A virus on the landscape 3 - Easter lock-in

 

Day 24
In the misnamed Land of the Free (people are anything but), or Land of the Blond Cuckoo, the toll of deaths in New York is horrifying. So much for the country being open again by Easter - which is what their delusional, mendacious and bad president promised a few weeks ago. Bernie Sanders has realized he cannot gain enough delegates to win the Democrat nomination for president. He has ‘suspended’ his campaign. In other words he wants to spoil Mr. Biden’s party at the convention.

I plant some chard seeds.

Day 25

Today is Good Friday. In normal circumstances millions of people would be driving to the country’s national parks to explore the British landscape. In Wales the police report they will arrest people trying to do what comes as instinctive in this season. It is a sad time when town dwellers cannot go and get some pure oxygen into their lungs. Having always had space around me, even when I lived in a city, I am heartbroken for urban people confined to quarters in this beautiful spring weather.

I remember an old wives’ tale relates that whoever in the household sows parsley on Good Friday, wears the trousers; and, it is alleged, Good Friday is the only day that Satan has no jurisdiction over my veg patch. Neither of us sows parsley.

I plant lettuce seeds. I think neither Satan nor God are watching.

Moreporks in Queenstown prison

Day 26

I am starting to feel how a caged bird must feel when confined to an aviary. I remember the Kiwi Birdlife Park near Bob’s Peak in Queenstown, New Zealand. Seeing moreporks^ looking down at us with glazed eyes from high up in their boxes was saddening. They had a small area in which to fly but what was the point? There was nowhere to go. There was no way they could spend time with others, go for a nice long fly or visit the golf course. It makes me think that in this age, when computer imagery can provide all experiences in education about natural history a child can need, we should free every bird held in captivity.

Anyway, lots of citizens will be feeling like moreporks.

Day 27

I am in Australia today. Not literally, but we were supposed to be coming to the end of our fourth week in Woodend, Victoria. As a bit of relief from the intensity of reading about the history of the Zulu nation in The Washing of the Spears, I have sought Australian contemporary drama and crime with Truth by Peter Temple. A newspaper columnist this week places this book in his top ten best crime novels published. Temple wrote two other crime novels set in Melbourne. They are good reads once you fathom the Aussie cop lingo.

I am also in Australia in my head, enjoying being with our Matthew, his wife and the grandchildren. And going for walks along the tracks into the forest, listening to my favourite Aussie bird, the Magpie, issuing its ‘bottom of the bottle’ warble.

Day 28

We walk for two hours across the silent fields and parched earth. The crops that broke through the earth two weeks ago are stuck. It is cold today. Spring is suspended.

A friend who lives in rural, southern France wrote to me this week: “Enforced isolation has prompted an increased awareness of my surroundings - the blue skies are empty of vapour trails - we are 33,800 feet below the Madrid-Mahon and the Lisbon- Berlin flight paths and so many others that crisscross the sky above us. Our rural solitude is enhanced by the Jackhammer drill sound of the woodpeckers, the cry of the circling buzzards and since last weekend the call of the cuckoo.” It sounds wonderful. We were booked to go and stay with him and his wife in June en route to Lago di Bolsena. C’est la vie.

Day 29

School prefect Raab, (Headmaster Boris is released from hospital and recuperating in the sanatorium), says today we have at least three more weeks confined to quarters. Despite not being able to play golf I think we can manage that. There is still much to be done in the veg patch, the kitchen and the reading room. My shelf of new books is still crammed. There are histories on: (OIiver) Cromwell’s England, Vietnam, Arnhem, Dresden, the Silk Roads, the wars for the American West, the wars at the Democratic party’s convention in 1968, the East India Company, the last of the Tsars and Brian Clough. There is fiction about or by (Thomas) Cromwell’s England, Maigret’s Paris, Anthony Trollope, Robert Harris, Dorothy Sayers and Brian Clough.

We just need some rain for the patch.

Day 30

Spring is reactivated, as the wind swings round to the southwest. It is time to plant more potatoes and the remainder of the veg seeds.

Day 31

Despite dawn until dusk sunshine and warm temperatures the mood is darker today. We have at least three more weeks of this incarceration. I avoid the newspapers’ obsessive reporting of the virus. I leave the radio silent. But then DB sends a copy of a report from the Henry Jackson Society entitled, Coronavirus Compensation? Assessing China’s Culpability and Avenues of Legal Response. Nobody locked in at home can ignore the economic cost of this experience. It is true that China does not play by the same rules of international law that we, in the so-called West, expect other nations to play by. China appears to have no regard for a rules-based international system. So it is all too easy to think that China IS culpable and this year it is kick-starting its march towards global supremacy.

Some commentators on the current position are getting itchy feet. They want a lifting of the barricade. They want to start re-building lives and economies. It might also be time to examine the case against China.

To soften the mood I plant seeds of French bean and Sweet Pea.

Day 32

Every morning on my walk around the ‘estate’ since the first seed sowing I stop to look for the first signs of chitting. I am dubious that the leeks are showing, also the carrots. It is so cold at nights I am not surprised. I just hope the seeds did not get frosted this week.

Day 33

I find it difficult to believe we are up to Day 33 since our cancelled flight to Melbourne and subsequent incarceration at home. I make my first visit to a supermarket. This is hardly an exciting excursion. We have to queue to enter the building. I walk around shying away from other shoppers. They shy away from me. One of them could poison me with the virus. They probably think the same about me. I want to escape.

Day 34

One newspaper headline this morning reads seventy year olds could have to be locked in for twelve months. I don’t think I could stand that. I would have to break out. On the morning Zoom call with the family we learn that Australia could prevent incoming flights for the remainder of this year. That is too awful to contemplate.

I feel a lack of making plans. Part of the joy of life is having something to look forward to. Seeing the grandchildren – in Leeds, Leicestershire and Australia – and doing things with them has become a large part of our lives. Not knowing when we can resume this ‘essential activity’  - I hope you read this Headmaster - has created a void, for them and us.

Day 35

Today I am transported to the garden at Trelissick at Feock in Cornwall. In 1974, during our first stay at Crantock after our marriage, we visited National Trust gardens in May. (My dear wife had just given me a life membership of the NT at a cost of £75!) Trelissick’s aspect is south over the estuary called Carrick Roads. This is the dreamily romantic landscape of a pirate in Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier, the King Harry ferry and our lazy cream teas in St Mawes. Azaleas and rhododendrons thrive here and there is one yellow variety, rhododendron luteum, which has a fragrant and exotic smell. Years later I bought a shrub of the same genus, planted in half a beer barrel on our terrace. It has just come into bloom. I stop to sniff it each morning; thus am I back in Trelissick.

The gloom concerning the unknowing when this lock in will be relieved is lifted by our holding an illicit tea party for six in our garden. Today is our neighbour’s birthday. She lives alone, is a very sociable person under normal circumstances and someone who prefers the company of others to her own. Cakes had been baked and we sit two metres apart in our summerhouse and orchard, buttoned up against the cold East wind.

Day 36

It is five weeks ago today that we were due to fly to Australia. We are still sad at the missed trip. The pattern of life is now becoming a trifle tedious for the first time. However, we have some welcome visitors to our landscape. Our neighbouring farmer has half his flock of sheep in his field next to ours. So, we open the gate and I now have twenty-five Mules* to talk to as I work in the patch.

The peas, onions and leeks are showing above the ground. At long last there is some daily growth in the produce to spot. Yet, as we have had no rain in April I have to water all the seedbeds every evening. The first harvested produce of the year is the rhubarb. A crumble is in the oven cooking.

We have another illicit tea party with friends the other side of the village. Being model citizens we sit two metres apart as we look out across the stunningly beautiful Wharfedale valley.

'We gated too?"

Day 37

On the early morning walk around the paddock I am followed by the twenty-five Mules. It’s a bit like Grandmother’s Footsteps; I walk, they walk. I stop and look around and they stop. I start, they start. Charlie the goat gives me the cold shoulder as if to say: “get you and your new women friends”. He turns away and does not greet me.

I am now reading Trollope – Anthony, not Joanna. My mother was a keen reader of his novels. I am slightly ashamed to admit that nearly twenty years after her death I am only now getting round to reading such delicious prose. The Warden is full of satirical references to the Church of England, Fleet Street and the Bar. What obnoxious men are the Archdeacon and John Bold. Yet it reminds me that the Church of England is being very quiet in the current state of affairs. I am so heartily tired of the television news coverage of CV I long for some juicy bits of distracting news. News such as Kim Jong-un having gone missing in North Korea, which is fascinating. I would welcome some sage words from the Archbishop of Canterbury. As Trollope might have written: the church is full of aristocratic souls, men and women not in want of wisdom, but able to share with the common man some advice on how to make life a little more rewarding.

Day 38

Today I am in the Hebrides. I am grasping with forlorn anticipation thoughts of whatever new landscape I can. Our good friends are organizing a trip for the six participants in the current Saturday virtual drinks party. To look forward to a journey to the Western Isles, albeit in 12 months time, is a wonderful idea. We shall need to dust down our copy of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore, a book I have read twice and shall enjoy again in 2021. As OTM says, my wife may be tempted to take up scuba diving to search for the remaining bottles of whisky lying at the bottom of the sea.

Day 39

I am off in Barsetshire again today. The warden is about to resign and the odious Archdeacon cannot stop him. Hurrah for the warden. Yah boo sucks to Mr Bold. On the other hand perhaps a modicum of reform was needed in the Church. On further thought, a bit more is still required today.

Headmaster Boris still has a sick note from matron. He has brought in an inspector from the Department of Science – which trumps everything Education and the Foreign Office have to offer – and Inspector Witty says I may have to be locked in for another 12 months. Bugger that I say.

Day 40

It’s day 40 already. I can’t say it has flown by. I am not a particularly religious soul – I like the Communion service using the 1662 Book of Common Prayer because of the words and implicit wisdom – yet I consider these forty days. Scholars of the Bible write “40 appears so often in contexts dealing with judgment or testing”. Yes, we are all being tested.  In Genesis, God destroyed the earth with water, bringing rain for 40 days and 40 nights. Could we have just a couple of day’s worth now please? In Exodus Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights on Mount Sinai. It was all right for him; we may have to spend 80, 120 or 240 days and nights in our private abode.

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^ Morepork, ninox novaeseelandiae, is the only surviving native owl in New Zealand. The Maori name for the owl is ‘ruru’ comes from the sad song that is repeated at regular intervals.

* A mule is a cross between a Bluefaced Leicester ram and a Swaledale ewe.

A virus on the landscape 2 – From China with Love

Day 11

The Prince of Wales has the blasted virus. He’s all right though because he is holed up in his Scottish pile with a small band of his staff. Some Scots are not best pleased at this news. He might have brought his illness from London and infected some of their citizens.

Headmaster Boris also has gone down with the bug. As has School Prefect Mr. Hancock – not the one in the lift with ‘eight persons’ but the prefect in charge of health and the NHS.

It was another backbreaking day in the patch. Creeping buttercup has long roots and every little sod (of earth) has to be pulled apart by hand. The long-tailed tits and red kites are keeping me company; the former are flitting from one tree to another uttering their cheerful tweet; the latter wheeling above issuing their mournful cry. Yesterday, high up and riding the thermals I saw a pack of over sixty kites, flying large circles and eventually moving off towards Harewood House where they are fed.

Day 12

I made my first break out for six days. It was an exciting two miles trip in the car to the local supermarket in Harrogate to buy a hard copy newspaper (we have the digital version on other days) and hunt for yeast, bread flour and carrots. Sadly none of these were on the shelves that are mostly stripped bare. My excitement of breaching the gate abated.

So it is back to the patch and by day’s end I have completed weeding the area where the first vegetable seeds will be sown. What do I think about during these long hours of toil in the patch? I suppose similar thoughts to those of Haruki Murakami in his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007). Murakami was training for the 2005 New York City marathon. I am training for the 2020 Covid-19 Summer Lock in. Except, I am not training, I’m actually in it. I am up and running.

I am often bemused by my awareness of location – my brain can suddenly transport me to somewhere in the world, it is not unusual for a place visited dozens of years ago to come to mind, quite randomly, when I remember whom I was with and where we were going. It is remarkable how often some places come to mind after so long a period. Today it was a walk in the snow-covered pine forests north of Vancouver, British Columbia, in the winter of 1967/8. With my cousin and a university friend we drove north to a First Nations village. Here I saw for the first time indigenous Canadians with no jobs, no prospects, nothing to look forward to except the next drink. There was old beer bottles strewn across the derelict land interspersed with the occasional wreck of a car without its wheels. This was hopelessness incarnate. I think some more about 1968. What a year that was! Moving up my reading list is An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968. I remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Negro riots, anti Vietnam War riots, the ‘abattoir’ of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Oh yes, that was quite a year. There were even student protests and sit ins on the campus of Nottingham University. Students are so well behaved and law abiding nowadays.

A second trip to ‘outside’ is to the village pub to collect our supper. It is not only feels good to support the pub – which like every small business will be experiencing hardship – but it gives me a second night off from cooking this week.

Day 13

Like many other house prisoners we have installed Zoom on our computers. On Saturdays we have weekly virtual drinks parties with friends in Yorkshire. Today we also hold our first Zoom hookup with all three of our kids and their families. Wooded, Victoria, Australia; Market Harborough, Leicestershire; Leeds, West Yorkshire and Kirby Overblow, North Yorkshire are all looking in and describing their best bits of the week. The Aussies are toasting marshmallows on an open fire bathed in autumn sunshine. Mount Macedon and golden maple trees shine in their evening glow. In North Yorkshire it is snowing. It is the first day of spring!

Day 14

Charlie and I are most impressed by the president of Belarus. “The strongman leader of Belarus is promoting his own unique recipe for staying healthy: drink vodka, work hard in the countryside and visit the sauna.” Now as someone who gave up gin in favour of vodka four years ago this is welcome good news. I drink vodka, (not on Mondays to Thursdays), toil in the patch (every day except the Sabbath), and have a hot shower (several times a week).  So if I follow President Alexander Lukashenko’s dictum I will keep free of the virus. Belarus is not a country in which I have travelled but it sounds like an attractive landscape. There are 9.5 million souls living there and as of last week the shops, markets and theatres were all open doing brisk business. I reckon we should head off there immediately I have my vegetable seeds in.

Back in the patch I am digging again. I have a game that keeps my golf putting in trim. I have set up a bucket in one corner and each time I unearth a stone I lob it into the bucket, keeping in mind: ‘Keep your head still, breathe in…and don’t leave it short’. A golf professional has also come up with Chipping Snooker; I have set up a series of different sized containers at varying distances from a mat. I then have to chip a golf ball into each.

Today my wife remarked she had the first twinge of concern we are in this incarceration for a long time. I share her thoughts. The novelty of the new life is starting to wear off for both of us. We are only two weeks in. How many more to go?

Day 15

It takes a long time to get motivated to do anything today. The likely length of the lock in is sinking in to my mind. I dig. I daydream about walking the Lakeland Fells. I make a few telephone calls to friends.

Our afternoon walk up our middle lane provides us with respite. At the highest point there is a clear, uninterrupted view up Wharfedale. There is Ilkley Moor to our left and Nidderdale to our right. Oh, how I long to get up there and stride out – and call in for a pint at The Craven Arms in Appletreewick.

Day 16

There is more good news for vodka drinkers of the world. A firm in New York named Air Co is taking captured carbon dioxide and turning it into vodka. So every time I pour a shot, or two, I am helping save the planet. Two positive steps are achieved with one slug. However, this vodka retails at $65 a bottle and…I notice that today is 1^st April. So maybe Mr. Trump is having a joke with us.

I continue to dig for virus.

Day 17

The wind has veered to the west. It brings different sounds and smells to those from the north of the past few days. I am now reading Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, the second volume of His Dark Materials Trilogy. If I cannot go out into my local landscape then there is nowhere better to be than with Pullman. The story in this book moves between three landscapes. Pullman calls them universes.

Having watched the disappointing 1979 film Zulu Dawn last night it has provided the inspiration to sketch out a bit more of the next landscape blog to be titled kwaZulu which is about the men caught up on the landscape where the battles of Isandlwhana and Rorke’s Drift were fought in 1879.

Day 18

I had a dream about Oxford last night. This is not surprising because it comes into Philip Pullman’s book. I dreamed about the people I worked with at Blackwell’s. Curiously I was firing a member of staff. The Ashmolean and the Bodleian Library featured in the dream.

Digging in the patch is getting difficult. The ground is hard and compacted. We have had no rain for over two weeks.

Are you talkin' to me?

Day 19

At this time of year, especially this year as I am out in the patch for many hours each day, I remember my father who every spring loved to recite this poem:

Spring is sprung

The grass is riz

I wonder where the birdies is

The birdie is on the wing

But that’s absurd

The wing is on the bird

My dad would without fail giggle his way through this as, en famille, we drove to our annual Easter walk in the Peak District. At the time I was ignorant of the author. It is Ogden Nash. My father was neither a great reader nor a bookish man despite manufacturing them. But he had an ear for music and absurdity in song and verse.

Day 20

I am covid out. My three weekend newspapers have little else to write about. I have had enough. It’s back to the patch. I decide that when ‘I stand and stare’ across my landscape I will record every species of bird I see in 24 hours. They are: coal tit, blue tit, great tit, long tailed tit, carrion crow, wood pigeon, pheasant (grrh, I hate them), great spotted woodpecker, blackbird, magpie, dunnock, bullfinch, chaffinch, red kite and goldfinch. We usually see robins and nuthatches but they are keeping away today. I also hear a tawny owl.

We both toil some more in the patch. I reckon one more day will see it dug all over. I sow seeds of leek and carrot, as the day is so warm. We just need some rain.

Day 1 before the dig 

Day 21 - after

Day 21
One aspect of this lock in is that we have all had to learn to reset our life’s objectives. With no end to the emergency identifiable I find it best to shorten plans and confine them to the day’s ambitions. (‘Setting the day’s ambitions’ is an activity my South African based sister and her family installed in their routines when the children were young. It is a good activity. Thus one avoids being disappointed by failing to complete a long list of chores or tasks.)

Today we completed the weeding of the veg patch. It has taken since Day 1. The hard graft is over. I sew some more veg seeds as the sun continues to shine. It is almost bliss here.

The robin and the nuthatch put in an overdue appearance. I suspect they did not want to be a statistic on yesterday’s list.

Day 22

Headmaster Boris is in hospital with the virus. This is sad and disturbing news. Also School Monitor Gove has it too. There is some good news from Westminster; we now have a believable leader of the opposition.

After sowing more veg seeds and onion sets we take off into the lower Wharfedale landscape for a 5-mile walk. Then I am back in my latest read; The Washing of the Spears; the rise and fall of the Zulu Nation by Donald R. Morris (1966).

with apologies to Richard Chopping

Day 23

The North Yorkshire landscape remains looking beautiful. There is no blight. There is no infection. As I talk to Charlie on the morning walk I reflect on the calamitous state of affairs in the United States. New York City is losing as many citizens in a day that the whole of the UK. In China it is announced that there are no new cases on the virus. In the province where the virus started people are allowed out. Life is getting back to normal. The 8-lane highways are full of traffic again and the airport is congested. Yet across the US hundreds are dying. The country’s president shows no national leadership. It is highly questionable that the US will ever be a global economic power again. The president and the citizens show little desire to be world shapers. This leaves the road open for the Chinese to move right in and become the single, global economic power. Their singular, Communist influence is about to be unleashed on us all – From China with Love!