Lockdown Diary — Week 4
Our next door neighbours don’t have a kitchen. The remnants of their old one sits in the sunlight in a skip out front. We send some more potatoes over, roasted not raw, with a pint of gravy, to the grateful family. Yes, a delayed kitchen is a first-world problem, but months without one probably feels the same for everybody.
It’s time to move the tree fort to the final location, now that the ground is clear, the tarpaulin laid to deter the weeds for a few years. There’s no good way to move it. I bend underneath, take the weight of it on my back and shift it with Rong’s help. The movement doesn’t help the fort, which is more wobbly after its ten-foot journey, visibly crooked. It takes some additional supports and adjustments to make the angles square again.
This is, I realise, the best it’ll ever look. In time, the sun will bleach the wood, and the moss and bacteria will start to eat away. Planks will break. One day the boys will be too big to care about their old tree fort, forgetting those sunny days when they couldn’t wait to see it completed. In some years I’ll probably take it down again, by myself, while they stay indoors on their computers. I don’t want those days to come sooner than they have to.
Tuesday
Young children are hard work, but there are times when there’s nothing better. A huge bag of wood chips sits on our drive, to surround the tree fort, keep the area soft for little limbs. I cut a hole in the bag and Jesse scoops out the chips, cautiously at first, then with abandon, delighting as the chips collapse down, like a brown cliff collapsing into the sea. He fills two or three wheelbarrows, with pride at the accomplishment. It is as happy as I’ve ever seen him, a delight.
We’ve seriously over-ordered wood chips. The tree fort area is thick with them and the huge bag is still half-full. God knows what we’ll do with them all.
Wednesday
It’s been a year since that fire tore through Notre Dame Cathedral, through the nave and up into the wooden spire. The world watched in shock as it came crashing down, and feared the worst. A year later, it remains unsecured, the start of restoration still un-started. All things take longer than at first planned, and lockdown will probably be the same.
There’s something reassuring about a building that’s seen it all, alarming when it’s nearly taken away. The thought of being left, like children, without elders. Notre Dame has stood throughout all the outbreaks, and plagues, a solid constant in a changing world.
Thursday
In home school today we skip a couple of academic years ahead in order to tackle electrolysis. Jesse carefully writes down the constituent elements of water and some other terms that I can remember. I put some emphasis on the writing preamble, but in the end its all about sticking 9V battery terminals into salt water and watching the bubbles come out.
I prepare a curry for lunch with home-made naan bread. The recipe is quite easy and the naans are amazing as they fry up in the pan: thin and crackly in places, soft and pillowy in others. I’ll never buy dry, dead ones in packets again. So many things had to be bought pre-processed in former busy lives.
The crossover between home-school and the start of work has become a low point in my day. A matter of will to start the working day when half of it has already passed. I’ve taken ibuprofen for the last couple of days to take the edge off a gathering headache. My back aches from the foolish tree house lifting. It’s fine once I get started, because work remains rewarding and endlessly interesting, but the reality is that two jobs in one day can never be a comfortable fit. It is, however, possible, in a way that I didn’t consider before.
Friday
It’s reasonable, apparently, to take a short drive to walk. I don’t need to be told twice, and bundle the kids into the car. We head to a large wood, a few minutes’ drive through empty suburbia. It’s another wonderful spring day. We explore the woods, walk beside the railway tracks. There’s a river, a farm, a heathland filled with heather. In the old days we’d drive past this place, en-route to somewhere more worthwhile. Now I appreciate how beautiful this place is, how many intricate details I’ve missed before. Trees creaking in the wind, paths so far unexplored, an old stump that looks like Forky from Toy Story 4 and makes the three of us laugh.
The heathland reminds me of my grandparents’ house, which was named after the heather. It was a big, cold house. At night the old boiler’s bangs would ring through the plumbing, the “good old thing” as my grandmother called it. The beds thick with heavy blankets. My grandmother loved the birds too, she’d enjoy hearing them so clearly.
People are more comfortable with the distancing now, finding passing places when the pathways are too narrow and waiting. Faces are more relaxed, more words of greeting.
Facemask in hand, I head to Tesco in the evening, the second time in a month. It’s 7pm and quiet, short queues and plentiful supplies of everything but yeast. I fill up my trolley carefully with supplies good for a couple of weeks. A woman rushes past to the checkouts, bottles of white wine and sparkling water in hand. Not everybody thinks the same.
Saturday
I’m grateful for the weekend in a new way. Glad its here, glad for the simplicity of a day without obligations to work into the evening, only looking after the boys. We dig the soil and scatter grass seeds and look forward to the next bursts of life.
