Lockdown Diary — Week 3

(Continued from Week 2)

Monday

The box arrived a few days earlier. Inside, a couple of small gifts, some old photographs and, of course, Easter eggs for the boys. We open them while talking online with my mother and sister. Its surprising how well the Zoom chat imitates an in-person conversation, the old reason behind the 200 mile round-trip I’d usually make around my birthday.

The world continues to turn slowly upside down, but the news of Boris Johnson’s move into intensive care adds another shock. It’s hard to switch off, and I pass a restless night, as do many others.

I wonder it was like for him. The arrival of the famous fever and cough, not entirely unexpected — aren’t we all expecting it? The comfort that most people don’t have serious symptoms. The desire to keep working. The messages that still arrive daily, hourly and beg responses. The cough that persists, the fever that remains. The pulling of breath, the realisation. I hope he gets well soon. Him and all the others that followed similar paths to their beds in hospital.

Tuesday

Weekdays consist of time with the kids in the morning, lunch, then an afternoon start to work, as Rong takes over the childcare. The evening brings further work for both of us, time to get on with promises made earlier. I relish my work, enjoy what I do, but the hours in the day are unforgiving. It is tiring. The working week is much longer, the weekends much more necessary.

The kids and I spend much of the morning shift in the garden, carving out the flattened ground for the tree fort, a wedge into our sloping garden. The soil needs a new home. A large flower pot drilled with holes serves as a makeshift sieve. The soil comes through unwillingly into the first wheelbarrow, then the next, and the next. We spread it out over the grass, with bonemeal fertiliser to add more green in the Summer.

My spade hits stone. I dig around, uncovering the foundations of an old outhouse, or a sturdy shed. Built to last by some stubborn Ozymandias. A significant setback — I don’t have tools for breaking up concrete.

I’m grateful for the absolute privilege of a house with garden space. A space of endless tasks, albeit some easier than others. A space we can walk into at any time, for longer than an hour if we choose - and we do choose - beneath the blue and the blossoms and the opening leaves. A space, free from other people gathering in murky ways, or looking accusingly, in case our time is up or our pace too slow.

Wednesday

My father spent many of his days outside, years in fact. He was a fan of outdoor eating and cooking, barbeques in particular. He’d prepare the coal and wood fire an hour before grilling. Significant quantities of meat beneath stacks of home-grown herbs that would catch fire and crackle. We’d sit outside for hours, chatting into the dark, as the bats began to flit between the willow trees. Sometimes two or three cars would drive past during our dinner. My parents would look at each other and wonder at how busy the lane was becoming. Who were all these people?

It’s dark now. I’m listening now for the sounds of cars, enjoying their absence. It is peaceful, quiet in a way I haven’t experienced since those days back home, years ago. I listen to the night, without the white noise of distant traffic, the air no longer laced with diesel. The sweet smells of summer linger instead.

Duty to the kids pushes work into the evening, catching up about the world into the night. On the pillow, thoughts of work and the day’s events continue to run round in my head, and I struggle to sleep.

Thursday

Meetings today were relentless, one after the other until early evening. I was going to go to the supermarket, but don’t have the energy. My head throbs slightly and I feel that feeling of the energy dripping out of my muscles downwards, the ache before illness.

Friday

I wake up with the same headache. Slightly cold. Unwell. I feel more irritated than anything. I haven’t left the house since the Tesco trip ten days ago. I haven’t been to the office for a month! Why the hell do I still have a blocked nose? And its a bank holiday!

I stay under the sofa for a few hours in the morning, with the boys coming in and out every few minutes to say hello, or present a drawing, or present some other priority. I steal myself and get up. The day is too good to waste, and the boys wouldn’t let me anyway.

I’m not up for digging, not while the blocks of concrete remain. I wander into the garage, pick out a few pieces of wood: a length of skirting board, a bit of shelf and make plans.

My favourite tool is my mitre saw, bought a long time ago when I first started making things out of wood. When I was still at University and my parents couldn’t discourage me from wasting my student loan on dangerous power tools. After fifteen years it cuts on only the second blade, needed only because my father once borrowed it to blasphemously slice a load of firewood. It still cuts like butter.

It is my favourite tool, in the sense that a naturalist might prefer a favourite shark. It deserves respect. The spinning blade would tear through a limb, irretrievably scatter bone and flesh and nerve without so much as a change in tone. I cut a couple of pieces of oak as supports for the legs of the desk, playing with angles, leaving the cut piece on the deck.

On the next cut the blade catches the oak piece, crushes it like a matchstick into two and flings it into my face. I’ve never made an unnecessary mistake like that before. I need to be more careful. Now is not the time for injuries. I hear the A&E department at the local hospital is triaging mostly outside, in tents on top of the car park.

Saturday

I’m reading A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr. In 1920 a young man arrives in a Yorkshire village tasked with to uncovering an ancient mural on the church wall. Still raw from the trenches of France, he falls into village life during a long and perfect summer. It drips with yearning for what could have been, the regrets of an old author for opportunities untaken and the endless possibilities of youth. A beautiful read, with some attitudes about travel a hundred years ago that are oddly reassuring:

Most country people had a deep-rooted disinclination to sleep away from home…It was the way they had always lived … they travelled no further than a horse or their own legs could carry them there and back in a day.

I remember my own summer at about the same age, after finishing University. I took a job for a Norfolk village to complete a census, going from house to house delivering and collecting surveys, then analysing and documenting the results. It was the summer of 2004, another glorious Summer that went on forever. I built them a website afterward, the second time I was paid to write software.

Sunday

The kids are anxious to make progress on the tree fort. It is the first thing Jesse asks about in the morning. Digging under the concrete foundations they come up thinner than expected — only about six inches. Enough to lever up, crack and slowly break up. The tree fort foundations are soon complete.

I’ve built a standing desk. Joined the skirting board to the shelf until it is a single piece. Attached the wood and covered my traces, sanding until flush, a layer of oil to transform it into furniture. It is profoundly therapeutic.

As dusk falls, helicopters fly overhead. One looks like a police helicopter, another obviously an air ambulance. The boys gaze up in excitement as the rotors throb overhead. Not far from us, a relentless emergency unfolds, of logistics and decisions and consequences.

I read a Facebook update by an old friend, a nurse in a London hospital, describing the ceaseless emergency of of COVID-19 patient care. How different her words are to mine as we each describe our week. I will stay home, plant vegetables and dig soil and get tired.

Tired yes, but my, have we got it easy.

And this steady rhythm of living and working got into me, so I felt part of it and had my place, a foot in both present and past.