We awake remembering the taxi for the airport is due at 8:10 a.m. The flight to Melbourne is at 1:10 pm. The bags are packed, time for a quick coffee. Then the 6-month long dream of a trip to Australia then turns into a nightmare, as yesterday’s cancellation is now a reality that stuns our waking brains.
In all fairness the trip has been off-on-off-on for days. Now we have to admit defeat. The pesky virus has won. That does not prevent a mood of depression that hits us full on.
Six hours later I begin to look at what positives could come from an enforced six weeks at home, possibly incarcerated within the limited landscape of house and garden. At least we have a garden, many others don’t. I come to the conclusion I had lost interest in our vegetable patch. Ah ha! So maybe now I can launch myself into a project.
Walking out from the village in warm spring sunshine is unreal. It seems that there should be something wrong with the landscape that is preventing travel and closing workplaces as well as killing the vulnerable old. Where is this virus? Can I see it? Is it lurking in the clouds, black and threatening like a thunderstorm? It doesn’t feel right that we cannot see what is closing down our normal way of life.
Tilling the earth seems like a wholesome and natural activity, so I set to and started weeding the vegetable patch. I have a long way to go. I plant a new, young gooseberry bush and a redcurrant shrub. Untainted life will soon be offering fruits.
My wife Liza has had a sore throat 4 days; we hope it is just a cold!
Day 2
Having booked to play golf as usual on a Wednesday, discretion gets the better of me, as I defer to the thought that if Liza has got the virus I should not go to play golf with a bunch of upper 70’s blokes. It would not be prudent to kill off one’s buddies, especially when I have taken some money from them of late. Anyway, it is spotting with rain, that won’t make it much fun. So, with reluctance, I stay at home. I regard our house and garden as ‘inside’. Everywhere else is ‘outside’.
The outside news gets worse everyday. More institutions close yet schools stay open for now. Are we seventy-year-old people really going to have to stay on our properties for up to twelve weeks? This really is frightening. Once again I regard us as fortunate; we have a garden and some space.
I feel I must go out. Liza is feeling ill but we still believe it is not the virus but a cold. We shall know tomorrow. So I drive to the post office, (to dispatch the Aussie grandchildren’s gifts that were packed to go with us), and then to RHS Harlow Carr garden for a walk and to buy vegetable seeds. The garden is coming to life in the weak spring sunshine. Red rhododendrons, dwarf daffodils and dogwoods bring colour to what should be a normal view. But I still see a landscape that should have some danger sign across it: ‘THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH, BUT WASH YOUR HANDS FOR HALF A MINUTE, THEN YOU MIGHT LIVE ANOTHER DAY’.
Day 3
The outside news is bad. Stock markets continue to free-fall. The pound sterling is at its lowest level for 30 years. Even worse, the cricket season may not take place. All schools will close indefinitely from 20th March.
The inside good news is that Liza is feeling better so it would appear she has nothing more than a cold.
There is some encouraging outside news. Joe Biden will almost certainly see off Bernie Sanders for the nomination for the Democrats’ candidate for the US presidency.
Having bought my vegetable seeds I must now get digging in the patch. But today it is too wet and cold to dig. I chop some firewood, prune some shrubs and retreat to the summerhouse. A first! A first sit in the summerhouse this year. Hurray!
Day 4
Our granddaughter in Australia has found the answer. Gwen says: “If I find a Conivarius I’m going to fart on it. That should do the trick.”
Her grandma in Wales has seen the positive extra benefits: “That’s the spirit Gwen. It should also help evacuate the surrounding area should people not be observing the correct social distancing.”
I search for normality with a first visit to the golf course in over a week. The sun in shining, there is no wind: ideal golfing conditions. Yet it is not normal. Dozens of others have had the same idea; the thought that you can’t catch corbyn 19, (or is it covid 19), if you are outdoors so long as you remain a club’s length away from everyone else. The flag poles have grey water pipe insulating foam attached to them so the ball won’t go all the way down to the bottom of the hole and we don’t have to touch the flag. The professional had an inspired idea.
The small bar in the clubhouse is closed but the lounge is open and chairs set a metre apart. It is reminiscent of “the few” waiting in armchairs by their Spitfires as they prepare for another sortie in The Battle of Britain. The young Tykes of our club believe the over 80s should not be anywhere near them.
“If they catch it they’ll expect to be taken to hospital and take up key resources. We are all going to die sooner or later, them a bit sooner than they thought perhaps.” It is not a position I can argue with.
After golf I am back in the patch, ‘digging for victory’ – to borrow the Second World War phrase used by allotment holders in the 1940s. Or it should be ‘digging for virus’. There has been much comment in the media of late, comparing our predicament – both health wise and economic – with the experience of Londoners during the Blitz in 1940.
Day 5
From now on my first excursion each morning, now we are largely confined to quarters, is to walk around the estate. It sounds grand but it’s just less than one acre. The joy of this at such a time of the year includes the morning chirrups of blackbirds, robins and wrens. Having planted a few trees last year, and the replacement soft fruit bushes this year, I also look every morning to see how each has chitted a bit more since yesterday. At the top of our paddock is a gate into our neighbour’s. Their friendly goat, Charlie, is there to greet me each day. I stop to give his neck a scratch, which he enjoys with a grin.
Headmaster Boris has declared we are now all gated. (Having been gated as a punishment at school over fifty years ago I remember that there are ways of temporarily escaping this restriction.) Boris has declared that under 70s can visit food shops only (that’s me excluded); to which I add the golf course but not the clubhouse, now that pubs, churches and gyms are off limits. So it is another day in the patch – weeding amongst the strawberries, raspberries and last year’s parsnips. I am preparing for the long haul and will soon be sowing vegetable seeds that will yield crops to keep us sustained through the long summers, autumns and winters of the next three years. If the chief medical officer is correct we could be locked down for three years. Three years! I could be dead by then.
So for an indeterminate length of time the landscape for us two Yorkshire figures is an orchard, a veg patch and a paddock.
To keep the brain being ossified I have read three books in five days; Rounding the Mark by Andrea Camilleri (Inspector Montalbano deals with death, illegal immigrants, the chaotic Catarella and the delicious Livia in Sicily); Maigret’s Patience by Georges Simenon (the 64th novel in this inimitable series); and The Looking Glass War by John le Carré (Penguin has just reissued this brilliant satire of the Cold War paranoia in Whitehall). Next up is The Making of the President 1964 by William Manchester. I am re-reading this in a year when we are critically short of candidates of the stature of Kennedy (Robert), Nixon, Johnson, Goldwater, Rockefeller, Scranton and Lodge – all flawed personalities but honourable leaders (with one exception). The similarities between Goldwater and Trump are uncanny.
Day 6
Mothers’ Day. Two bright sparks in the village have set up a Facebook account for the church and a camera in front of the altar. The Rev. Ralph Hudspeth holds a virtual service. What would my mother, (116 if she were still with us), have made of this fiasco we are in? No doubt she would have carried on phlegmatically as she did in the last war and through all subsequent crises in her life.
Another thirty square feet of impacted soil in the patch is dug over today. This is followed by completion of the fourth book of the week; the hilarious golf memoir, The Downhill Lie by US crime novelist Carl Hiaasen. In this book he addresses the insanity played out by millions of figures across the world every week when blasting a little white sphere around a park with eighteen holes.
Day 7
The sun is shining; it is a brilliant and bright spring morning. The golf course is open (most of the club buildings are closed) so where better to spend a few hours? The Times correspondent in Scotland writes today that many courses north of the border are fearful for the future. Club membership is falling throughout Great Britain. This crisis could put many out of business. As of today it is still not contravening advice to play. We don’t go nearer than two metres to our fellow players; we touch no course furniture - neither fixed nor loose. The five of us are of the same mind to get some exercise, doing what we like and in good company. We shall continue to play whilst the going is good.
Whilst my own rural landscape is tranquil and largely deserted the towns are full of shoppers rushing about like ants around their nest, hunting for food with which to stock their larder. It is a frightening world where many folk are obsessed with provisioning their cupboards to bursting point. There are books to be read, films to be watched and gardens to be dug; these are the simplest yet most rewarding life activities.
Across the world, parents are homeschooling their children, and in the process learning themselves; that teachers are unsung, and underpaid, heroes. Step up Mr. Gisborne – the other one.
We are all now in ‘lockdown’ as the newspapers like to call it. Headmaster Boris has banned us all from going anywhere – we must stay at home. My golf club has e-mailed to report that the course is closed from today.
So the veg patch is the main project now plus the books. I realize my wife and I are fortunate to have a bit of space in which to breathe the country air and a large library.
The view of the landscape across the fields looks stunning this morning. It is bathed in bright sunshine and the blackbirds are definitely animated with the thought of nookie.
Day 9
On my walk around the paddock once again I am struck by the invisible destructiveness of this virus and the purity of the air and the landscape before me. I am reminded of the great twentieth century philosopher, Anthony Aloysius Hancock. Trapped in a stuck lift with ‘eight persons’ he muses about air and the shortage of it in their predicament and the likely demand for it as the world population grows so fast.
“Too many people breathing too little air.
“It’s a funny thing air, isn’t it Doc? You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. You can’t smell it. But its there.” He could be talking about the virus.
Day 10
On my morning perambulation around our plot – it would take under five minutes without the chat with Charlie – I am struck once again by the dichotomy between the inspiring North Yorkshire landscape, bathed in warm sunshine with the birds full of lusty song, and our country’s position on the brink of a precipice, about to tumble into a public health and economic depression. I do fear for our kids’ and their generation and our grandchildren too. The economic damage being perpetrated on this country will thrust uncertainty on all who expect to work and gain financial comfort before they in turn retire. We are the lucky ones who look not for work but leisure and peace. Is this ‘lockdown’ worth the effect it will have on the lives of our children’s children?
A virus on the landscape
will be back
in....
Fom China with Love
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