How to invade Uruguay and other personal stories
Friday, 5th
February 2021
Remember when you moved in a crowd, the roar at a match, the singalong at a gig, the crush of a bar on a Friday night at last orders, the warmth of others...? Nah, me neither.
*
So many
of you have been asking me* how we, as a family unit, are getting on in Lockdown 3 – Revenge of the
Mutating Virus that I thought it would be good to give you an insight into life
chez nous.
[* Utter bullshit: nobody is asking me. I think writing that influencer blog post has infected my brain and I am now doomed to think and write as if I have a large audience of followers.]
If
Lockdown 1 had a kind of wunderbrat vibe going on, like a gatecrasher in a neon
shellsuit vomiting in your sock drawer and knocking your family photos off the
shelves with his enormously sharp, free-swinging elbows, at least it had the
element of surprise and originality on its side. Lockdown 2, at only a month
long, was more like the relative you dislike coming to stay at their own
invitation whilst they sort out some kind of emotional disaster in their
personal life. It sucked but it was mercifully short. So Lockdown 3, like most
movie franchises, is the one where everyone knows the plot and the characters
but nobody is emotionally invested enough to care. It’s the one where you just
stuff popcorn into your mouth in repetitive mindless scoopfuls. It’s the one
where you get fat and bored without noticing.
So here
we are again in what is increasingly beginning to look like a cycle of
lockdown/depression, easing of restrictions/repression. The idea of total
freedom/joy is fading into history in sepia tinted tones; something that
belongs in the past. This virus is a slippery fucker. Just as the global
machinery has cranked into gear to deliver a vaccine, it’s off again wearing a
new suit and travelling across borders with forged documents, the Leonardo Di
Caprio character in ‘Catch Me If You Can.’
Anyway,
for this most personal of blog posts, I’ll begin with the lowest forms of life,
here in our house, and work upwards, finishing with myself, the towering
intellectual colossus in the family (this might be a disputed fact but it’s my
blog so…).
The old
Labrador, Poppy, thirteen this year, is on a slow slide to that great wild
meadow in the sky where she will be forever in her prime, springing through the
long grasses with that wolfish look in her eye of knowing she has miles of
running in her legs and a heart as perfectly conditioned as a Formula 1 car
engine.
She is
now prone to wandering off on a walk in the wrong direction, back down the path
away from our desperate calling of her name. She is increasingly deaf and her
eyes have a filmy sheen that suggest her eyesight is more shape than detail.
Her nose is still excellent, however, as recently demonstrated on a walk in the
woods where we found a murky looking large pond. Poppy edged to the shallows,
then went in up to her belly and then swam out towards the middle as we tried
to call her back. Nothing would deter her, however, from seeking out a few
mouldy sponge-like pieces of bread floating there that even the ducks had
decided were not worthy of their digestive tracts. In the night, I often hear
her fall off the sofa where she likes to sleep, probably a result of her trying
to clean her ears with her back legs and losing her balance. She is now the
elderly dame of our family unit with the metaphorical blanket over her knees
and a half-drunk Tia Maria by her side, snoozing into oblivion.
Sheriff,
the cockapoo puppy, our lockdown treat and complete saviour of this last nine
months, remains the most-loved, well-handled, spoilt dog of all time. He seems
to have so completely blurred the boundary between dog and human, pet and
owner, that it is not a surprise to enter a room and find a member of the
family on their hands and knees barking at the puppy who is up on the sofa
barking back with his tail in the air and his little chin quivering with
excitement. Sheriff has also learnt to do a high five when held, sat upright,
in someone’s arms, reaching his paws up slowly towards your own. This serves no
purpose other than to amuse ourselves and also to demonstrate that we have all
had too much time on our hands and all this time has been spent at home. If there
is ever a day, sometime in the future, when every member of our household has
to be out for a few hours, it is hard to see how Sheriff will cope – all he has
known is the constant companionship of ourselves, his pack*.
[*Sheriff has also assumed full security responsibility for our property and will reliably bark at the following: a knock on the door; an unusual noise; someone coming downstairs; his own reflection in the window; the window cleaner; and, his favourite, foxes in the garden. We live in a neighbourhood full of foxes. They have a den in the little bit of land beyond the end of our driveway and are regular users of the school playing field beyond the end of our garden. It is unusual not to see a fox or several on any night-time walk we go on with the dogs. A couple of weeks ago, one evening, Sheriff stood growling at the back door. I opened it for him and watched him tear down the garden to the back fence where the unmistakable sound of a reasonably-sized mammal could be heard leaping onto and over the back fence. This is now his favourite game: ejecting foxes from our garden at night like a little bouncer (appropriately dressed in his black and white colouring).]
The
Screenager is still in full possession of the ‘family’ iPad (nicknamed ‘my
baby’) and continues to suckle it to his breast even though it is almost as old
as he is now. With his free hand, he watches stuff on his phone, whilst he is
now forced through home-learning to have a laptop so that he can evolve a third
eye (and hand, perhaps) to watch each of these simultaneously. He has put on 10
kilos of muscle due to a concentrated home-gym program and a new diet honed to
protein intake and the consumption of enough meat and eggs to make a vegan
quake in their faux-leather sandals. He veers between joy (GCSEs are cancelled)
and disappointment (no rugby opportunities for 80 mins of approved violence)
and anger (GCSEs are cancelled but a version of them will still take place).
Occasionally,
he will emerge from his screendom to tell me that he wants to airlift all the
kangaroos out of Australia (50 million) and dump them on Uruguay (population: 3
million) to see if the kangaroos can take over the country and declare a
kangaroo republic.
‘Is that
something you’re learning in Geography?’ I will ask.
‘No,
TikTok,’ he will reply.
All told,
however, he is more human than during Lockdown 1, if a little scary-looking and
rather shy of a good shave and wash.
My eldest
son is finding the first year of his Practical Film-making degree course a
little bit lacking in the practical elements. As film-making is such a group
enterprise, being stuck inside alone is not the ideal environment. Fortunately,
he is a pretty phlegmatic character and is just getting on with it. His last
twelve months have been a rollercoaster of boom and bust in terms of his social
life but he has made the most of the boom times by fitting in two holidays, a
visit to his uni mates in Bristol, and a good many eat-out to help-out visits
to prop up the restaurant business almost single-handedly. It doesn’t hurt, I
suppose, to have a long-term girlfriend during this period and they have spent
nearly a year together (but apart) and all under the shadow of the virus. Love
in the Time of Cholera, and all that.
The
missus has the best and only claim to be really busy. She is employed full-time
and training on the job to be a CBT therapist, working long hours, including
some of the weekend, in an uncomfortable impression of my former life as a
full-time class teacher. A sign often appears on the living room door saying,
‘Appointment in Progress’ meaning she has air-locked herself into the
conservatory with the living room antechamber between herself and the rest of
us goons so that none of us breaks into the living room making those stupid
noises that indicate we want to play with the puppy because we are
bored/restless/under-stimulated etc. All the messages that she gets from the
NHS, her employer, warn of the mental health tsunami coming their way, which
will include many of their own employees: the doctors and nurses dealing with
the pandemic on the front-line.
Our
mutual escape from the enormity of the pandemic is either a long dog walk or a
swim in the sea: nature as healer. One recent evening, walking the dogs along
Brighton seafront, we met a former work acquaintance of my wife’s, sitting on a
bench with a bottle of something and a friend. Ordinarily, this might have
meant a ten minute catch-up but we stood there for 40 minutes talking excitedly,
manically almost. The sheer unadulterated joy of seeing another recognisable
human face that wasn’t a member of one’s own household was obvious in our
wanting to linger and stretch out the encounter. Afterwards, I felt something
new and rather disturbing: a kind of mental kick, a high, of engaging socially
with another person. Strange times.
The
little beach at the end of our road is part of Shoreham Harbour and is what I
would call mixed-use. Heading down there for a swim, you are likely to find any
combination of the following: surfers riding the waves caused by the funnelling
of the water between the harbour ‘arms’; fishermen either on land or kayak; dog
walkers; families trying to enjoy living by the sea in winter; elderly couples
sat in their cars drinking coffee and watching the sea; tradesmen enjoying a
break in their vans and watching the sea; enormous ships transporting
lumber/aggregate in and out of the harbour; rowers on their sculls (Rowing Club
next to the small car park); and one group of varying numbers but always there
either side of high tide: sea swimmers.
There are
many many more runners and cyclists around than twelve months ago but it is not
unusual to find between 10 and 20 sea swimmers on the little beach where we
also like to bathe*.
Some of these hardy souls, are still going in wearing nothing more than gloves,
boots, and a swimming costume. Personally, I am so wrapped, head to foot, in
neoprene, as to be practically insulated from getting wet at all. It is easy to
feel like a cheat when you see someone in the water alongside you, with their skin turning a very alive-looking
bright pink. But I like to swim for a while and stay in as long as possible even as
the temperatures reach their winter low (7.5 degrees last Monday).
The kick we are all looking for, that must explain the exponential boom in
numbers down here, is the cold water shock and then the cold water high. It’s
important, I guess, for our bodies to be plunged into the extreme and then to
know, immediately afterwards, that we survived. ‘Whatever gets you through,’ is
our regular refrain, and one we invoke before sea swimming, eating chocolate,
and drinking gin on Sundays.
[*This seems to be entirely the wrong verb for winter sea swimming as it has connotations of leisurely enjoyment of which, personally speaking, there is none.]
I am in
the strange position of feeling semi-retired before I hit my 50th
birthday later this year. I have my two full days in school that are my
contracted hours but have lost any chance of supply teaching because schools
are working on such limited capacity. I have Marie Kondo’ed my drawers, built a
woodstore onto the shed, decluttered the cupboard where our files are stored,
been on several long lonely bike rides, and made several things out of
driftwood and stone that have no known purpose.
I have no
problem filling my days but what I have found hardest is what I thought I might
enjoy the most during this time: writing fiction. I am halfway through a novel
for adults and onto a second book in a series for children but there is a block
in my imaginative process that is maybe brought on by the ‘life is stranger
than fiction’ reality of the world outside my window. It seems slightly insane
to be making stuff up when life is so squashed out of shape. Who wants to read
about beard squirrels when people are dying? I just don’t seem to have the
appetite for story-writing because although I know people are craving forms of
escapism, I can’t shake the feeling that writing fiction is an ivory tower
activity at the moment*.
[*Just to be clear: I have never made a penny from my writing. All attempts at being published have been rebuffed and so any financial basis for putting pen to paper simply doesn’t exist. I write because I love it, because it keeps me sane, putting thoughts into words and sentences, and because it is when I experience what the psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, termed a ‘flow state’ whereby one is so immersed in an activity that one loses oneself into it.]
So
overall, my family have been protected from the worst ravages of the pandemic
so far, both financially and in terms of our physical and mental health. The
question now is, for us and everybody else: how will we emerge? You’d have to
go back to our stone age ancestors to find brains whose habitual mode was
survival with the constant threat of danger looming over every day. If it is
now second nature to avoid strangers, to give each other a wide berth, to limit
the known physical world to a radius of 5 miles, to view surfaces with
suspicion, to wear masks, and to have one’s mortality flapped in our faces like
a ragged flag, then how deeply have those thought and behaviour patterns become
entrenched? How do you know how crazy you are, when you are sat at home in your
pyjamas, viewing the world through the screen-prism?
Maybe
when you are making plans to invade Uruguay with kangaroos, is when you need to
start worrying…
Latest data for the UK (as of 12pm):
Infected: 3.87
million
Deaths: 109,000
People I know who are infected: Nobody.
Song of the Day: ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down’ – Rolf Harris
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