Week 4: Death by Repetition


Saturday, 25th April 2020


Do you remember when there were no dolphins in the canals of Venice? Ah, those were the days… Hold on, that doesn’t sound right. I’m confused which is apposite because Week 4 of lockdown was the week it all fell apart.

Bless him, the Screenager has taken a fair amount of stick on this blog (he doesn’t read it but I have told him) but now I am thinking that maybe he was right all along in his defiance. When we accept the new abnormal as simply the normal, I think that something is lost.

The Angry Moustache has railed hard against these new conditions. He has had his outlets for extreme sporting violence curtailed and his anger lies just beneath the surface. When he comes towards me, I don’t know whether it’s for a cuddle or for some physical abuse. He has also railed against home learning and its failure to actually educate. He can’t see the point of simply jumping through the hoops and if something is new and a bit difficult, he wants a teacher to explain it (and not his primary-trained father who can’t really help anyway).

In his own way, he is protesting the imposed conditions of lockdown and the disruption to the way we used to live, blithely going to work, the gym, to the cinema, to the beach, to see friends. He has refused to bow his head and just ‘keep calm and carry on’ (the most banal, over-used phrase in the history of banal, over-used phrases) and I hereby salute his adolescent punk fury – even if a lot of it is directed at the ‘system’ through the object that is my body.



For the Cine-Teen, he has to watch and wait as the things he was looking forward to this year, either recede into the far future or are abruptly cancelled. First, he had to give up on learning to drive. Then he the Bon Iver concert he was going to attend as the birthday treat for the Voodoo Parsnip was put back to next year. After that, the Amsterdam music festival that he was hyped for was postponed to next year (no refund) and now his 18th birthday looks in jeopardy as well as the holiday he booked in Portugal at the very end of summer for him and his mates. And will he be able to take his place at film school in October…? Bit by bit, his life is eroded at a time when he should be having the time of his young life.

Remember smoking weed on park benches with your besties
(and not in the shed when your mum and dad have gone to bed)

I feel for the teenagers. They have a social life, a party lifestyle, the need to roam as a gang, to make some vivid memories to look back on. As adults, we are simply waiting to get our old lives back but does any of us still have a gang to run with?
Personally speaking, I had no music festivals or concerts or holidays or events of any sort to cancel. I just hoped to still be alive at the end of the year so I could start the next one (although even this single modest ambition is at risk under current circumstances).

This has been the week of ennui and lethargy here in the Punk Krow household. I have struggled to do any productive work, to persuade myself to keep fit, and to leave those bottles of wine, gin, vodka and Kahlua alone. It seems by Thursday we all crumble and hit the booze, shouting out the front door for the NHS and passive-agressively (or just aggressively) playing a board game to thrash out all our frustrations with each other. Behind it all, lies the thought best expressed by the Screenager: what is the point? Is not working that different to working? Am I excused from the pretence of carrying on because an invisible killer is stalking the very air we breathe and to blithely carry on is, in fact, an insane response to this most craziest of times?
*
Anyway, the dynamic of the house has changed. The arrival of the Voodoo Parsnip has evened up the gender disparity and introduced a note of lightness into the house. She bakes. She watches Disney films with the Screenager when the Cine-Teen is at work. She is always playing Scrabble. And she sings. From all over the house and garden is the sound of singing, only spoilt when the Cine-Teen joins in with his enthusiasm being matched inversely with his talent. Still, singing is joyful, life-affirming, necessary to counter the darkness. Even the birds are doing it.

In a half-drunk spasm of spontaneity last night, I promised, on behalf of the Screenager, the wife and myself, to make up for the cancelled Bon Iver concert which would have taken place tomorrow by putting on our own performance of Bon Iver songs. This can only go horribly wrong. We are a family of non-singers. Bon Iver would no doubt prefer it if we just didn’t. But it’s week 4 and if new challenges are not taken on, then we sink into the abyss. Our neighbours may never speak to us again, Bon Iver might sue us for the damage done to his professional reputation, the foxes beyond the end of the garden may join in, but we will sing…

Latest data for the UK (as of 11pm):
Infected: 148,377
Deaths: 20,319
Celebrity Deaths: 3 (It’s about time they stopped posting pics of themselves in their underwear or being all silver foxy on the beach and started dying)
People I know who are infected: 0
Song of the Day: ‘Sing a Simple Song’ – Diana Ross & The Supremes with The Temptations

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