Category: Uncategorized

I’m afraid I didn’t have much time for writing this week.  In fact, I’ve been neglecting all my projects including the spider plantation, my complex exercise regime, this month’s online courses, and lurking on Twitter.  I’ve been neglecting them all because of Netflix.

Holy mother of God, why did I sign up to Netflix?

Up to now, my home entertainment schedule relied on me downloading films and series from a selection of streaming sites, and this always worked out well.    Occasionally, I would have to watch something with subtitles in Arabic or French but that would give me something else to look at if the film itself was dull.  Things have changed now that I have Netflix.

I signed up with Netflix so that I could watch season four of The Crown without interruption. In a sense, could we perhaps argue that my new addiction is another tragedy caused by the Palace?  I honestly thought I could watch the series and then keep the subscription for a couple of months, to see if there was something else I wanted to enjoy.    

I thought I could handle it, I was wrong.

At first, the variety of choice was too great for me, so I only watched films that I’d seen before.  However, I quickly started watching new content, and all the recommendations Netflix made for me.  I consume Netflix at an alarming rate.  It’s as if I’m doing it for a charity fundraiser or as a challenge for the Guinness Book of World Records and I’m probably damaging myself in some way.  I binge watch while devouring Tesco Belgian chocolate eclairs.  There are currently six cushions, two blankets and a hot water bottle on my sofa. You don’t sit on my sofa; you get into it.  Of course there’s no room on the sofa for my partner so he must sit alone, over by the window.  Sometimes he tries to communicate with me, but I just growl at him, like a bear and return to my new friends in Netflixland.  I curl up on my sofacave while watching hours of new shows, and it’s just a matter of time before I’ll need a neck brace.

One of the things I love about Netflix is watching people nonchalantly interact with one another in a physical dimension.  I watched Wine Country the other night but missed most of the plot because I was marvelling at how six women could go off together for the weekend.  They could go wine tasting, and bicycle riding, and they could gossip together in a hot tub!

On Netflix, no one wears masks, everyone hugs, and people go to restaurants and bars. It’s just a better place to hang out in than Dublin right now, and I plan to spend more time there in the coming months.  Dublin is just a bit quiet, and people are getting irritable, and there isn’t much craic.

One of the many reasons I loved living in Dublin was because of the craic. 

Dubliners love to talk.  My first memory of Dublin is a conversation. I arrived in Dublin airport one March afternoon, and I got into a taxi and the driver started chatting.  I told him I had that just moved from Copenhagen to Dublin, and that I was going to stay with my friend.  I had Julia’s address written down on a piece of paper, and I was so excited about the new adventure.  In return, he told me about his recent holiday in Copenhagen with his son, and something about the best pubs to visit in Temple Bar.  When we pulled up outside Julia’s apartment, he helped me with my luggage and told me that the trip was free:  then he said, “welcome to Dublin” and I’ve never looked back.

What’s not to love about Dublin?

It’s a gorgeous city altogether with great pubs, restaurants, theatres, parks, mountains, and the sea.  We love the craic agus ceol, and we love to talk.  If the average person uses five to seven thousand words per day the average Dubliner can treble that in a morning.  We talk waiting for the bus, and getting on the bus, and while moving on the bus, and when we’re just after getting off the bus.  We use equal passion and breath when we talk about the weather, one another, the politicians, or our families.  Have you ever seen two Dubliners meeting for the first time outside of the city?  Within five minutes they are the best of friends, within ten they are family, if you leave them alone for an hour, they will have adopted one another for life.    

Thus, telling Dubliners to isolate and keep their distance seems a harsher request than perhaps asking Scandinavians to do it, for example, or the quiet and unassuming Tibetans.  Dubliners need noise and an audience for their daily performances, and this simply can’t be done online.  Without the story to tell someone, there’s little or no point in doing an activity in the first place. 

Why do anything at all, if you can’t tell someone about it?

Zooms are poor substitutes for Dubliners and cannot replicate the intimacy and fun of interactive conversations.  Zooms are one-way, performative, monologues where very few people come across as themselves.  One of my own problems with Zooms is staying on track.  One minute I’m updating people about a project or activity then the next thing I know I’m comparing the performances of Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich.  I end my sequence of talking with the words “in conclusion then, I would argue that it’s very difficult to say whose performance is the best after all,” and everyone nods, as if I made sense.

It’s just harder for we Dubs, than most.

So I’ve decided to embrace the fictional world and watch my characters interact instead of me.  It’s only a matter of time before I start speaking English with an American accent or offer my legal counsel to someone wrongly accused of a crime. It’s simply a matter of time before I start re-watching shows I’ve already seen and experiencing déjà vu because of it.  It’s also a matter of time before I accuse real life friends of misdemeanours fictional characters committed. 

But I don’t care.

I’m enjoying my never-ending supply of content to absorb, and I’m doing it with glee and guilt free.  I highly recommend that you do likewise. So snuggle under that duvet and turn on your favourite show and enjoy every single second of your time. 

Every single second of your time.

Orientation for life

When I was younger, I was very much afraid of rattlesnakes and quicksand.  Luckily, I grew up in south Wales so the chance of seeing either was low.  Nevertheless, the fear I experienced was real and was possibly due to staying up late on Saturday nights watching inappropriate films for children.  At least that explains the rattlesnakes.  The quicksand, on the other hand, must have come from watching Tarzan.

Do you remember those 1970s American films they used to show on TV on Saturday nights? 

The film would start off slowly, and then some guy in aviators and a rain mac would start following our protagonist around the city.  Sometimes he would slip envelopes under doors or listen to phone conversations with a tissue over the mouth-piece so that no one could hear him breathing.  Usually he would smoke, and drink whiskey and soda, but we never saw him eat, meet with friends or exercise. 

The background music would start quietly.  It would grow more hectic as the paranoia grew, reaching a chaotic climax of clarinets, cellos and discordant piano notes towards the end.  If there was a woman involved, she would have fabulous hair and shoes, but would be dead by the final credits if she had sex or showed interest in anything other than our main hero.

Everyone was terribly competent at opening apartment building doors with their credit cards, roll jumping out of moving cars and remembering complex clue details without writing anything down.  Dates and times were arranged and strictly kept to, lunches went half eaten and no one needed to go to work or phone in sick.  No one needed directions while driving. 

If the government of Ireland wanted to spy on me, they wouldn’t need to hire anyone.  They could just browse my social media where I have expressed all my thoughts, whims and fancies, every day for the past 15 years.  Everything is there:  my political opinions, food preferences, work details and holidays.  Even in lockdown I keep them informed of my whereabouts and my trips to the supermarkets, my walks in the parks and my yoga. 

The conspiracy theories of the 70s were so much better than the ones we have today.  Did Elvis kill JFK and then film the moon landing in Stanley Kubrick’s studio?  The fact there was never any evidence to support these theories was evidence itself of the cover up, which led to a delightful proliferation of Catch22s and chickens and eggs.  The best thing about the conspiracies back then, of course, was that people believed in the moon landing hoax, but also that you could send letters in paper envelopes safely and have private conversations on public telephones. 

Bless.

Virus related conspiracies are dull in comparison with what’s going on in public life and seem quite ordinary when put side by side.  The current President of America believes the election was a hoax; the Prime Minister of the UK has recently sacked his Head of Propaganda (but no one believes him); and the Tánaiste of Ireland (who everyone, including the Taoiseach, is still calling Taoiseach), is hand delivering confidential documents to all of his friends.  Sadly, the motives for all this are also very dull.  They are doing it for the money.  That’s all.  I don’t know how many yachts they need to make them happy, but they are only doing it for greed. 

I can’t wait until we’re post-capitalism, post-politics and post-government as life is going to be much lovelier.  Then we will be able to concentrate on much more interesting conspiracy theories such as, do we exist, is music just in our mind and is time linear?  Are molecules real and what happens outside outer space?  How did the dinosaurs really die out and did the Palace kill Diana?  So many more vastly interesting things to contemplate rather than the wealth of the rattlesnakes of politics who are making us all suffocate in their grubby, dirty quicksand. 

I know some of you have had a slumpy week. 

It’s not easy, all this.

It’s actually quite hard, which is why I wrote you another poem and I hope you enjoy it, and that it cheers you up.  Remember it’s November, so wrap up well and be kind to yourself.  Stay indoors and drink warm drinks and be gentle with your mind.  However, if you do see a man in aviators and a rain mac following you around, try and loose him at the corner of 5^th and call me, and let me know!

Orientation for Life

Orientation for Life

is in room 274

Irredeemable Love is in the main hall.

Due to high demand

The Epicureans and Dreamers practical exam

is happening on the roof

Devil May Care (for beginners)

is in the music room

Evergreens for transitions

Has been cancelled altogether, while

Umbrella Maintenance

is in French

Finally, the how to build an igloo course,

You’ll all be pleased to know,

is taking place online.

I must tell you what I did on Monday.

After my lunches, I decided to take a stroll around the city.  I thought it would be useful to take my boots to the cobbler to get the soles replaced before the winter. I thought it would be helpful if I dropped my partner’s watch into the jewellers, for them to replace the battery.  I also thought I would stop off for a coffee and a piece of cake on my way back, so I told my partner my plans, and my partner nodded and said, “OK”. 

Lately, I have been forgetting parts of the English language.  Mostly I have been forgetting nouns and some of the lesser used verbs and this is down to lack of usage.  So what I literally said to my partner was that I was taking my “foot coverings” and his “wrist clock” to “make working properly”.  Luckily, he seemed to understand the gist of what I was saying, so I set off and went into the day.

Monday was beautiful.

It looked grey and damp from inside, but outside the weather was mild and the air was fresh and invigorating after the night’s rain.  The colours of the leaves seemed even more striking against the contrast of the silver sky, and I thoroughly enjoyed my walk around town.

About half-way up Grafton Street it suddenly dawned on me that everything was closed. All of the shops, including the cobblers and the jewellers and the coffee shops and the cake shops, were closed.  There’s a pandemic and we’ve been living with restrictions for 35 weeks, and all the people are inside, and all the shops are closed. 

I had forgotten. 

I had simply forgotten. 

I had slipped into Plato’s allegory of the cave where the shadows on the wall of my reality were open shops and business as usual. In my parallel universe people could pop into shops to speak with the crafts people therein and stop for sugary snacks on the way home. 

What on earth was I thinking?

When I returned home, I said to my partner, “everything is closed due to the lockdown!” and my partner nodded and said, “oh yes”.  I put my foot coverings back under the place where we sleep, and I placed my partner’s wrist clock on his furniture item, where his laptop sits.

Seriously though, I am starting to forget the English language which is a shame because I’m not fluent in anything else.  I could hold a short conversation in Danish and perhaps buy some meat and dairy products in Mongolian, but it’s English I rely on for the most part.

I used to tell my language students that the best thing they could do to improve their English was to practise as often as possible, with as many different people as possible.  To this end, I would advise them to try out their new vocabulary on strangers on the bus, to try out new grammatical structures with the people in the supermarket, or to even try and fall in love (ideally with someone who had better language skills than they).  All this was to prevent them losing skills they didn’t use, and usually, this strategy worked out fine.

I used to speak a lot.  I would speak at home, at work, after work, during the weekends and even in my sleep.  Now, I speak less and less and there are whole sections of the day in silence.  Nowadays, I use a fraction of the words I used to use, which has resulted in me using words like “nowadays”.  Most of my interactions take place on video calls or the phone, which makes the live, physical conversations the anomalies. 

I use more and more emojis in my written correspondence, I find reading entire articles exhausting, and it can take me a month to read a small paperback.  I believe that the sound of my voice has changed since March, and I’ve started leaving notes to myself which make little, or no sense at all, when I try to read them back to me.

Wednesday’s note, for example, said “forrest ring head.  Lisa (heads off)”.

That’s not even how you spell forest.

Thank heavens I have this blog where I can keep practising my English.  If I didn’t have the opportunity to use my words here, I might lose them forever, so I am very grateful to you, for reading.  Thank you for returning here, week after week, and for supporting my very public writing apprenticeship, and for keeping me so well. 

I wish you much wellness in return 😊

This pandemic is a peculiar backdrop, but our lives still go on.  People are still getting married and announcing their pregnancies, they’re still getting divorced and announcing their splits. They are changing jobs, and going back to college, and having arguments with family members and making new friends.  People work, they relax, they gossip, and they sleep.  They celebrate birthdays with cake and wine, and they cry alone, and together when it all goes wrong.  The sun comes up and the sun goes down, the sea comes in and the sea goes away again.  The clouds cover over the blue sky, and then they drift away again. 

Yes, those vapoury watery mass things float over the blue sky, and then they go away again.

I used to love Sundays.

Sundays would start with hangovers and coffees but drift into brunches and newspapers effortlessly.  Sundays would involve walks around the city to buy innocuous items such as garlic presses or plant pots.  Sundays might have pints and toasties in Grogan’s and late afternoon chats with friends.  Sometimes, Sundays would have visits to galleries or museums. Sundays could, if you wanted them to, finish up with take-away dinners and films at home, or any slow variations of the descriptions above. 

I’m not sure I love Sundays anymore.

Now that I spend on average 22 hours per day in my home, being in my home isn’t the treat it once was.  Sunday is now just part of the blob of time that has morphed into itself, and proof indeed of the law of diminishing returns.

Sundays at Level Five bring challenges. 

Although, in my opinion Lockdown Two is so much better than the original.  When they said we were moving into Level Five I raced out and bought provisions for the new situation. I bought some cosy warm curtains, eight books, a Bialetti Moka, a meditation cushion and some vanilla scented candles.  These may not sound like the items one would normally buy to prepare for a humanitarian emergency disaster, but I swear to God, that meditation cushion has been a game changer. 

I love my home, I love working from home, and I think I’m quite good at entertaining myself when everything is closed.  Even so, even I may be running low on ideas as we move into the 8^th month of Virus Hide and Seek. I still have my Spider Plantation to maintain, of course, and all the online courses I’ve signed up to.  I love reading and watching season after season of almost anything, and I’ve developed a fondness for documentaries. 

But when is it going to end?

A lot of people claim they love working from home, but when you ask them to explain why they do, they tell you all the things they didn’t like about going to work instead.  They didn’t like the commute or the open plan office, they found the office distractions annoying or found the building too damp or too cold.  I love working from home for its own sake.  I love the comforts of not wearing shoes and socks and the never-ending supply of tea, toast, and snacks, and I love being able to work to my own flow.  Nevertheless, another disappointing thing about the pandemic is that it has removed the joy of Sundays, now that working from home, and Sundays look and feel the same. 

It’s impossible isn’t it?

It’s simply impossible not to mention him.

It’s simply not possible not to mention Donnie Trump.

We all know that Donnie is a symptom of a much more hideous disease. 

Perhaps when he’s not permeating our collective memory with his rants and his tweets, we might be able to find out how and why he was elected not just once, but nearly twice.  Why are some women, people of colour, and working class people voting for a man who clearly hates them?  What emptiness does he fill, what questions does he answer, what hope does he promise?  It seems to me that the only way we can ever find out is by asking them, rather than by continuously shouting at or laughing at them. Perhaps when all the balloons are depleted and the campaign decorations have been put away until next time, we should ask them what’s been going on?

Maybe they’ll be able to tell us, this one time, before it’s too late. 

I wouldn’t want to be Biden right now.

I doubt that Biden wants to be Biden as he inherits the Biggest Kingdom of Crap in the history of the States.  Lord knows it’s always tough starting a new job, but where is he going to begin?  Will he start by trying to return children to their parents at the Mexican border, or will he try and ensure health care for patients with Covid instead?  Might he have a look at some of the environmental issues Donnie made a mess of, or should he look at the horrendous prison-for-profit system first?

Good luck Biden, good luck.

What I would suggest is that Biden makes his working from home area as comfortable as possible in the White House.  Might I suggest he invest in some cosy, warm curtains, a Bialetti Moka, a meditation cushion and some vanilla scented candles.  This will get him started and they’ll be purchases he won’t regret. 

Alternatively (if he can) he should spend time looking at rainbows.

I saw one Sunday when I was walking along the city and it changed my mood dramatically.  I was quite grumpy and irritable beforehand, but as soon as I saw the rainbow, I felt happy and calm.  Rainbows are such beautiful mysteries of refracted light and I love how they are optical illusions you can photograph!  I love that they have no purpose or evolutionary role to speak of and that even though we can just see the arcs, they are perfect, never ending circles.  They appear for a while, their vivid colours so clear to us, and then they disappear without trace.  Our ancestors believed them to be magical, and perhaps they weren’t wrong about that.  I know that whenever I see one, I feel better inside, and I love pointing one out to a friend.

Look Biden, there’s a rainbow!

I spent the morning in Mexico.

I drifted into Mérida and glided silently into the city.  I smiled at people I passed on the street, and I didn’t mind at all that they didn’t smile back.  I couldn’t smell the frijol con puerco being prepared or enjoy an icy mojito.  I couldn’t hear the traffic or feel the mosquitos’ bite.  I could, though, enjoy the ancient Maya ruins and the pyramids of Uxmal.  Handily close to Mérida, it didn’t take me long to get there.  I didn’t have to queue in the hot sun for tickets or decide if I wanted a guide to accompany me. I had the site to myself and I marvelled at the magnificence of the Pyramid of the Magician.

When I was tired, I closed my laptop lid, and came back home to Dublin.

In the real Mexico, the women are making masks in preparation for Día de los Muertos.  They are decorating graves with candles, marigolds and photographs, and honouring the lives once lived, with love.  This ancient ritual sees mourning the dead as disrespectful to the natural world, which is why the festival is filled with dancing, music and parades.  Food is presented at alters for the dead to enjoy, and the bells ring out on the village squares.  People dress up as skeletons or in their Catrina costumes, and the festival goes on for two days.

Meanwhile in Dublin, this city feels like a ghost town.

Office buildings look like haunted houses and all the non-essential shops are closed.  The streets are mostly empty of people except for an hour or two at sunset when they queue for free food outside the GPO on O’Connell Street.  Sometimes they get soup, sandwiches, free masks and a small drink, and the queues are getting longer every week.

Sometimes I wonder if our government really know what they’re doing?

I wonder if the group of mostly men who govern us, would be better off trying to teach us all how to work with this word “essential” rather than expect us to comply with contradictory advice about virus management?  I agree with the public health messaging and I am privileged enough to be able to follow the guidelines.  I also understand that what was essential for me in March isn’t necessary now, and what I need for my body and mind today, I couldn’t have imagined way back at Easter.

Our first objective must be to protect one another.

At the same time, if Person A knows that a sea swim will increase her immunity and psychosocial durability, does it matter if the water is outside her agreed 5 km radius for outside exercise?  If the swim will make her more robust, which will ultimately protect her should she catch the virus or other diseases, isn’t that a good thing all round?  If she harms no one on her journey to, let’s say for arguments sake, the Forty Foot bathing spot on the southern tip of Dublin bay, shouldn’t she be allowed to do this? 

Apologies for sounding very Kim Kardashian over here complaining about my lack of access to coastal views when the world is both on fire and melting at the same time.  I just think that as this virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, we need more than the bare necessities of life to continue; we need reasons for living.  We need to learn how to mitigate risks carefully but confidently, so that we can balance the real dangers of this disease with the types of lives we can endure.

If we replace the word “essential” with “very important” or “really quite necessary” perhaps this helps the discourse.  My situation and set up is so vastly different to yours and both are changing with the seasons.  Of course I’m not advocating non-compliance with public health measurements, but your unique decisions are based on your circumstances and mine are based on mine.  Short term solutions don’t tend to work very well with long term problems, so I just think we should be trying to learn how to live, rather than exist, in the meantime.

Or we could overthrow patriarchal capitalism and replace it instead with a system that values public health more than private wealth, thus supressing the virus to a manageable level.

We’ve been living like this for seven and a half months.

I feel like Time is the ultimate Trick or Treater and putting the clocks backwards last Sunday didn’t help my perception of where we are at all.  My concentration is so low that this morning I took my breakfast dishes into the bathroom and it was only when I got to the hand basin I thought, “well, this doesn’t feel right at all!”  Yesterday on my way to the supermarket I wondered why the world was all fuzzy and out of focus.  I realised that I was wearing my reading glasses while walking around the street, but as I was thinking about other things, I hadn’t noticed that I couldn’t see!  I’m forever forgetting the simplest of information, and my mind is like a runaway LUAS.

Luckily, I keep a journal, so I can check my entries to see what I was doing during the days of the pandemic.  For example, on Saturday the 24^th October I have written: “saw a squirrel, ate five bags of cheesy wotsits”.  This means that in the future I will be able to look back at my time here and remember that this was the day I saw a woodland mammal and ate some corn-based cheese snacks. 

What a life! 

This weekend, however, I have great plans.

I have already carved out my pumpkin and prepared my Treats for my stay-at-home-solo-trick-or-treating-activity.  I am going to celebrate the ancient Celtic celebration of Samhain by eating a whole chocolate covered cheesecake and by watching season one of Pose and The Vow, which I’m sure my ancestors would approve of.  After the harvest, we are supposed to enjoy the fruits of the forest, to fatten ourselves up for the dark days of winter ahead.  So eat, be merry, sacrifice a cow or a goat if you have one, and keep terribly cosy and warm.  From here until the solstice in December are the darkest days of the year, but don’t worry about it too much, it will get light again.  Enjoy the blue, full moon on Saturday night and know that soon, it will brighten up again.

Happy Samhain to you with all of my love.

(photograph by Sophie van den Abeele).

I am an almost frozen lake, altering this October into solid.

Every last one of my waves struggles to complete.  I am fresh water, purified and invisible, filtering the bad dreams away.

In my lake the fish swim for fun and experiment with shoal shapes.  The moon watches over my still water to make promises it keeps.

Grey moon of October, whistling down for attention!

It’s OK autumn harvest moon, for we see you.

As I freeze, I sigh and this movement happens slower now, as my molecules huddle closer.  If you watch me you can’t see it, for your attention isn’t gentle enough, but suddenly I am one. 

Never moving again, until the light of the next spring, solidly taking a break.

Sleep with me,

rest with me,

breathe with me.

This late, autumn harvest moon will keep an eye on us together.

We are safe.

What a day, what a week, what a pandemic!

This week in Ireland our three-party coalition government announced the budget for 2021.  Our country has a deficit of 21.5 billion euro which is why we’ve decided to borrow money from the European Central Bank and spend, spend, spend!  Clearly “borrowing money” is the new “saving money” and I’m more than happy to watch this gamble play out in real time.  It’s like me walking into my bank saying, “I have absolutely no money at all, please give me a million euro” and my bank manager responding with the question “why don’t I give you a billion euro instead?”

Spend, spend, spend – your money, not your time!

No sooner had the government informed us that we should be spending as much money as possible to keep the economy alive, they told us not to spend time with family or friends in our own homes.  At least, I think that’s what they said.  It’s hard to keep on top of the instructions at this point.  I believe one of the three men in charge told us that the previous rule of having six visitors per visit, per household was now reduced to zero per household, if you are in a Level Three or Level Four area of the country. 

Or perhaps it was the other way around.

In fairness to the government (and that’s the first time I’ve started a sentence this way), we know what the rules are.  The rules are thus: spend as little time with as few people as possible if you want to decrease your chances of picking up the virus, or passing it along.  Those are the rules.  Those have always been the rules.  Those will always be the rules until we invest in a more equal society.

So spend, spend, spend – your money, not your time!

It’s tricky to spend money in a pandemic.

What do you spend money on once you’ve paid for food and shelter?  The cinemas, indoor restaurants and pubs are all closed, it’s pointless buying new clothes or shampoo, and taxis are death traps.  You can’t go on holiday, the internet does everything else and even I can’t spend that much money on chocolates and confectionery.

Some people have been talking about Covid Fatigue this week and the fact that they are hitting the wall.  I think those people are so optimistic.  Imagine thinking we’re half-way through this thing and imagine thinking that one day it will all be over?  I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I am going to spend the rest of my life watching the lives of others through the internet and group chats.  I am doomed to experience everything either at the wonky table in my living room, or here on the sofa.  Everything I ever see will be through the camera of your machines and I’ll never dance in public to a Prince song again!

Humans love to name and classify things, don’t we? 

We say to one another, “that is a white cloud” or “that is a grey squirrel”, but I don’t have a name or description for what I feel right now. It’s not depression or anxiety or existential sadness, although there are shadows of those things nearby; but I think what I’m feeling right now is…under the weather. 

It started on Monday, when I heard from some Mongolian friends and this set the tone for the week.  I was delighted to hear from them, of course, but as we organised a time and date for a reunion Zoom, it made me kind of wistful too.  I revisited Ulaanbaatar, through Google Earth and visited the university where I used to teach, the Lion’s Bridge and the Wrestling Palace.  As I hopped up and down Peace Avenue I realised how much I missed travelling to new and old places and I craved just one day on the road.

Then I felt angry that Europe isn’t asking Mongolia for advice on Covid management and containment seeing as they currently have zero deaths from the disease.  Mongolia of course, has been containing outbreaks of the bubonic plague since the Middle Ages, so they have a long history of experience they could share with us.  Every summer one or two people die from the plague, but it never leaves the region and they have a wonderful control and understanding of the disease. 

Perhaps we should ask for their advice? 

You should go to Mongolia if you ever get the chance.  I loved living there and learning the things I did.  Even when it was so cold that the water bottle in my bag would freeze or my eye lashes stick together, I loved every day in the land of the eternal blue sky.

I’m just a little bored and mixed up and under the weather, at the moment, and tired of being told, to spend, spend, spend – my money not my time.

I feel like the photo at the top of this week’s blog.

It’s a photo of a corner shelf in my local Tesco and I’m fascinated by it.  Who would decide to put all these things together?  Why would you have all those things in the same place?  Some chocolates near the tooth brushes close to baby food and pot noodles?  Why are those hula hoops there and what is the 18 piece dinner service doing near the floor?  It’s the shelf of confusion, the shelf of broken dreams, the shelf of no clarity and forgetting.  Who stocks this shelf, for the love of god, and what kind of monsters are they?  This shelf has been organised by a mean hearted tyrant, and it very much symbolises the current thoughts in my mind.

Still I’m happy to see you this week, and I hope you know that you’re doing OK.  Week after week of this, month after month of this, season after season of this, you are doing OK.  I’m giving you a little time lapsed hug right now and an appropriate kiss on the cheek. I’m nodding in your direction and telling you once more, that you and I are doing just fine.

I don’t know about you, but nowadays it takes me at least an hour to leave my home.

First of all, I need to find my glasses, keys, purse, mask and outdoor-clothes, and then I need to do it all again.  By the time I have everything ready, I’ve forgotten what it is I’m going outside for, so I must look for the note I wrote to myself earlier, to remind me of what it is I think I’m doing.  It’s an endless and thankless task which requires a great deal of patience and strength.

Once I’m outside I am disorientated. 

The outside floor needs a different type of foot covering to what I’m used to, and the temperature is changeable. Sometimes there is water in the air which falls onto my head straight on or sideways in, and often there are others in the outside too.  Sometimes I try to communicate with them, but they can’t hear me through my mask, so I gesture with my hands and eyes instead.  I grunt and point wildly at the goods I want to purchase in the shops, and I have difficulties with money and numbers. 

I’ve always had trouble with numbers and like many young girls, I found maths at school challenging.  In particular, I found the types of problems we had to solve a little distracting, especially the ones that looked like this:

If John has 2 apples and Jane has 8 apples, how many apples do they have altogether?

I was always too busy wondering who John and Jane were to worry about how many apples they had.  Where had they come from and why did they want so much fruit?  Were they baking a cake, or did they want the apples as weapons and why didn’t they want any bananas?  Sometimes I would want to warn Jane that by sharing her apples she would be complicit in the patriarchal oppression of all women, and that she would be better off keeping her own.  In fact, I wondered if his name really was John and if he was hiding one or two apples in a basket, boat or bathtub later on in the textbook?  How many apples they had together was the least interesting question you could ask about them, but that didn’t help me at all in the maths examinations. 

Another person having difficulties with numbers this week was the current President of the United States, and the IRS is still waiting for him to pay up that bill.  He and his current wife claimed they had the virus, but most of the world disbelieve them.  Did they lie to get out of the Biden debates, questions about the pandemic or to stop Pence gaining in popularity?  Or did they do it to distract from the leaked tapes of Melania asking, “who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration?”

Thank you Melania, thank you. 

I’ve been using her words all week as an antidote against all the things I hate and worry about. It’s wonderful and you should try it and I’ll show you how it works:

Who gives a fuck about corona stuff and decoration?

Who gives a fuck about zoom fatigue stuff and decoration?

Who gives a fuck about work stuff and decoration?

Who gives a fuck about climate stuff and decoration?

It’s hard to accept that Melania and her husband are just Homo Sapiens, like us. 

Not long ago they were both microscopic unfertilised eggs in the bodies of other adult females, and then one tiny sperm found each of them.  If those sperms had been tired that day, the Trumps would have missed out on existence and this would be a paragraph about the migration patterns of Monarch Butterflies instead. 

I think about eggs a lot.

Once I was an egg in my mother’s womb, and she was an egg in her mother’s womb.

And she was an egg in her mother’s womb.

And she was an egg in her mother’s womb.

All the way back until there were so few of us that you, me and the Trumps were the same egg in the same woman’s womb.  It’s not that we’re interconnected or loosely related, we’re versions of the same.  We are symmetrical Mandelbrot’s, enticing, well-formed fractals, reproducing themselves into infinity, and then we’ll start again.

Here in Ireland we had our own trouble with numbers this week too. 

Our government couldn’t decide which level to place the population on, so they leaked some documents to gage public opinion and finally decided on Level Three.  It’s like playing a game of poker with an untrustworthy drunk who’s been on acid all afternoon, and we’ll see the results of this strategy in 10 – 14 days.

If school A have 100 pupils with 1 virus, and school B have 200 pupils with 2 viruses how many deaths will it take before the politicians accept that there’s a contagious disease in our society that we have absolutely no control over, because we chose not to resource the health, education, and housing sectors? 

In addition to thinking about eggs and numbers and the innate corruption of the politicians in power, I’ve also been thinking about the Neanderthals.  They were the last species of humanoid to become extinct of course, so I’ve been wondering what the mood was in the camp on those last evenings. Were they sad and wistful and wondering what went wrong?  Were they hopeful that our species, at least, would do great things with our language abilities and tools?  Were they dreaming of the Uffizi Gallery, the moon landing and the possibilities of heart transplants?  Or did they simply think, “who gives a fuck about the future of Homo Sapiens stuff and decoration?”

I guess we’ll never know.

The best we Irish can say about sea swimming is that “it’s grand once you get over the shock”.  The sea water here is simply colder than in any other country in the entire world, or as we might describe it; “fresh”.  I don’t know why this is the case, but trust me, it’s true.  At first you can’t breathe, then your skin turns blue, sometimes you lose all sensation in your fingers and your toes, and it’s also quite magnificent.     

Dubliners have really embraced outdoor sports and recreational activities since the pandemic made meeting people inside life threatening.  Everyone took up running, cycling, outdoor yoga and sea swimming to a level the government’s healthy living advisory committee could have only dreamt about back in March.  We are all enjoying the outdoors, our bodies and our limitless exercise induced endorphins.  We have hamstring injuries instead of hangovers, and there’s a slight smell of Deep Heat that lingers in the city centre air.

A couple of months ago, I met some friends for a swim and the afternoon went as expected.  They took ages cajoling me into the icy cold water with encouragement and morale boosting comments.

“It’s OK.  Really, it’s fine!  It’s honestly not that cold when you get used to it.  I swear it only hurts for a second or two and then everything goes numb, oh come on, just get in!”

I went into the water, tuned blue and got back out, but happily enjoyed the rest of the afternoon drinking hot drinks and catching up.  Later that evening a strange thing happened. I was curled up on the sofa watching Samsara again, when I noticed that I felt very wonderful.  I felt relaxed, happy, sleepy and calm.

So the next weekend I went back to the sea, and I’ve been going ever since, and I love every detail of my new ritual.    

I love the ever-changing colours of the sea and that moment just before you take the plunge when your head is screaming “no, please don’t do it!”  I love the feeling of the icy salt water all over my skin, but most of all, I love the praise. 

Oh, how I love the sweet sound of all the warm approval. 

You see, everyone knows that going into the water is a ridiculous thing to do, so the more experienced swimmers commend the efforts of those of us newer to the sport, and these sentences help us through the shivering.   A little “well done you” or “ah, there you are now” translates as admiration and it’s highly intoxicating and addictive.

I love chatting to the others after I’m warm again.

I start by asking if they swim all year round and they delight to tell me that they do. I ask them how long they’ve been swimming, and many have been swimming every day since 1953 (apart from the day they got married or had a kidney removed).  I ask for advice and for tips and it’s these comments I look forward to the most.  You, the non-sea-swimmer, might laugh at this and ask “what advice can there be?  You go in, you swim, you come out again!”

People give advice about all sorts of things.  They talk about the best time to swim in accordance with the tides and how the water feels in comparison to its actual temperature.  People have different ways of warming up afterwards and everyone has an opinion about Dry Robes.  We talk about other water based activities and if wearing a wet suit is cheating.  Sometimes we talk about non-water related issues but not very often if I’m honest. 

A few weeks ago, I watched a woman on a stand-up paddle board being followed by a group of grey seals.  She didn’t see them at first, but when she realised what was happening she panicked, and started shouting back to shore.

“They’re following me” she called out “I think the seals are following me”.

No one paid her any attention which obviously alarmed her more.

“Oh God” she cried out from the water “Oh God”.

Sometimes when I’m nervous, I laugh. 

Laughing while swimming in the cold and open water is difficult and potentially dangerous, but there was something about the sound of her calls for help that I found funny.  “Oh God” she shouted again, this time louder, but no one was going to her rescue.  I couldn’t help her, because I was in enough trouble myself and suddenly, I saw the whole thing unfolding in my mind, as a tragedy reported on the six o’clock news.

I managed to ask a near by swimmer if he thought she was in any real danger and he frowned and said “not at all”.  Then he swam out to sea, much further than I would ever go, and of course in the end she was fine.  I stopped laughing at her, caught my breath again and I was quite well too.  The seals moved on, the paddle woman came back, I finished my swim and went home.

This weekend might be the last of the summer sea swims as it’s getting colder now.  In fairness, the sea isn’t worse than it was in August, but it’s colder getting dressed afterwards.  We had such a mild and beautiful September, but I think this weekend will be the last one.

Instead of being sad for my loss, I’m going to practise the gratitude teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh who tells us that nothing is permanent in the natural world, but everything is as it should be.  Remember how he taught us that if we see a beautiful cloud floating in the sky, we should be grateful that it changes into rain, for this becomes water which we need for our hot tea.  If we look in our teacups and say, “thank you little cloud”, we can’t even help but smile. 

I brought some shells and pebbles back from the beach to put in a bowl on my book shelf.  I admire their perfect geometry and individual patterns.  I have my social media posts, those cave walls of our times, to remind me of the colours. 

Finally, of course, I have you.    

For you have witnessed it too. 

The tide comes in and the tide goes back out again.  The breath of the sea is the tide that we feel, and the spectacular beauty of reality in 3D leaves me in constant awe.  Today, I am grateful for the sea. 

I have been thinking about the 80’s this week, and how brutal that decade was.   

In Wales we lived with the miners’ strikes, Thatcher and the threat of nuclear annihilation and in our free time we consumed The Thorn Birds mini-series and Flowers in the Attic.  I remember watching The Thorn Birds with my parents at home. Of course I didn’t understand the themes, but I was envious of Rachel Ward’s lovely blue and white towelling robe that she wore on the beach in the famous scene with the priest.  I remember thinking it was very exotic to wear a robe on the beach and the next time I went on holidays with my mam and dad, I started to do the same.  My parents must have found it odd to see me sitting on the beach in Weymouth in my full-length, flammable dressing gown, but they didn’t mention it at all, if they did.

We were convinced that there would be a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR, and I clearly remember talking about how to survive nuclear winters with my friends in the park during our school lunch hours.  I remember the discussions taking place, but I can’t remember what our tips or recommendations were.  We assumed that omnicide was going to happen, that the human race would be exterminated and that we were the generation who would witness it.

Isn’t it funny what you remember and what you forget?

I remember a woman called Sherazade, who I knew, when I lived in Prague.  I moved to Czechia a few years after the Velvet Revolution, when it turned out that the people behind the iron curtain didn’t want nuclear annihilation either. It turned out the people in eastern Europe just wanted to get good jobs and go to the countryside for their holidays, they wanted to meet interesting people and sometimes to go dancing.

Sherazade came from Canada and was exquisitely beautiful and funny.  She used to carry a violin case around Prague with her, but there was nothing inside except some papers, her purse and her cigarettes.  She would open it up and laugh at people’s confused expressions, but she liked the way it felt on the Metro and in the old town.  The last I heard of Sherazade was that she moved to India where she was collected from the airport by an old boyfriend on his Harley, and I’ve never heard from or about her since. 

Prague then was full of transitioners; full of artists, writers, poets and film makers.

It was spectacular in the winter under a fresh coat of snow, and simply charming in the spring dressed in blossom.  We kept the bars and restaurants in business before the tourists arrived for their weekend mini-breaks and stag dos.  We felt that we were watching history unfolding as Czechia moved away from the former Soviet Union, and towards the west.

Isn’t it funny the things you remember, in amongst all the things you forget? 

I remember the smell and sound of Sherazade’s violin case as if it were yesterday, and the imagined texture of Rachel Ward’s towelling gown.  But ask me how I’ve spent all the days since the 12 March, and I would be pushed to give you any details.  Sure, I’ve spent time working and time exercising, and there’s been food to enjoy and a visit to Wales.  I’ve read some interesting books and I enjoyed the online courses, but how six months has gone by, I don’t know.

One thing I have enjoyed is my Spider Plants.

Originally from southern Africa, Chlorophytum Comosum, was first described by Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg in 1794.  I brought one home from my office desk in March, and now I have eleven.  They seem to propagate at will and every time I turn my back one of them has sprouted some more plantlets and there’s constant messing around and mischief.

I have the original plant, who seemed to be suffering with stress related issues in the early spring and didn’t enjoy the move at all.  It’s fine now, but I still have to be careful with the irrigation.  I have a stunningly beautiful one, which is fully symmetrical and has beautiful colouring.  I have a hippie one, and a wayward one, I have two quiet ones and a sombre one.   The three littlest ones are still finding their feet and then I have one that makes creaking sounds when it grows.  I stroke and chat to all of them all most days, but living with eleven spider plants is unsustainable, so if you live in Dublin and you want one, let me know. 

Last week, after watching a particularly powerful YouTube video I gave them all a steam shower. My partner, who is usually very supportive, simply asked “have we gone too far with this botany project?” so I cut Spa Day short and put them back on their shelves.  Memories of Sherazade’s violin case melts with Rachel’s robe and it all comes together as I chat with the spider plants. 

Aren’t we people odd, aren’t we funny, aren’t we strange? 

This week, my favourite twitter account @smolrobots described humans as “apes who learned to star gaze and dreamed of heaven” and it made me think we’ll be OK.  We care for indoor plants that don’t feed us, and we care for women from our past including fictional ones, and those we don’t see now.  The full-blown nuclear war we feared didn’t happen, the quality of TV mini-series improved, and the tide came in and went out again.  We are capable of such gentle thoughts and memories, and I think we’ll be OK.

In amongst all the harder stuff, I think we’ll be OK.