Do you think you banished me beyond the threshold of the kingdom, passed where the dragons sleep? Do you imagine I’ve disintegrated? Do you believe that I’ve dispersed? Do you envisage I’ve dissolved? Do you suppose that if you don’t mention my name, I may not return?
“That, oh that, yes that was unfortunate”.
Do you suspect that I no longer linger in the dirty air you breathe or skim your filthy oceans? If I am no longer on your soil, where do you expect that I’ve gone?
Am I spending midsummer on the lakes of Mars, hiding away from your sun?
I hear the wails from the hippos and the moans from the giraffes. The sounds wander over the park and into my backyard. Sometimes they are interrupted by the bells that Buddhists use. I hear the sea waves and the early morning greetings from the birds. At the end of the day, I hear clouds yawn.
This is about a Japanese woman who is walking in the Botanic Garden on a hazy June afternoon. The low pressure has given her a headache and she is wearing an oversized sunhat to protect her from the sun she can’t see. She is walking with a kind Irish couple, who have offered to show her the garden. They are good guides because they know the names of trees. They are sad because they can’t show her the orchids in the glass houses or stop in the tea rooms afterwards, but anyway they can see the flowers.
The flowers and the trees.
Suddenly a grey squirrel runs down the bark of a Betula Pendula and out into the path right in front of the Japanese woman’s feet and for a moment she is terrified. She wasn’t expecting to see this type of animal and having it so close makes her uncomfortable. She is afraid and she screams. It’s an involuntary cry of fear that she has no control over, but it sounds so much like anger that the squirrel runs away.
Not far from her, a man sits on a bench near the canal. He is feeding the ducks bread, raisons and grapes. He feeds them slowly so that they can all receive something from his box. One duck has a damaged webbed foot, so this man pays him special attention to make sure he gets as much food as the rest. When strangers pass by and say hello, the man over-compensates with chirpy answers and cheerful banter, but this is the sound of abandonment. The misty June afternoon has given him a headache too and he wishes the rain would come to clear the air. The weather is making him restless and he even hopes for some thunder. He thinks back to a time when anger was still popular, and he curses the people who litter.
The sounds of his sighs show exhaustion.
This is not about the Japanese woman in the Botanic Gardens or the man who feeds ducks from the bench. This is really all about the sounds of grief, and why grief always sounds like a whistle.
Grief is a terrible man in the shadows who follows you daily and hides behind doors. Grief carries a whistle and nibbles his grubby finger-nails and smirks all the time while you cry. Grief is a menacing man, with a fat greasy face and the smell of his breath makes you vomit. The whistle rests out of the side of his mouth and there’s a snail trail of saliva just on it. When he finally blows, the sounds are high pitched and they terrify when they slam through you.
Grief is a cowardly piece of stale piss in the wind, and he only has this one very cheap trick. He can stay in the shadows, in dark corners of rooms and he can stay all day long if he wants to. Let the whistle be, just one sound in the mix, and let the other sounds around absorb it.
Hear the cries from the zoos and the bells the Buddhist ring and see if you can’t listen to sea waves. Listen all day to the way birds say hi, and at the end of it all there’s a cloud yawn.
I only ask because I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week. If you’re a scientist then you probably think that reality is made up of atoms, particles, space, time and gravity and you can probably show me an equation to show me how this is so. If you’re more inclined towards the humanities then you probably think that reality is a collection of the thoughts, actions and beliefs of the people who once lived here. Linguists might assume that reality lies within a perfectly constructed sentence that encapsulates feelings about life, truth and love. Or perhaps for you, reality is the slight evening movements of a spider plant, a cello note or a morning drop of dew.
On Monday 600 shops and businesses re-opened in Dublin and we all returned to a reality. In addition to the food and hardware shops, you can now purchase clothes, shoes, Carroll’s Irish souvenirs and jewellery. We live in a world where you can queue to buy earrings from Pandora’s; so we might just call it reality with a twist.
I was quite surprised to see all the people on Monday. I went for my walk as normal, but for the first time in 13 weeks I felt underdressed and a little self-conscious in my cut-off jeans, coffee stained T.shirt, oddly shaped cardigan, ski socks and sandals. My matted mane of hair and I were ill prepared for all the visitors from beyond the 5km and it was odd seeing so many new people walking up and down Henry Street, window shopping and talking.
I’m sure you’re not at all surprised to hear I’m finding the new stage a little shocking and a little bit odd. I’m sure you’re thinking “but Ruth, you’ve handled all the other stages of this thing with such dignity and effortless grace!” I feel like I’m experiencing a complicated version of Stockholm Syndrome where I am both my own kidnapper and my own hostage. In addition, I am also my own hostage negotiator.
“Let her go, let her go I tell you!”
“I will never let her go!”
“Let me stay, let me stay here! I need to watch the end of Chariots of Fire and lick the jam from these freshly baked Jammy Donuts. Let me stay!”
“God damn it let her go, she’s delirious, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. For the love of God let her go before it’s too late!”
“I will never let her go, she is not going back to reality, she’s not ready!”
I’m happy to see the people returning to the city, as this means we have the virus under control and there are less people sick and dying. That is undoubtedly a good thing. But I was sad to smell all the traffic again and smell the concrete pours from the heavy construction. It had been nice to have clear air for a while and I naively thought we might keep that improvement. Now it smells like Dublin again and it sounds like Dublin again and it looks like Dublin again.
Yet, people like me will continue to work from home, and in our free time too we will be at home.
I work four days a week, which only takes up 17% of Time.
Isn’t that remarkable and did you also used to think it took up so much more of Time? I’ve done the sum several times and I can show you if you want. Look!
28 hours per week of a possible 168 of weekly hours x 100 = 16.6666 %
I rounded up the number to be as fair and transparent as possible but it’s a fact that a 4 days-per-week-job only takes up 17% of Time, and even if you are working five days a week it’s still only 21% of your weekly allowance. I used to think it was such a bigger part of my essence but working from home has shown me it’s really just such a small part of my day.
Numbers don’t lie because they’re not sentient beings.
It’s just 17% of Time.
So that leaves me with 83% of free time to work on my other Activity Projects, which include but are not restricted to scrolling through social media sites and having imaginary arguments with some of the people who are there too. I’m seriously considering cutting back on the social media circus before I do permanent damage to my right thumb, which is already damaged enough after an accident on a dry ski slope in Merthyr Tydfil sometime in the late 80’s.
Social media is such an obvious demon of time evaporation it’s almost not worth the effort to criticise it. Obviously, I love it in my domains, because I am the Queen of all I curate in my special kingdoms. I don’t chop off the heads of my enemies, but I can mute and block them, and I win all of the imaginary fights that I engage with. When I’m tired of it, I turn off its sun and when I’m playful again I turn it back on. What’s not to love in that paradise? But even this world is starting to lose its magic after all these days and weeks and it’s a very poor substitute for real life.
It lacks a sense of veracity.
I want new memories of reality and even some boring ones. Memes are not memories, and I want something to happen in real time.
One of my first memories is being on a slide in the playground of the nursery school and I can still feel the black rubber steps leading to the top. I remember the touch of the plastic slide and the squeeky sound it made on your legs if you were wearing a skirt. I can remember that day very clearly. Some other children were playing near the climbing frame and there’s laughter coming from the teachers, standing close to the door. It was a grey day and a cold day, but that sky-blue slide is embedded in my brain. It’s not Twitter Blue, or Skype Blue or Jitsi Blue, but real sky blue and the memory remains.
I want to go deep sea diving without any equipment or gear. I want to plan a weekend mini-break with my girlfriends and spend just an hour with my dad in his back garden. I want to kiss my friend’s kids and the children in my family and cuddle them and tickle their bellies. I want to meet several people inside somewhere and I want the real reality back now, not this.
Most religions encourage us to love our neighbours.
It makes a lot of evolutionary sense to do so too, at the very least so that we can expect our neighbours to love us back! Our ancient ancestors, the hunter gatherers needed to protect one another from being eaten by saber tooth tigers and in modern times we need our neighbours to keep an eye on our homes when we go on holidays. However, in the past three months I’ve started to wonder if we’re very neighbourly these days at all.
I don’t love my upstairs neighbour very much, for example.
He spent the first month or so of lockdown engaging in every DIY activity known to humanity. He loved to hammer and drill and saw and bang. When he wasn’t improving his home, he was playing a game called “droppy keys-laughy-hop-hop”. He also enjoys dragging his sofa around the living room, bouncing on his space hopper and practising the haca. I spend a lot of my life rehearsing the conversation I intend to have with him in the future. Alas, when I do see him in the hallway I inevitably say something like “hi there, how are you holding up? Everything OK?” because I fear he will dislike me more than the pain of the noise he makes.
He’s a vast improvement on his predecessors who were a never ending supply of Air B&B guests. Every three of four days a new batch of holiday makers would wander around the building, come home late, forget their keys and ask me for directions or suggestions for the best places to eat and drink. Again, in my mind I would plot and plan what I would say to the strangers, but every time I found myself saying “oh you should definitely go to the Italian quarter for dinner and then over to Temple Bar for drinks and music”. I’d spell the names of pubs for them and say “enjoy your holiday” and then seethe to myself afterwards and all throughout the day.
I didn’t like a little girl I met last Sunday, in the garden of Dublin Castle either.
I was reading my Buddhism for beginners book and learning all about the importance of cultivating loving kindness for all sentient beings, when this little girl approached me. As I assumed she must be one of my 5km radius neighbours, I smiled at her, but she was a little too close for my pandemic comfort. I looked over to her owners on the bench, but they just smiled back proudly so I didn’t know quite what to do. I wanted her to step away to the appropriate two metre distance as recommended by health experts, but I also wanted these strangers to like me! So I didn’t say a word. When she stepped onto my blanket and rubbed my nose for a moment, I laughed my public laugh which translated as “this interaction doesn’t bother me at all, in fact, I’m rather enjoying the spontaneity of it!” When she bored of me and moved on, I thought isn’t that funny? I would literally rather risk death more than risk being unliked by people I don’t even know.
I like to be seen as a helpful neighbour.
That same day, after I left the Castle, I saw a man trip up the curb and have a nasty fall. You know those falls that don’t hurt as much as shake you for a moment, and he looked a little disorientated. I started shouting from across the street “are you OK? Are you OK?” and then I shouted a number of suggestions to him.
“You should sit down for a moment, catch your breath, have a sip of water!”
I have absolutely no medical training or qualifications whatsoever, so I have no way of knowing if my recommendations were in anyway of any use. But onwards I continued. In the end he brushed himself off and went away, possibly more embarrassed by the attention I’d given him than the fall itself.
I was just trying to be neighbourly.
I like some of my neighbours.
I like the woman at the end of the street, who stands outside her house meeting and greeting all the passers by in the morning. I like the guy who takes his dog for a walk half a dozen times a day, and I like the Latvians on the second floor. I became friends with them on the night of the Brexit referendum back in June 2016, when I came home tipsy and got in the lift with them. It was there I apologised on behalf of all British people for the result of the referendum. I told them that I loved Latvia, having only just recently visited Riga for a work trip, and I think they found the whole interaction a little strange but fine. We’ve been friends ever since and they always smile when they see me. Maybe it’s a smirk, but I see it as a smile when they see me.
They’ve been going to work throughout this whole horror shit show, and their three children have been looked after by an ever thinning network of friends and other parents in the same position. If one of them gets ill then the gruesome and grotesque pantomime of normalcy disintegrates and disappears like a water bubble on the surface of a lake in a forest. These two people are risking their health and lives so that they can hold onto their financial security, even though they probably know that The Economy is a mirage; you can see it, but it’s not really there.
I just feel like we are currently failing the most basic, neighbourly ethical dilemma of our time. Remember back in college when you used to sit on the floor drinking wine, sharing spliffs, discussing philosophical hypotheticals? Someone would suggest a dilemma and you would have to answer, and then they’d play around with the details? It’s like that, except we’re doing it for real.
“Would you jump into the rough, icy sea water to save ten children from drowning after their wooden rowing boat had gotten into trouble? Even though doing so would inevitably cause your death?”
“Yes, of course I would, without hesitation!”
“And would you jump into the rough, icy sea water to save…five children?”
“Of course, yes, of course!”
“two children…”
“Um….that’s a harder one, but yes, yes I would”.
“And what about a boat of older people, people with underlying health conditions, zero-hour contract workers and poorer people in general?”
“Oh no. That’s quite different, I’m not willing to save them. In fact, let me swim up to their wooden rowing boat and tip it over so that they all fall into the icy sea water a bit quicker!”
It’s just getting harder as it all goes along, that’s my opinion anyway.
I honestly don’t understand why we closed down the world when there were six thousand corpses, but now that there are over four hundred thousand, we’re opening back up with pleasure and delight. None of it makes any sense to me and it becomes more and more peculiar as time moves on.
I’m going off us as a species to be honest. I think we’re a bit rubbish, which is why I’m spending more time watching wildlife videos on YouTube and documentaries about the non-human animals on our planet.
Seagulls are no longer my favourite birds. They have been replaced with the bar tail godwits. I love these birds more than seagulls for two reasons. Firstly, I love them for their names which are genius, but secondly because these birds make the longest non-stop flights of any of the migratory birds, all the way from New Zealand to Alaska! They fly for seven days and seven nights without any food or rest so that they can go to their breeding ground on the other side of the world.
Isn’t that remarkable?
I came across this YouTube video of them preparing for their humungous journey from New Zealand and I think it might be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It’s something delightful for World Environment Day, and I really hope you enjoy it.
Take good care of yourselves, and I’ll see you next week.
Don’t feel homesick for the life you once led. It won’t help you through the day-to-days and it might even leave you melancholy. Best to keep busy, exercise daily and eat lots of fruit. Do try and sleep a regular eight hours per day and don’t dream too much about castles in the clouds or combative dragons, as this will leave you restless.
Don’t quarrel and quibble over matters of no consequence, why battle with those things that don’t matter?
Do realise that there is no such thing as objective reality or absolute truth and that your existence itself is debatable.
Do go outside carefully (if you enjoy being outside) or stay indoors if that’s your cup of tea. Drink tea! Plenty of Earl Grey with milk from a special china cup that makes you smile because it was a gift from a friend. Never drink this tea while you’re reading messages or reliving old conversations with arch rivals. Rather, pay the tea and the cup the attention they deserve. If you would like to have a small piece of chocolate cake or a biscuit to go with it then good for you.
Run, skip, laugh, sleep.
Stand, stop, close your eyes and feel the sun on the part of your face the mask doesn’t cover.
Buy some candles.
Watch a film with Goldie Hawn in it.
Listen to the radio.
If you must listen to the news listen to it in a language you’re unfamiliar with, like Mongolian or Silbo Gomero. If you like, read the news in one of these languages too.
Plan a holiday. Don’t buy the tickets yet but imagine what you’d like to do in late summer. Maybe you would enjoy a ten-day ayahuasca holiday in the Peruvian Amazon, or a rented cottage in west Cork? Maybe you would happily give away your soul for a weekend in south Wales, or you might prefer a winter trip instead.
Don’t be too harsh on yourself for spending longer than you planned on your social media sites. They were deliberately designed that way.
Do talk to your plants about your day and tell them about the things that frustrate you.
Don’t spend time finishing a book or a film that you’re not enjoying – leave it there, give up on it, walk away.
Look at old photos and remember the smells that went with them, then have a drink and take a break without guilt.
Nap after lunch for a maximum of 90 minutes. If it goes over 90 minutes then you’ll have to call it sleep.
Don’t be meanspirited to the other people in your household or the strangers in the street who do things you Strongly Disagree With. They are tired of wading through their own labyrinth of shit and are probably fed up with you too.
Don’t be disheartened that you’re not as wise or kind as you hoped you would be, but spiteful and small minded instead. Definitely don’t worry if you still don’t know what you’re doing. No one does. Some people are just better at pretending.
Don’t worry that your trip to the supermarket takes so long. Being angry won’t speed up the queue. Being angry about this is like being a fly, trapped inside, bashing itself relentlessly against a glass window pane, on a sunny afternoon in July.
Remove the word “productive” from your lexicon and replace it with more interesting vocabulary. Say instead that the meeting was pulchritudinous, that the email was full of serendipity and that the report was like a freshly made jar of marmalade.
Do live in a country with a female leader as you’re less likely to die from this virus if that’s so. If you feel it’s too bothersome to emigrate right now, then ensure you’re a white, heterosexual member of the middle class with secure housing, and the ability to work from home instead.
Love fully, grieve fully, cry fully, rest.
Don’t mourn in a half-arsed way, mourning deserves more than that. Mourn in full technicolour with high pitched voices, and when you’re finished with mourning, mourn some more. Your grief is yours alone and it can be ugly. Don’t leave it unattended for too long.
Don’t be alarmed if you feel discombobulated right now, there is much discombobulation to be found. This now, is the height of the incomprehensible, as we’re further away from home than before.
Don’t think too much about post-pandemic life. Either things will get better, or they won’t. Do what you can to promote a kinder way, do what you can and sit down. Go and sit on the nearest bit of grass and listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice how the birds, construction, trees and traffic hardly ever perform the same symphony twice.
Do continue to read these weekly blogs. Unread words can be so terribly lonely. It means a lot to me that you continue to stop by. You are a beautiful, golden May sunset and do believe you’re ready for the next of it. Don’t mind these guidelines for wading through your labyrinth, except “do believe you’re ready for the next of it”.
I live in a gardenless work-life-unit so it’s important to go outside during Exercise Time for fresh air and sunshine. Sometimes I wander down to the river and saunter up and down the quays deciding which bridge to cross at: the Ha’penny, O’Connell or Samuel Beckett. Sometimes I don’t cross over a bridge at all but I sit on a bench on the boardwalk, and watch the people pass by.
The traffic has been so quiet so it’s easy to listen to people talking without seeming too rude or too nosey. I listen to women complaining to other women about their spouses and bosses. I hear people making frantic phone calls that perhaps they can’t make at home. I see a lot of secret smokers. You can tell the secret ones as they will smoke four cigarettes in succession and they never have a lighter or box of matches to hand. Sometimes there are people like me, who watch the river water flowing up and the river water flowing down. These are the least interesting of all the characters, who are waiting for a cue in a plot they didn’t write.
I watch a lot of seagulls on my visits to the quays.
I didn’t used to like seagulls after an incident outside a café just off Leeson Street when one of them stole a cheese and ham sandwich from my plate. He had been planning the theft for some time, from his observation point on the roof of a car nearby. When he finally swooped in I screamed quite loudly and I wondered who the woman screaming was, before I realised that it was me. Instinctively, I held onto my lunch for a few seconds, but he held on too, and in the end he won. It was quite embarrassing actually, because Brian O’Driscoll was sitting at the table next to me, with some friends, having a mocha. I felt sure they all laughed after I left and possibly told other people about the crazy screaming woman they saw, fighting with a bird.
Another time I was cycling down Capel Street and a piece of toast landed on my head. I was never very good at cycling one handed, so I couldn’t remove it for a while and rode down the street with some breakfast just perched there. When I pulled up at the lights, I saw an eager seagull waiting for his snack. Clearly, he’d dropped it while flying and now wanted it back, so I took it off my head and threw it to him. I looked at the other cyclists casually in the queue as if it were quite typical for me to ride around the city this way.
Now, I think they’re beautiful.
I love their soft white plumage and the way they walk. They are skilful flyers, and I love the fact that they can reverse. That’s possibly not the technical term for it, but you know the manoeuvre I mean, when they are able to double back on themselves. A fisherman on Inis Mór once told me that when seagulls eat mice they find them too hard to swallow dry, so they drop them into the sea to make them easier to digest. The sea is just one giant salty dip to our friends, the seagulls. I don’t know if the fisherman was pulling my leg, but I do know that seagulls mate for life, hunt in flocks and have developed a complex system of communication. These days, I find them fascinating.
A lot of people feed the seagulls.
Some people feed them bread and fruit while others give them left over takeaways, Shepherd’s Pie and jacket potatoes with beans on top. On Wednesday afternoon I saw three people give them a sausage roll and some chicken wings and the seagulls couldn’t have been happier.
The three people were sitting near me, one bench up and were sharing a two litre bottle of Strongbow. The woman took off her shoes to enjoy the sunshine fully, but otherwise she was dressed for winter. The thinner of the two men was trying to piece together the events of the night before, but it was all a little hazy and he was having difficulty with some of the details. Apparently, there had been an altercation with two other friends, namely, Damo and Frankie, who had done something unspeakable. Damo and Frankie were now mortal enemies of this smaller sub-group, which was a shame according to the barefoot woman, because they had all been exceptionally good friends up to this point. Nonetheless, the actions of Damo and Frankie would never be forgiven, even if they couldn’t quite be remembered, as this conflict was serious and had terrible ramifications.
The second man, who hadn’t participated in the discourse much up to now, joined in the conversation by saying, “do you know what you should do? You should visit the Cliffs of Moher, go on one of those bus tours. Have a day out!” It wasn’t entirely clear who he was aiming this recommendation to, so the woman started to check her pockets for some item, and the first man decided to take a little nap.
The traffic is starting to come back to the quays, which is a shame because it was much easier to eavesdrop when it was quieter. Voices travel further when not competing with motor vehicles and it’s smoother to pry without being noticed. I sit there with my mask and sunglasses on, like an extra from Mad Max and I love to hear what’s going on in the lives of the residents of Dublin 1.
Some of them are thrilled to see the city starting to go back to normal, while others are terrified. Some are looking forward to the next of the five phases, while others are dreading what it all might mean. Some of them find the seagulls a nuisance, while others think they are beautiful.
Before I left my bench on Wednesday an older man came by with a carrier bag of bits of bread. “Have you seen the swans yet?” he asked me and I told him I hadn’t. When I left, he was leaning over the barrier waiting and I don’t know how long he stayed.
But well done you, yes you my small but terribly loyal group of readers! You’ve made it through another week of your challenges and I’m so happy to see you again. You deserve some kind of a medal, and I wish you nothing but well.
Last Saturday afternoon I bought an ice-cream. It was a 99 ice-cream with spirals of raspberry sauce all over the Cadbury’s flake and cornet and I sat on the grass, took off my shoes and enjoyed every mouthful of heaven. You can’t ever buy that raspberry sauce from shops but only from ice-cream vendors and vans. It’s more like a syrupy cordial than a sauce, and it doesn’t drip all over the place but stays stuck to the other deliciously complimentary components. It was a holiday, eating that ice-cream on the grass with no shoes on. A holiday.
Approximately 48 hours later, on a zoom call to a work contact, I noticed that I still had some of the sauce in my hair. I had slept on it twice and showered with it once, but a little bit of the sticky magic was still connected to my being. I’m not sure if the work contact noticed my sudden surprise when I discovered the raspberry sauce on my head, but she kept it to herself if she did. My resting Zoom face is so odd even at the best of times. I’m surprised to see my own self arrive in the Zoom gallery, as if I can’t believe I’m both on the screen and still looking at the screen. The work contact didn’t say a word and why would she? There’s no reason in reality that she would ordinarily imagine I had some dessert on my head. She was possibly more concerned about her own appearance anyway, which between me and you was highly inappropriate. I don’t mind saying this to you here in private, but her clothing was positively eccentric!
I’ve noticed some of you are still making an effort to dress every day and to those of you straightening your hair and applying make-up, I salute you. Others are less well groomed. Some of us have gone full-metal-retro-student, ca. 1990, with big socks, bigger cardigans and even bigger hair. Many of us said farewell to bras, zips and buttons in week one, but as it’s becoming more idiosyncratic it’s getting harder to know what’s hot and what’s not, in this pandemic.
For many women, the very idea that they have superfluous time to worry about clothing gets the Oscar for this year’s brightest comedy. Most of the women I know I are cramming their eight hour working day into ninety minutes in the bathroom when everyone else is asleep, while making a Camera Obscura for a school project the kids forgot to mention. These same women are carrying the bulk of the housework on top of any additional care responsibilities, while their partners claim the majority of the communal living space for their VERY IMPORTANT MEETING AT 3.00PM DURING WHICH TIME THERE MUST BE SILENCE IN THE HOUSEHOLD! OK, not all households but this is a fairly accurate picture of some of the heterosexual, middle class, “working from home” women’s lives, that I know and hear about, here in Ireland and in the UK.
Meanwhile, working class women continue to risk their health and lives to go to work in shops, care homes and factories. Their own kids are being looked after by grandparents, and aunts and uncles who probably should be cocooning but have no other option but to join in the risk. It was always expensive to be working class, but now it’s deadly.
Thankfully, this week the British Taoiseach, Mr Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, said that as long as these working class women stay alert they should be able to keep the country going and get Covid done. So that was probably a huge relief for them.
A pure, enchanted relief for them all.
To prove just how serious he was about this whole issue, Mr Johnson brushed his hair for the press conference. That’s how low the bar is in international politics today. We are now impressed when a 55 year old man, with the most responsible job in the United Kingdom, uses a comb before a making a public announcement. It’s almost as if hiring a TV personality for the top job in the country was a mistake; you know, with hindsight.
Anyway, I’ve been terribly serious about this whole global humanitarian emergency disaster recently, so I decided to just lighten up! To that end, I spent the entire evening last night re-watching episodes of Twenty Twelve and much like the ice-cream in the sun last Saturday, it was a holiday. If you haven’t seen Twenty Twelve, watch it tonight and if you’ve seen it before, watch it again. It’s basically this BBC mockumentary about the 2012 Olympics and the team responsible for organising it. The Head of Sustainability doesn’t really get on with the Head of Legacy, but my absolute favourite character of all is Head of Brand, Siobhan Sharpe. She is such a great character and she makes me laugh so hard. If I had to choose my three favourite episodes, then I would say the one where Head of Deliverance gets shot in the foot, “Jubilympics”, and the episode where they have to design an audio logo for the games. You may well have different favourite episodes and I don’t mind if that’s the case.
I’d forgotten how getting engrossed in comedy is such a great escape from the latest conspiracy on social media. I think the most recent theory is that Greta and Gates invented the virus in a Chinese lab in order to sell us expensive home office furniture from IKEA, and you know what, I can’t actually prove that this is not true. Maybe it is the truth, who knows? What I do know though, is that curling up catlike on the sofa, with some comedy and some Cadbury’s is not a bad distraction at all.
Not at all.
See, here we are nine weeks into this madness, and we need more breakout rooms and escapes than ever. You’ll notice I put the number nine at the end of the title for this week’s blog, right there, like so, in brackets (9). I thought that the number nine was way too much of a panic number, with its associations with the emergency number, “999” and I didn’t want to alarm you! So that’s why I put it gently (in brackets). I did it to protect you.
Another thing I might do to protect you is to stop doing this in a while.
Not writing this blog every week, I’ll continue with that for as long as I can, but counting the weeks as I do so, because I’m not sure that it’s helpful anymore. I have this horrible vision of me posting a blog called “week 232 of forgotten butterflies and euphoria” or something, and it’s too scary. So perhaps I’ll drift us into numberless updates before too long; not yet though, but in a while.
I have to go now. My first assignment for my Buddhism and Modern Psychology online course is due in. I want to submit it early to impress the professor and piss off the other participants, so I have to get cracking on that this afternoon. You have a good weekend now. I know it’s not always easy to differentiate between the week days and the weekends, but try and do something restful. Please look after yourself and stay sane and watch some comedy and eat some Cadbury’s. Do it in that particular order, and you’ll be just fine!
The resplendent beauty of my bedroom door handle must never be questioned or denied. Its divine exquisiteness and intrinsic impartiality shouldn’t be ridiculed or ignored. The bedroom door handle watches daily scenes and tries to reflect what is there. It neither embellishes nor disguises simply shows what it sees, it’s a mirage, it’s a photo, it’s a dream.
This time last year I was in Hanoi.
I strolled around pagodas and temples and went to the most magical show on a lake called “The Quintessence of Tonkin” that had water puppets, dancing and lights. I ate delicious food and met new friends and had the joy of the freedom of travel. I miss travel now. I miss the revelry of the trip. The other night during a Jitsi meeting, my friend Julia practically screamed out “I want my privileges back” and I understood exactly how she felt. I want my privileges back too Julia, especially the privilege of travel. I crave my old life. I really envy my Buddhist friends at the moment, as they can observe the current crisis and think “wow, that all looks really impermanent. Thankfully, as a good Buddhist, I don’t crave the past or cling to attachments, so I’m not suffering at all right now”. Me? I’m much less mindful. I want the past back, at least the best bits of it, and especially the bit about travelling.
This time last year I was obsessed with Soviet designed RBMK nuclear reactors.
Who wasn’t?
It followed that HBO series about Chernobyl and all the follow up documentaries and films. One thing I’ve been thinking about this week was how stoic all the survivors seemed during the interviews, years later, especially the liquidators and the so-called bio-robots who had to clean up the mess and stop a further tragedy. So strong, and brave and lacking in drama. I’m not stoic at all! We are in the disaster and it’s happening now and literally all I’m being asked to do is send my emails from my apartment instead of my office. I’m hardly being asked to clean up nuclear waste and yet I’m making such a fuss of it.
Why is it yet so difficult?
The pendulum of my emotions swings deliriously each day from delighted happiness and contentment to fear and sadness and grief. Earlier today for example, on my masked run, I was experiencing happiness. The adrenalin of the exercise was flowing through my blood and I was imagining my first breakfast once I got home. Then I had to stop at the lights for a hearse to go by. The driver and the undertaker in the front seat of the car were both wearing masks and there was just one car behind it. The hearse was almost completely unescorted for its final journey, and this made me cry. Tears for an unknown corpse in the middle of Dorset Street. I noticed a woman on the other side of the street, and she seemed to be weeping too and she was trying to wipe her eyes with her inside of her elbows. Suddenly she called out to me “you alright?” and I when I told her I was, we both started laughing. Then I went back to my run.
It’s exhausting, this disaster, and there’s no end in sight.
Or is there?
There was a little bit of good news this week as the government of Ireland announced their five phase plan to get us out of this pickle and get us back to normal, so that was a relief of sorts.
“Leo, how many phases do you want in your exit strategy?”
“12?”
“Don’t be bloody ridiculous. None of the other countries have twelve phases. That’s too many phases. The people will panic!”
“I want 2 levels”
“Don’t be silly. They’re not levels, they’re phases and two is too few. The people will think you’ve just made it up out of the top of your head”.
“5?”
“Yes, OK, a five phase plan! That sounds believable. The people will follow that plan”.
At first, I rejoiced when I heard the outline of the five phase plan, but then I read it and realised that basically we’re stuck like this until autumn. That’s the plan! Stay where you are until the trees turn brown. Then I wondered if I had dreamt an election in which we had voted for a female Taoiseach, sometime in the past, and if that had even happened at all. Was that one of those odd, vivid dreams everyone is talking about?
After the initial shock though, I felt a lightness of being. Now I know this life is for the longer run I can plan better for it. I could do one of those online courses I signed up for in week one, and then ignored. Or I could lower my expectations considerably. I can slow, slow down the already slowed down and remove the last of the pretence to be normal as we have indeed sailed away from the harbour of Before and are adrift now on the sea of change! We are living through this disaster, this is it. The day is happening now. Waiting for autumn to come is not a very helpful plan and won’t be much fun. Be in the sunny afternoons now.
So let us venture on our quest through the five phases together, and let’s fight all the monsters that we see. My trials and tasks will be different to yours, but we can rest at the lakeside together. Take my hand, go on. Let’s open the door, press down on that handle, let’s see what’s on the other side.
Deep breath – we’ll be ok – we’ll see what’s on the other side together.
7 is a singer from Nashville. A short little fella with a strong voice, cowboy boots and a white-leather, fringed jacket. 7 drinks whiskey straight but never gets hangovers and if you want company to a party or a wedding, 7’s your man. But don’t expect 7 to read a story to the kids, change the sheets or clean up the kitchen. 7’s not interested in domestic routines because 7 loves the road. 7 is a magical prime number, everybody’s favourite, a wonder and delight.
Yesterday at Feeding Time, I thought about celebrities.
I used to love those celebrity magazines filled with news and gossip and scandal. I didn’t care one hoot if it was true or not, I just loved hearing what the sources close to the star thought about their new beau, baby, house or film. Strangely, I loved reading them most of all when I used to fly on aeroplanes, but the gossip is flat now. Sure it was nice seeing the inside of Gwyneth’s house, Madonna’s bathroom or Posh’s backyard, but I need them to do more for me than just stay indoors if I’m to envy them properly. I need to see Ange and the kids arrive in LAX or wear a new frock or go heliskiing. Otherwise, she’s just like me, and that’s a little dull at the moment.
It’s just another thing to get upset about.
The current president of the United States is also upsetting me at the moment, and causing me much wrath. I’m so bored by the blond-haired psycho killer and the fact that he’s likely to get in for a second term hurts my pride, as I’m obviously taking it personally. It’s hard to know what was worse last weekend: the bleach comment, the lie about the bleach comment or the fact that he doesn’t know the difference between irony and sarcasm. He’s just a filthy old joke, told by a drunk at a party you didn’t want to go to.
Imagine going to a party now? Even one you didn’t want to go to. Do you remember parties? Do you remember offices? They seem so anthropocentric now don’t they, especially when you walk around the city centre of Dublin and see how much space was given over to them. Rooms filled with desks where people would silently send messages to other people at other desks. The silence broken only to discuss the heating, lighting or unholy mess in the kitchen. Sometimes there was cake.
Bless us all.
I don’t miss the office but of course I miss my colleagues and talking to them. Talking to anyone. I miss the magic of conversation, and the alchemy of multisensory exchanges that require more than just audio-visual and two-dimensional interactions. I sound like a robot on Zoom, and not a very clever one: “hello, how are you, I am fine, I trust your family is also fine, that is good, thank you, goodbye”.
It’s no surprise that we Irish, especially we Dubliners, are missing talking and conversation and the craic something mighty. Have you ever been to Grogan’s? It’s full of people furiously agreeing with one another with different words. We will say the same thing over and over again until someone gives up and goes home. Pint after pint, toasted sandwich after toasted sandwich. Wasn’t it Freud who said the Irish were impervious to analysis because we liked to espouse both of the sides of the same argument? You can see that in evidence in just a few hours in Grogan’s. No, apologies, on reflection that’s not a fair comment to make, I’ll erase that.
I miss talking with words and the sounds they made.
I think I’m starting to hear things. I think I can hear someone in my building tuning in their electric base guitar, but I don’t know where it’s coming from so I don’t know who to accuse. I lurk in the hallway trying to catch which apartment the sounds are coming from, but I haven’t got time to monitor this situation all day. I’m busy. And I can’t randomly start knocking on doors looking for the evil doers.
“Hi, it’s me again. Yes, can you please stop tuning in your electric base guitar all through the evening as it’s very distracting”.
“I don’t have an electric base guitar”.
“Well, do you have any instruments here at all? Some woodwind perhaps?”
“No, no musical instruments at all”.
“OK, well that’s very good to hear. Just checking. Keep safe!”
It seems that sound, along with space and time is slipping through the silence.
I’m so full of sloth this week and I don’t know why, as obviously I’m not doing 12 hour shifts in ICU! It might be the existential worry and monkey brain activity. Yesterday, for example, during Exercise Time I saw some new businesses had opened up and I was delighted. Before I got to the end of the street I was suddenly terrified and in panic that we were easing restrictions too quickly and taking too many new risks.
Where is Artificial Intelligence when you need it most? I hoped it might have developed a vaccine by now and copied it 7.7 billion times on a 3D printer and I don’t fully understand where the delay is? It’s all very disappointing, and so terribly exhausting.
7.7 billion of us waiting to resume play. You and me and 7.7 billion other people breathing in and breathing out, for 49 rises of the sun and 49 sets again.
7 weeks of 7 days.
7 is a magical prime number, everybody’s favourite, a wonder and a delight.
I wanted to buy a plague doctor mask. One of those long-nose-bird-beak ones and perhaps a silver tipped mahogany cane, to go with it, to fend off other shoppers with. In the end though, I settled for a couple of reusable ones from the euro shop and some posh ones from the pharmacy instead. I know the advice on this issue is conflicting, but I thought I would buy a few and see how I got on.
I wore a mask running and as imagined, it was an unmitigated disaster. It kept sliding up over my eyes, so I ran off the curb twice and almost into a dog walker once. In fairness though, this could be because I am losing the ability to differentiate distance in three-dimensional space. The other problem was that I couldn’t breathe. I’m not a fast, elegant or coordinated runner but I was good at breathing. With the mask on I finished my route looking as I do after checking the oven roasted chicken, or after a particularly ambitious sauna. I swore that I would never again wear a face mask, as long as I lived on this beautiful blue planet.
So the next day I wore a mask to the supermarket and there I did notice the benefits. Other mask wearing shoppers gave me proud, approving glances which I could recognise by their subtle eye movements. I crinkled my eyes back at them, which translated as “I see you and I value you” and I went about my day. My very long day.
Week six though, week six, hey!
I found parts of week six quite challenging and I felt particularly non-essential and blue on day 38. It dawned on me that this plan to keep us all inside until we invent a vaccine seems a little bit flakey now, doesn’t it?
“What are you going to do?”
“Yes, we’re going to keep everyone indoors until we invent a vaccine”.
“Anything else, are you going to do anything else?”
“Nope. That’s your lot. Everyone indoors until we invent a vaccine”.
“Do you know how long that will be?”
“Nope. Haven’t a clue”.
“OK, well do let us know how you get on”.
“Will do”.
Day 38 was also the day that I did a virtual tour of the Basílica de la Sagrada Família, which did the opposite of cheer me up. In fact, I would say that it made me quite wistful. The Church (built in 1882), is an extraordinary piece of architectural beauty which I was lucky enough to visit with my girlfriends a couple of years ago. Seeing it virtually made me miss sensory experiences, my friends and casual travelling.
I also found several, new grey hairs congregating on my head on Day 38 and I realised that when I do see my family again, I will look older and so will they. We will all have gotten older and fatter while we were waiting for life to resume, and that’s only if we are the randomly fortuitous ones. Fingers crossed, hey. Yes, so wistful was I on Day 38 that I wrote a poem about it. I called it Day 38.
Day 38
I boiled the eggs.
Soft and easy and
served them
With oceans of bored salt and butter.
Later, I’ll put the birthday card away
It’s been on the shelf since March.
I think a few of us wouldn’t mind knowing how much longer we have to stay in our work-life-units. I heard David Attenborough suggest the other day, that perhaps we should stay like this forever, for the environment. Forever. Margaret Attwood, however, was a little more optimistic. Yes, Madame Dystopia said we should start thinking about our Castles of the Future now, and plan what we would like to see in them.
There wouldn’t be any money in my Castle of the Future. I wouldn’t change the economy or adjust the currency or greenify or diversify, I would simply erase it. Otherwise our billionaires are going to become trillionaires and have you seen how ridiculous a trillion is in numbers?
1, 000, 000, 000, 000
It’s absurd.
Without money we wouldn’t need banking, governments, stockbrokers, accountants, or insurance. All those professionals could help with food production and distribution instead. We’d renovate all those fabulous buildings into luxury homes for the health workers and then the rest of us could work out a system where we either Gave or Received, which would suffice for all other interactions.
Let me give you a tangible example in case I’m getting too technical for you.
My neighbour loves to do DIY. I’d say it’s his favourite lockdown activity of all. Boy oh boy, does he like to hammer and saw and drill. So I could pop into his place and ask him to fix the doors on my wardrobe and shower cabin and in return he could ask me to do something from my special skillset. He might ask me to read a Dylan Thomas poem aloud, for example, or fold his clothes neatly and put them away. He might like me to wash his dishes, which I’m also very good at, or tell him about my favourite films and why they are ranked in that particular order. It would be up to him to choose what he’d like me to do and I would be happy to comply.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
You’re wondering what on earth we could do with some of those American Republicans who might not have special skillsets? All I say to that is that many of them seem to be hell bent on dying for their leader anyway, so maybe that problem will solve itself. For those American Republicans who do survive, I suggest that they spend time in my lake of healing which is near the garden of forgiveness, opposite the zebra stable. Between the moat and the maze. There they could drink freshly squeezed mango juice which would help them recover from that which made them so angry, lost and sad. My Castle of the Future is the rainbow coloured intersection where anarchism meets Buddhism and where everyone is welcome. Even Republicans, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael voters and yes, Tories too.
In my Castle of the Future, Tories would be welcome too.
But look it, these four, jam-filled-sugar-topped Berliner donuts are not going to eat themselves, are they? Before I go though, I can’t thank you enough for reading these silly vignettes of mine. None of this was what any of us had in mind when we said we’d like to make some changes on New Year’s Eve last, was it? We just thought we might join a gym or give up dairy. But you are playing the hand you’ve been dealt so very well, and you’re taking care of all of your challenges.
Shorter than me 