’), and rolls out more police and surveillance powers – you know, just in case, just for the naughty ones – lockdown is starting to feel like a cruel social experiment. It’s getting harder to avoid the thought that I’m Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. The sun is shining, it's a wonderful day, nobody is in a hurry, everyone smiles and says hello but something's not right... In fact, I have indeed got time to set up a deckchair in the front room and count the seconds between that couple walking their dog down our road and the postman arriving and then finding it is always the same! Every day!

First, lockdown was physical. Now it’s mental. Is it only me who wants to scream and shout a bit to lift the boredom and to break the hushed morbid fog of the quiet streets? I am, of course, of a Thursday evening, whooping and hitting a saucepan with a wooden spoon on my doorstep for the NHS but take just a small step back and even this is the behaviour of the fruit-loopy kind. Are we doing it to show our undying love for the NHS or is it just a chance to release a bit of pent-up tension? I suppose it’s both. And I suppose if I’m still there every Thursday a year from now, when life has gone back to normal, then things have gone a little awry in the old mental wiring department.

It seems we are beset by the invisible. A virus serial killer that might be everywhere (do not touch!) or nowhere at all (Hi, Mr Icke/Mr Trump); a lockdown with no lock and invisible bars; and a mental pendulum swinging between paranoia (5G masts! Apps that the govt. will use to control you!), joy (as working from home comes increasingly to look like not working from home), and despair (when, oh when, will this end?).

Yesterday, I did the unthinkable and went outside to weed the patch of jungle the other side of our driveway that is technically ours. In the past, I have avoided this for two main reasons. One, because the previous owner told us that a fox had made a den there one year and two, because it is a job that could break a man. Just to make things worse, our neighbours have turned their adjoining patch into a lovely flower garden with a very marked line between their order and our chaos. Our chaos includes nettles, ivy growing up every small tree, lawn clippings, and has a general air of nature run riot; anarchy really.

So I go out there, not with good intentions and a master plan but out of sheer boredom and to get away from the sad figure of the Screenager whose lethargy is infectious (2 metre gap advisable). Close up, the job assumes Herculean proportions. Weeds are fighting weeds for every square inch of space. What doesn’t sting, prickles. After half an hour, I have cleared a patch the size of a flannel. As I rest on my laurels, two robins appear, a mating pair, I assume from the size difference: Mr Robin being, basically, an attractively coloured tennis ball with matchstick legs and a beak. I spend the next twenty minutes in a Zen exercise of stillness, to watch them turn up small worms from the earth and turn their heads to eye me every now and again with what used to be the fear of predators but is now annoyance – ‘I thought they had to be inside.’

This small interaction with nature was the highlight of my day. Sitting in the sun, watching two birds go about the daily business of survival. By the time this ends, I might be on first name terms with every earthworm in my garden…

Time. There’s a lot of it about. It is there to be used or ignored (Screenager). Or, as in TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, ‘measured out in coffee spoons.’ This morning, I did something else unthinkable: disassembled and cleaned the kitchen unit and cupboard where our recycling and rubbish bins live. It was never going to happen until this moment in time. It might never happen again. Once finished, it did not, really, bring me joy. But it used up twenty minutes of my day.

As you may have realised, the Screenager is struggling to fill his day. Over dinner, we try talking to him but he turns his head away and strokes the dog at his feet, half-listening but not really engaging with our ideas and suggestions. 

I know the problem. He is struggling to shrink his life into the space now allotted. He usually alternates between violent bursts of energy (rugby, Tae Kwon Do) and screen addiction. Now, in the new abnormal, there is only screen addiction. Chess boxing was as close as we have come to replicating the violence his teenage brain requires. Aiming for a compromise, last night we suggested that the Angry Teen Moustache might like to do boxing but with pads.

‘But I want to punch Dad in the face,’ he moaned.

*

Nothing is enough. Eat, sleep, Friends (repeat). An image flashed into my mind: two lions under lockdown, three weeks in.

Parent lion: Want to hunt an ant?

Teenage lion: A fucking ant?!

Parent lion: Yeah, you know, for fun. And a bit of exercise.

Teenage lion: I’m not hunting an ant.

Parent lion: I know it’s not the same as an antelope but-

Teenage lion: You’re fucking right, it’s not!

Parent lion: But we could stretch out the muscles a bit. Keep in shape for when we can get back out on the savannah.

Teenage lion: You go hunt an ant. I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when this is all over.

Latest data for the UK (as of 9pm):

Infected: 98,746

Deaths: 12,868

Celebrity Deaths: 3

People I know who are infected: Back to zero (conspiracy/giant hoax radar back on!)

Song of the Day: ‘Futile Devices’ – Sufjan Stevens