Covid-19, Lockdown Easing - Weeks 13 and 14 - The Ticking Clock.

Shopping

Week 13 was the week all shops were allowed to reopen. Lots of people were very excited about this and rushed off to queue for entry to shopping centres and the like having been deprived this dubious pleasure for months. We are a nation of shoppers. Personally, I had no such desires. I don't do queues. Every second you sit in a traffic jam or stand in a queue in a shop is a precious second of your life you'll never get back. Tick-tock, tick-tock goes the clock....

I was also struggling to understand how on earth we can logically operate within the guidelines. You can limit how many people are inside a shop, insist on social distancing and one-way systems (only if the shop is big enough), but what happens to those clothes you try on in the changing room? Touching the changing room curtains, touching the fabrics of the clothes, pulling stuff on and off over your face....we know the virus sticks to textiles for longer than your hands, which can be regularly washed and sanitised, but clothes in the public domain? Apparently everything you try on is then quarantined for a number of days. Well, any small shop would soon run out of stock if they were to apply those rules! So, I imagine the rules are being broken left, right and centre. I hasten to add, this is not a criticism or a barbed comment. Just an observation. Basically, this whole situation is almost unmanageable, unless you continue with total Lockdown - and then the economy would be irretrievable, millions would be in debt, on the breadline, reliant on state benefits, plunging into depression and suicidal thoughts as their businesses they've spent years building up crash and burn in the apocalyptic flames of the Covid-19 pandemic. No, we had to open up. But it will have consequences - everything we ever do in life always does. Some will be good, some will be bad. But that's life too, isn't it? We just have to learn to take the rough with the smooth, and do the best we can in the circumstances. Every person on the planet is in a unique life situation and nothing any government could ever devise will suit all of us. That's a fact that has to be accepted. You win some, you lose some.

Somewhere along the line, I've lost the desire to fulfill my spiritual and emotional needs by shopping. That's not to say I don't enjoy a lovely little boutique and finding beautiful things - but I suppose that's it. I have lived long enough and am lucky enough not to need any more 'things'. I have spent time during lockdown clearing out cupboards and other areas of mess and muddle. As if I didn't know it already, I have more than enough STUFF. I have enough lotions and potions to last the rest of my life, I have enough cheap jewellery to open a shop. I have enough clothes (especially scarves, a former weakness) to last the forseable future. Suddenly I find myself with fewer desires, wants and needs. I know now where to find my happiness - and it's not in STUFF. Stuff just suffocates and overwhelms. My friends reading this will laugh out loud as I am known as a hoarder. I hold up my hands and admit to this - everything has a memory for me which makes it so hard to let go of, especially if you have had children and are of a nostalgic and sentimental mindset: every little notebook with their scribbles, every item of clothing now discarded or grown-out of. Even correspondence from school and every other aspect of their lives (sport, dance, gymnastics, choir, brownies) takes on a huge sentimental value for me. I have often tried to analyse this and my best conclusion is my obsession with the passage of time. Tick-tock, tick-tock goes the clock....

What new mother cannot relate to ABBA's timeless song about time, 'Slipping through my fingers'? I watched my first born playing on a mat in our apartment in Milan in 1999. I heard this song come on the radio and I wept. Already I could see her growing up so fast and I knew that in the blink of an eye she'd be escaping my gaze and heading off to school. New people would come into her life and start to form her. She would start to form herself. The teenage years would come and that person, whose mind and heart I will always only be able to guess at, will slip even further from my grasp...

School bag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile...

That is why it is so very very important to try and live in the moment. Appreciate every second of that ticking clock. One day it will stop.


Grandmothers

Both our mothers are in their 80s - one in her mid-80s, one in her late 80s. They are both remarkable women, but the most remarkable thing right now is their stoicism at having had to endure such lack of physical human contact over these last three months. Given that every moment is precious, these lost seconds, minutes, hours and days of their lives are all the more poignant. We have tried to keep in more regular contact than perhaps we did  in 'normal' times and we must make sure we continue with this practice. It is so very hard to live so far away - but at least we are on the same landmass.

One of the hardest things for me about being told we had to move north for N's job when the children were still so young was the wrench of having to leave family behind. 17 years ago the grandmothers were 17 years younger. My father was still alive. They were till living their lives to the full. With the passage of time, this has inevitably changed. My mother still grieves the loss of my father. She is achingly lonely, I know, and misses the company of males - especially, of course, her lifelong mate. When she met this man in a Torquay hotel bar in the mid 1950s she realized that he was her passport to escape the sometimes suffocating nature of her only-child life in suburban south Devon. This was a man from the other end of the south coast, a journalist, a traveller, a man of the world with wide horizons. They married in 1958. He died in 2014. He was my beloved father and I remember him this Father's Day, 21st June 2020.

They have both coped so very well with these difficult circumstances. I think it is the measure of two women who have lived in a very different era to our own. They were born a few years ahead of World War 2, too young to really understand but old enough to have lasting impressions of how life was then. So much horror. So much tragedy. So much senseless and violent loss of life. The destruction of cities, towns and villages. Landscapes changed forever, physically and mentally. The loss of a generation of young men. Hardship, rationing. Making do and mending. This is the prism through which they, and their generation, are able to see this pandemic. There is a relativity to everything. And the longer you live, the more acute this realisation becomes.

The new 'support bubble' rule allowed us to get in the car and head south once more. Would we hug them? Would we kiss them? We just did the former. It was touch they were desperate for. We 'stayed alert', sanitising and washing hands regularly. We sat further apart than we would normally. The weather was gloriously hot, so we were outside a lot. Fresh air and sunshine, what better cure?

We cooked them meals and sorted out problems which had not been able to be resolved during Lockdown: unblocking drains, fixing broken things, moving their lives on in a more positive direction. But most of all, we were simply just THERE. The chat, the company, the social interaction was more vital than all the rest. For those who like to criticise how this crisis has been managed and would have us all locked up forever, never to set foot outside our homes again, I say this: stop living in fear. We have to move on. We have to start to get back to some sort of normality as there will be a load more costly problems to have to solve, mental health issues and deaths across ALL ages from undiagnosed cancer and lack of treatment programmes. Tick-tock, tick-tock goes the clock....

We took them to the beach and breathed in the briny air - the same beach that I had been to so many times in my youth, motorbiking down from London on hot summer Sundays. As N and I stood with the small waves of the English Channel lapping at our feet, bracing ourselves for the icy plunge, I could not help noticing our own age. Where once we were young, now we are more than middle-aged. Our own children were not there to gild the lily with their youthful vitality; all around us much younger people and families frolicked in the sea as we once had with our own girls. It was hard not to feel nostalgic, not to feel sad. Time moves on, inexorably, as the shadows of our past threaten to engulf us in their darkness. I sometimes wonder how I am going to cope with this inevitability. I used to tell myself 'Don't be silly, you have years yet'. Now I'm not so sure. The diary is running out of pages. Yet those pages are still there for the moment and still need filling, so fill them I will continue to do. It is the only way forward. Tick-tock, tick-tock goes the clock...

A young life I know of got snuffed out in the early hours of last Friday morning. Here one moment, gone the next. A tragic accident. If I live to be old and happy, and all those that I love do too, then I will count myself very, very lucky. We have to have hope, we have to believe, we have to go on. Every second is precious. My mother admits to getting increasingly irritated with life and people as she ages, often railing at the television for the stories it emits. My mother-in-law is different. As she sat in her chair on the beach that hot, sunny evening, her reply to our question as to whether she was frustrated that she cannot taste or smell much any more (while still sipping and enjoying a glass of cool white wine!): 'What use is there getting angry about it? It is so much easier and I am happier if I just accept it.’ The stoicism of someone who has lived a long life and has the advantage of perspective. We could all learn something from that.