Another day draws past, undistinguished from other days, and weeks pass. Is this what retirement is like? But I am not retired and I work, now from home, and occasionally London now that this is smiled upon with an askance look.
Day runs into day, hour into another coffee waiting for the dishwasher to fill – that is how time runs.
This cannot be any new normality. It is a collective coma. If I become despairing, what must it be like for those who suffer mental stresses? Many new MPs of a few months ago (it seems forever ago) spoke to say their major concern is mental health, which is as worthy a cause as one can find (and I will write about Hobbes’s observations on the subject before too long), but of all the things to do, this lockdown is a mental health disaster, and for years after the last coronavirus patient has risen from their bed, the trauma of confinement will haunt many, many in their homes, leading to rash actions and choices, and worse disasters ahead. For the sake of sanity it must end.
Another week looms though, unreleased. I can stretch my legs, and take long, long walks from home, but I have to work proper hours, distracted, staring at the work to be done in the garden – and remembering how fortunate I am to have a garden when many are confined to two-room flats. How must they be at this time?
I have long since lost track of time, the weeks, which day it is sometimes, because there is no familiar rhythm beyond the call of the stomach, which is dangerous so close to the cake cupboard, and with loss of time comes the temptation to head out to clear my head in the fields – and each time I think of those who do not have that luxury.
Lethargy loses its charm soon enough. End the lockdown, please, Mr Johnson. I would rather get the disease, even if it is as bad as you had it, then last through more of this. I am resolved though never to retire if this is what it is like.
Another coffee. Another coffee spoon. Whatever the time is, I do not know any more but by counting the used spoons in the bowl.
See also
- All the things I meant to do
- Out to the blue remembered hills
- Don’t make us resent this
- You’ll never take me a-skive, copper
- Waiting for the storm
- Does anyone understand the rules?
- Waking as from sleep
Books
- The Borisaurus: The Dictionary of Boris Johnson by Simon Walters
- A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
- Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay (1841)
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B Peterson
- Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath
