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!
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 1st 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.
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| Are you talkin' to me? |
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.
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| Day 1 before the dig |
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| Day 21 - after |
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).
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| 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!
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