Met online with my lovely writing group today, and, as we frequently do, we did a picture exercise. This involves finding a random picture* and writing about it for a set time. Peter is a master at this, and usually finds us four or five pictures to choose from. This time Chris joked “Someone will show off by writing a story tying together all the pictures”. Of course I took that as a challenge. These are the pictures, this is the story. It was written in twenty minutes, so it’s as rough as a bear’s bum, but I’m quite pleased with it.
She sits by the open window for most of the day, staring out, head resting on one hand as she dreams her days away. The other residents of the block wave and smile to her as they pass, or exchange a few words “You good today, ma’am? You enjoying the sun?” “How are you today, Mother? How is your arthritis?” “Do you need anything, Ma? I’m off shopping, is there anything you want?” If they have time, they stop to rest before dragging their bodies weary from work, their heavy bags, up the winding stair from landing to landing to their apartments. On the few occasions she leaves her own apartment, she passes the stairs, winding to the top of this big, elegant building. When she was little, she and her brothers would race each other to the top and then back down again, clattering and shouting until their father or mother snapped at them to be quiet. When her nieces and nephews were small they would climb up and drop hazelnuts from above, trying to hit the centre of the tiled roundel at the foot of the stairs. Occasionally they would drop them on the heads of the other residents, prompting complaints. The memory makes her smile.
Often the residents have their children with her when they stop on their way home; she hands them sweets from the jar she keeps on the window sill and winks at them “Don’t tell your parents, now!” And mother or father will smile back at her in the pleasure of a shared joke. Black faces, brown faces, yellow faces, she beams at all of them and they beam back at her. When they rest before they climb the stairs to their homes, they often talk to her, sometimes about their days, their troubles, their small joys and pleasures, but often also about their homes, the places they come from. She sees through their eyes countries she has never visited, animals she has never seen, landscapes foreign and exotic but, she can tell, in the words of those who speak to her of their lost homelands, loved, so loved. The wide courtyard of the apartment block blooms with flowers, with fish, with birds, with mountains and narrow city streets, with animals and plants, with food, with smells, with long twilights full of insects and bright clear mornings full of birdsong and long noondays drowsy with heat.
She sees their homes through their eyes, she who has hardly been further than the front door of the building since the day she fell. Swinging on the cast iron bannisters, her foot slipped and she crashed to the tiles below. Not a huge fall, not even one storey, but enough to break her back and put an end to her racing days forever. No more running up and down the stairs for her. Her brothers left and she remained, first with her parents, then alone, managing round the familiar apartment on crutches, neighbours shopping for her. At first after her parents died she was lonely, so lonely, except when her brothers and their families came to stay, of course, but then the residential area, which had been smart and desirable when her parents bought this apartment, started to go downhill. The straitlaced respectable middle-class couples moved out and gradually first poorer people, then immigrants, moved in. At first she watched from the window in fear at these strange people, concerned that they might harm her in some unspecified way, rob her, or otherwise take advantage of her weakness. But instead they smiled and waved. She started to smile back, then to wave, then, after a small Vietnamese woman knocked on her door one day with a gift of fish stew, she opened the window and waited so she could say “Good day”. And now she has ten, twenty, thirty friends she sees every day, who inquire after her health and fetch her shopping and share their food, and their dreams of their homes so far away. She has never travelled in her body far from this apartment, but in her mind now she travels everywhere, back to all their homelands, the colours and scents and sounds vivid in her mind while she gazes from her window onto the world.
Well, it’s not that topical any more, given the speed with which news moves these days, but it’s a week since our dear* PM’s car crash of a speech at the CBI, which inspired me to finally write something after an embarassingly long time. It was actually written for a small cabaret evening put on by my local AmDram group, so it’s what you might call performance poetry, or, to be more accurate, performance doggerel. I was thinking of this article which my friend Andy Golborne shared in the aftermath of said speech. It’s long, but very entertaining, and well worth a read, because it makes very clear that, whilst Boris’ refusal to get on top of his brief, or to acquire any real in-depth understanding of anything other than his own career and advantage, is genuine, his supposedly breezy and spontaneous responses to being caught out are anything but. And that made me think, if that’s your schtick, what happens when the laughing stops? Anyhow, here it is. Enjoy!
Boris at the CBI
From Downing Street, the limousine
Purred northwards from the London scene
Of funkapolitan** farragos:
Rail snafus, second job embargos.
On pigskin seats BoJo reclined,
His next engagement on his mind.
"What's next?" he asked his servile SPAD***,
"I can't remember. Whoops! My bad!"
"The CBI" replied the lad.
“Ah, top hole stuff! That’s just the ticket!
Parliament now is not quite cricket,
But these good fellows, they think big!
Tech unicorns! And Peppa Pig!
I think I’ll have a little nap.
Nudge me when we’re there, old chap.”
For he assumed they’d love his spiel,
These guys who live to wheel and deal,
The ones who built on Thatcher's rot,
The knights of Tory Camelot!
Profiting from deregulation,
To shaft the once-great British nation,
Sold assets off as profits soared
And sent her industry abroad,
To Singapore and to Korea
Where business owners need not fear
Union reps or Elf and Safety,
Or injured workers getting baitey,
A few cents pay is all it takes,
And need not cover toilet breaks.
And unions, that fought day and night,
To safeguard jobs, for workers rights,
Proper protections, decent pay,
Sick leave, time off, maternitay****
Are now Stonewalled and spend their time
Policing pronouns, sex thought-crime.
Now in the North Mcjobs are all,
From Hadrian's to the once-Red Wall,
While once-proud factories decay.
Does Boris give a stuff? No way!
Eyes closed, he snoozed throughout the ride,
A nice warm feeling deep inside.
He can ignore the COVID mess,
The shattered, tottering NHS,
The Red Wall Tories in his hair
Whining about the cost of care,
The hideous decor, snagging yet,
Designed by Carrie Antoinette,
And spend a morning riding high
The star turn at the CBI!
Upon the podium he grinned
The Brexit hero! Yes, he winned!*****
And now he thought he'd triumph again,
But no. Alas, he looked in vain
For laughter and for warm applause.
In each expectant, hopeful pause
Came tumbleweeds across the room.
He caught a whiff of deepening gloom -
Despite the chummy nods to "Tony"******
All of the faces stared back, stony.
He tried what had been sure-fire winners
At other fat-cat black tie dinners:
"David Attenborough! Ferrari!
Burble! Wind power! Masserati!
Electric vehicles are crap!"
There barely came a single clap.
Rattled, he stumbled, lost his place,
Murmured “Forgive me”, red of face.
“Forgive me” as he shuffled pages,
The awful silence stretched for ages.
"Good lord" he thought
"They've bowled a yorker!
I know! They'll love a fellow porker!
This speech needs inspo intravenous:
Peppa Pig World - business genius!”
And thus he turned to Peppa Pig,
But Peppa did not go down big,
Hairdryer pig was not a hit.
The media verdict: "It was shit".
Forgive me....
Not for COVID deaths,
The lonely quarantined last breaths,
Forgive me....
Not for Brexit lies,
For shortages as prices rise.
Forgive me....
Not for grift and sleaze,
A jolly profitable wheeze,
To take tax pounds that we all pay
For BoJo's mates to stash away.
Not the betrayal of a nation,
But for your own humiliation.
Forgive me....
I cannot see why.
Forgive me....
Peppa Pig might fly.
* ironic ** If there are any words in here which you don’t recognise, chances are they’re a direct quote from the speech. *** Parliamentary slang for Special Advisor **** The rhymes don’t always come. So sue me. ***** Past participle of win, obviously. ****** Tony Danker, Chair of the CBI
I have a desk!!! After nearly eighteen months without one, I finally, finally, have a desk with proper, working computer equipment. I cannot even begin to explain to you the sheer wonderful transcendent joy of this particular moment. Feast your eyes upon the magnificence of the desk, above. See the way its glorious desky structure stretches across below the window to accomodate all the necessities. See the filing trays, the printer, the monitor, the mouse, the keyboard. THE MONITOR, THE MOUSE, THE KEYBOARD!!!!! I have a MONITOR, a MOUSE and a KEYBOARD, PEOPLE!!! And I’m typing this blog entry with them, right now!!!!
Of course, the last time I sat at an actual proper desk with an actual proper monitor (in fact two monitors), an actual proper mouse, and an actual proper keyboard, I had no idea that it would be the best part of eighteen months before I did it again. Actually, I tell a bit of a lie. Truthfully, it’s been fourteen months since I sat at such a desk, but that was only for four days before it was snatched away again. It happened thusly.
At the end of 2019 I had agreed with my manager that I would take a two month sabbatical and then return to work for fourteen hours a week in March 2020. Prior to that I had been working four days a week in my company’s office in the City of London, where agile working meant that each employee, including me, would not have an allocated desk, but wold book one of a number of identical desks in our location for each day they were in the office. This meant that my morning routine comprised getting my stuff from my locker, heading over to my chosen desk, plugging my laptop into the docking station, getting out my bits and pieces* and arranging them, and starting work. Because our company had done agile working properly, all the desks were identical with excellent equipment which could be easily adjusted and everything worked, so that every desk I booked was a pleasure to work at. The moment my monitor flickered on, I grasped my mouse and started to tap away on my keyboard, that was the moment I really started work each day. It greased my wheels, got my motor running and my brakes off, started me moving smoothly up through the gears, and other similarly dodgy motoring metaphors. Not to put too fine a point on it, I really liked having a decent desk to sit at; it seemed to help me work.
However, by the end of 2019 I was about to turn sixty and felt that, however much I liked sitting at an agile desk in an agile office feeling agile and professional and other super things like that, it was probably time to wind down a bit before retirement, and that I could get quite enough pleasure from sitting agilely at a desk for a maximum of two agile days a week. My manager and I therefore agreed that I would take a break for two months (I was REALLY knackered. Turns out that working quite hard during a long menopause is pretty tiring. Who knew? Hashtag irony) and that I would come back in March 2020 rejuvenated and ready to once more enjoy the delights of agile desking for two days a week. Ho ho, with the benefit of hindsight. By the time I returned, the Big C was looming, and our office shut on Sunday 15th March, a full week before BoJo found his cojones and locked the whole UK down. And that was it for me and desks.
Of course, it wasn’t it for me and working, for, like so many others, I had to rather swiftly pivot to working from home. I was much, much luckier than many in having a job which could be done from home, a laptop, and excellent IT support from a company which had been working flexibly and agilely and remotely for many years, so it was a pretty seamless transition in many ways, except in terms of the desk. I did, in fact, at that time have a desk, a very very old one designed to be used with a tower PC rather than a laptop, in a spare room/study which was, not to put too fine a point on it, a tragic dumping ground for all sorts of extraneous crap.
I decided instead to work at the kitchen table. This wasn’t all bad – the weather in that first lockdown was glorious, and it meant I could have the doors open to the garden. The table was too low, but I raised the laptop on a document box, and I had a surface to my right where I could dump bits and pieces like my notebook and pens. I even had a co-worker. You can see my 2020 workstation in the two smaller photos above – the close up is of my keyboard, mouse and monitor (ie laptop) and my coworker’s bottom. Sorry. She is terrible about purrsonal space. I was lucky in getting a cheap desk chair from a neighbour a couple of weeks into the first lockdown, since working whilst sitting in a kitchen chair was doing nothing for my back. When she posted on the street WhatsApp group early one morning that she’d put it outside her house in case anyone wanted it, I literally ran down the street in my pyjamas to snaffle it. And so that’s where I worked, for the rest of 2020 and into 2021. I retired at the end of 2020 (I went into the office to collect the bits and pieces still in my locker from when I left the building in March, and that was a strange thing to do in December last year, I can tell you, since nobody was in the building who absolutely didn’t have to be and the whole place felt like the Marie Celeste). By this time I’d purchased a Chromebook for personal stuff, which was great in the sense that a Chromebook is fabulous, but terrible in the sense that it has a somewhat different keyboard and mouse pad to a laptop, and using it was not intuitive. I wasn’t consciously not enjoying being at my “desk”, but I found it hard to get on with stuff and had no energy for writing, something I’ve always loved. I hoped that would change when I retired, and I did try to blog a bit, but it never really took off.
And then…. My intention had always been to create myself a study to write in when I retired, and my lovely decorator had painted my spare room a glorious sunshine yellow. My friends Egg and Margy had designed and built a fabulous desk, and I had treated myself to a desk chair the exact same model as the ones we had in the office, but reconditioned and covered with a upbeat bright green fabric rather than dull corporate grey. Everything was set, and I just needed to sort out connecting up the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and printer that I’d prepared earlier (or rather, purchased off the internet earlier after a mammoth hunt to find such things, what with the huge demand for them from all the other people who found themselves in exactly the same boat as me but were a bit quicker off the mark). Because I needed to connect up a Chromebook, which don’t really come with docking stations, I’d also had to buy a USB C hub, and when I’d earlier tried connecting everything up on my old desk (see above, eeewww), nothing worked. I put this down to the difference in levels between the USB hub and the keyboard and mouse, since the latter needed to be on the pull-out shelf and the former on the actual desk, and I assumed that this made it hard for the wireless technology to work, but privately I feared it was more that the whole set up just wasn’t going to function very well, if at all. It was quite scary trying to work out what I needed to buy given the equipment I had, and I did wonder if I’d got it wrong. Hence, once I had my wonderful new desk with my wonderful new chair in my wonderful new study, I didn’t connect everything up and get working straight away, because I was convinced that doing so was going to be difficult and challenging and involve hours of me trawling the internet endeavouring to interpret Geekspeak so I could suss out how to get stuff to work and why it wasn’t working when it should do. I felt I needed to gird my internal loins for a struggle. I needed to be ready for it, and prepared for it to be hard.
And thus we come to this afternoon, when I decided that I was feeling ready enough and strong enough and determined enough to face the challenge of connecting it all up and making it work. I connected everything up. It took about five minutes. And it worked. It all worked!!!! I felt like Josh in The West Wing. I had to do a few emails. I did a few emails. I needed to Google a couple of things. I Googled a couple of things. I was sitting at the desk, typing on the keyboard, mousing with the mouse, staring at the monitor, and it was like a drug. I felt like I’d been given a big, fat hit of something I hadn’t had in a very long time – the sheer joy of working when the physical act of working is made easy and all you need to concentrate on is what’s going on in your head and how best to get it out into the world. It was bloody wonderful. I had planned to spend the rest of the day doing a bit of gardening and reading my book, but I was enjoying myself so very much that I instantly binned that in favour of doing what I really wanted to do – WRITE. Oh, yeah, baby, this is the stuff, this is how it feels, that’s the spot, right there. Three hours of writing about a desk, and this is the result. It’s not much, but in many ways it’s the best three hours I’ve had in a year and a half. And if that makes me sad, I don’t care. Apparently, I still love to write, and now I have a proper desk to write at again. Yippeee!!!!!
*One unexpected joy of agile working is that you once more need a pencil case, something previously not required since childhood. There was a moment or two when we moved to agile working when I considered buying a wooden pencil case of the sort that was very à la mode in Cirencester about 1967, but good sense prevailed and I took my inner child shopping instead for the sort of pencil case which would portray an appropriately professional image in the office when I put it on my agile desk.
My lovely friend Deborah has a lot of necklaces and is currently wearing one a day and posting photos of herself in said necklace on social media. It’s a very good way of noting the passing of the days in lockdown. One of the necklaces is a small locket she bought in Northcote Road antiques market containing photographs of, as she put it, “random baby and random grandad”. My writing group thought this would be a terrific prompt for a story and so it proved – we met this afternoon and wrote four very different stories about the locket. This is mine.
It would be so easy to make it a tragedy. The baby should be the adored child of an older father, the late-flowering bud of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, born just before he was called up in the war to end all wars. The locket of course is his leaving gift from his wife, purchased with money saved from the housekeeping, containing a photo of the baby for him to wear against his heart. It was clasped in his hand when he died in the casualty station and sent home to his grieving widow and her fatherless child by a kindly officer doing his best to find some salve for the unbearable news.
But wait, that doesn’t work. If it were that, it would be a photograph of the baby, and one of her mother. All right, then, he gave his wife the locket before he was called up, placed pictures of himself and their adored daughter within it, clasped it tenderly about her neck, where she grasped it in instinctive fear when she heard the knock on the door heralding the grim telegram and its terrible news.
It still seems strange that there was a picture of the baby, though. She saw the baby every day. Maybe he put the baby in there because that was what he would want. Or maybe that’s not the story at all. Maybe it was two pictures of the same person, the baby he was and the soldier he became, placed in the locket as a gift to his dear old mother before he left for the front, solace for her both in her sorrow at his departure and her grief at his death. Yes, that must be the story. Terribly sad. She was wearing it when she died of a broken heart the very day of the Armistice, the day the guns fell silent, just two weeks after his death, the dreadful telegram clasped in her hand. Terribly, terribly sad.
She nodded with satisfaction, putting aside the random photographs she’d taken from the box from the house clearance, small circles showing where nameless faces had been cut out. The locket was……..yes, sold to her by the great niece of the person concerned, after her mother died. Why’d she sell it? Maybe it was unlucky? Or maybe the great niece just needed the money. Yes, that was it. No need for a bad luck story. Don’t want to overegg the pudding. The great niece probably wanted a bit of money to… to…. yes, to give to her son to help him buy a house….. to buy a car….. to go to university! Jack (bound to be a Jack) had been an intelligent man but of course, in those days, uneducated, had to leave school to go to work, but a great reader, books his comfort in the trenches, he’d be delighted to know his gift to his old mother was bringing in a bit of money to send his great-nephew to university for the education that he’d been denied. Great-great-nephew. How many years would that be? Sounded right.
She reached for the polish, but decided against it. Don’t want to make it look too new. People love to think they’ve discovered a treasure. “Looked like nothing when I bought it but it polished up beautifully. I don’t think she knew what she’d got. She told me a wonderful story about it. Terribly sad”. Sixty… no, eighty-five pounds, and she’d let them beat her down to seventy five. Seventy if she was having a good day. That would do nicely. “Terribly, terribly sad.”
Throughout the pandemic my writing group has been meeting regularly over Zoom to do a couple of hours writing together. Despite all my best intentions it’s pretty much the only writing I do now, as if the sheer effort of dealing with all the change that’s going, of creating a new life more or less on the fly on is using up all my creative energy. Each session we do a few short exercises and one longer one, usually based on a picture generated by this site. Today the picture was this one, and I wrote a short story.
“’Canal Killer on the rampage?’ Police fear that a serial killer may be attacking victims in the Twiningly area. Over the last three months several victims have gone missing in the area around the Twiningly lock, and, despite extensive searches, no signs have been found.
Chief Inspector Stafford of the Airesly Police Force reported today at a press conference that there are six presumed victims of the Canal Killer. When the first two victims disappeared there was little concern; both men, who vanished within a fortnight of each other, were itinerant and homeless, and it was assumed that they had moved out of the area. However, in the last two months four more people have disappeared from the tow path in the vicinity of the lock. In April a teenager vanished, followed by a dog-walker last month, and, on Sunday, toddler Murray Vine disappeared completely from under his mother’s nose. Despite extensive searches of the canal no trace of the boy could be found, and, in the succeeding publicity, a further disappearance has been linked when a sex worker reported to the police that a client of hers had vanished in the same area. The client has been identified as married father of two Simon Hawthwaite, who left his family home in May and has not returned.”
“Pff. Tosh. Utter tosh. Sensationalist crap. Just what you’d expect from a free local rag.” He chucked the paper aside. “Six people though” Kerry remarked, pouring herself another coffee. “Six people! Two homeless blokes who’ve either killed each other or died of drugs or gone back to Poland, a teenager who’s run away from home, a depressed middle-aged woman who’s probably topped herself and a toddler who fell into the canal because his chavvy mother wasn’t watching him. Oh, and a bloke who’s walked out on his wife. Load of crap.” He bent down to check the laces on his running shoes and glanced at his Garmin. “I’m not going far. I’ll be back by 12.” “Fine.” She’d picked up the discarded paper and was leafing through it. “See you later.”
Once out of the house he headed downhill towards the canal. For a moment he wondered if he should head to the common as he usually did, but he was short of time, and anyway, the newspaper report was a load of rubbish. “Serial killer my arse!” he muttered under his breath. He apparently wasn’t the only person to have read it, though. The towpath was usually fairly deserted, running as it did through a semi-derelict industrial area, the haunt of drug-dealers and the homeless, but today he didn’t see a soul as he pounded along, sweating in the humidity. After a couple of miles he checked his Garmin again. Just time to get to the lock and turn around. As he came out into the area by the old factory he nearly turned his ankle and realised that his running shoe was coming loose. He bent to tie it, then saw an old chair dumped against the concrete wall of the little loading dock. It was an ancient chair with grimy upholstery and he had no intention of actually sitting on it, probably wet through and soaked with the urine of whatever elderly person had last owned it, but he perched his buttock on one arm of it to retie the shoe. He loosened the laces, pulled it off and checked the lacing, then, as he bent over to put it back on, he felt the chair jerk. He started up and looked around, assuming someone had grabbed it to frighten him. Nothing. Trick of the imagination, or maybe the arm was loose. He realigned his weight and bent down again.
No mistaking it this time, the chair actually jerked, hard, throwing him off-balance so that he tumbled into the stinking padded seat. “Urrrgghh!” Fear and disgust galvanised him, his assumption that the chair was collapsing under his weight making him thrash forwards, trying to regain his feet. Without success. The seat of the chair was sinking under him, causing him to drop backwards, his buttocks down and his feet coming up. Retching, he tried to grab at the wooden arms, but they swung back at him, rapping his knuckles painfully. He was right down now, head well below the back of the seat, feet pointing upwards as the front of the chair pushed back. What the hell? Was it over a hole, or something? Some sort of obscene practical joke? A trap? He thrashed desperately, trying to grab the edge of the seat, the armrest, anything to get purchase to pull himself back out, but everything was slippery cold satin, clinging foam, vile, stinking cushions sucking him in, closing over him, smothering him, at the last pressing slickly, wetly, over his contorting face until he could no longer even breathe.
Silence, stillness on the canal. One running shoe on its side beside an ancient, stained, discarded chair. Nothing else. Stillness, silence. Until, just once, the chair burped.
So here we are again. The title is, as you know, one of Samuel Beckett’s most famous quotes, the other being “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” which is aother of my favourites (I spent a LOT of time thinking this during my eight hour swim down Lake Annecy). I’m trying again to write this blog on a daily basis.
During lockdown I’ve been posting, six days a week, on the South London Swimming Club Facebook page, setting a daily photo challenge on various topics for the group, under a daily photo from my own camera reel. My photos had, according to my own rules, to be of the Lido or something closely connected with the Club, such as a Club trip, and had to have a connection to the subject in hand. We started with the colours of the Lido cubicle doors (red, yellow, green, blue, easy), moved on to rainbows, then we spelled Lido, then Tooting Lido, then we did ALL the letters of the alphabet, which was a bit harder, THEN everyone wanted to carry on, so I did a materials challenge based on the themes of wedding anniversaries. Finding photos which are linked to the Lido on the themes of China, Cotton, Leather, Lace and Iron has been challenging, at times extremely challenging, but fun, and the daily posts have also given me the chance to write a bit, which has satisfied my creative urge.
It was also helpful to me in giving me a bit of structure to my days. In the absence of being able to get up and go to the Lido, or the office, I’ve been getting up at six, feeding the cats and going back to bed with tea and breakfast and usually the more sociable of the cats for an hour, when I catch up on social media and the news and do the SLSC photo challenge. This has meant spending fifteen or twenty minutes every morning searching for an appropriate photo, writing the caption, deciding on the winner from the previous day’s submissions and asking them for their choice for the next day, all of which is no longer required.
Which leaves me with fifteen or twenty minutes a day to do something with before I get up and do my exercise (YAY!! for my rowing machine!). And since I’m very much more creative and enjoy writing a lot more first thing in the morning than in the evening, I thought I’d use it to have another go at this blog and see where we go. Try again. I’m pretty sure, fail again. But hopefully, fail better.
So, this blog started as a comment on a friend’s Facebook page. They had shared this Guardian article and I’d commented “The Queen is an absolute lazy cow. She’s only 94, she should pull her bloody finger out. Normally she’d be doing 25 public engagements a month. Bloody shirker!”
A lot of other people commented as well, and this morning the OP added that they posted the article because they thought it was mildly amusing, but that most of the comments were from ‘Mr Angry’ and the other half from people who hadn’t read the article, and wondered why, if people weren’t interested, they didn’t just scroll on?
When I read this comment I wondered this about myself. I’m trying not to respond or comment on stuff I don’t like on Facebook, since Facebook loves anything which triggers interaction, so the best way to make sure a post you don’t like disappears into the general silt is to ignore it. However, in this case I cared enough to comment, and well over a decade of therapy has trained me to wonder, when I react to something like this, why I do so. To quote many a tortured actor “What’s my MOTIVATION?” This blog post started out as a response to my friend’s comment that the article was just mildly amusing, and grew from there.
In terms of the article, I had indeed read it, and dismissed it as clickbait, basically. But I do get slightly irritated at people like the columnist in question who accuse the Queen of being lazy. How many 94 year olds are still doing a full time job? Never mind broadcasting to the nation at a time when everyone is joking about the trouble they have getting their grandmothers on Zoom. Doing something like that is very far from easy (try writing and delivering a five minute monologue to video yourself if you don’t believe me) and whatever your feelings about the role of the monarchy, there is no doubt that she has an incredible sense of public duty.
I also felt the comment about Prince Philip (“At least get Philip out in the gardens at Windsor doing laps for the NHS, come on”) in somewhat poor taste. Quite apart from the fact it’s not terribly good optics for someone who’s never done anything more dangerous than sit at a desk to have a pop at a 97 year old who saw very active service in World War II, and who was still doing his job until three years ago, you would also hope that someone who has written very sensitively about his own family history would have a bit more sympathy for someone with Philip’s family history; enough, anyway, not to use them as the butt of a cheap joke.
I also had a little look back at the writer’s previous columns because I like to know a bit about the writers of these things before I comment. I thought it was somewhat ironic that he’d commented a few weeks earlier about the Thursday Clap having a bit of a “Where’s your poppy?” overtone, but he was now making a similar “Why isn’t Prince Philip walking up and down his garden like Major Tom?” comment for a cheap laugh. I’m pretty sure Colonel Tom didn’t walk around his garden so he could be used as a stick to beat other pensioners, or as the punchline for a cheap joke. So yes, intended to be humourous, and he is making what is essentially a decent point, but spoiled by making some cheap and imho unnecessary jokes.
So why am I bothered by this particularly? I’ve written above about why I was irritated enough by the original article to comment on it in the first place, but why then was I motivated to write a really very long comment (so long it turned into this blog post). I think it’s because I, like many of us, am a bit sick of the “It was only a joke!” line. I’ve heard “Calm down, love, don’t get your knickers in a twist, it was only a bit of fun!” too many times to be comfortable with that. And clearly, a hip young writer like Joel Golby can’t use women, people of colour, disabled people, or LGBTQ people, or any other minority as the butt of his jokes, which leaves him with not many targets apart from politicians. I’m pretty sure he thought “Aha, the Royal Family, we can still make jokes about them, right?” So no, whilst it may have been meant as a joke, it was a pretty cheap one poorly pasted over some mildly cruel comments that the columnist had made expecting them to be well received by a sympathetic audience.
Finally, I do understand that he’s a writer trying to make a living, but, again imho, the difference between good comic writers and great comic writers is that the greats manage to be funny without being cheap. It’s harder, for sure, and it means you have to work for your laughs, but it makes for much more lasting comic writing which is, from personal experience, much more rewarding for both reader and writer. But this was clickbait, as I said, and I bit.
Anyhoo, rant over. Interesting for me, if not for anyone else!
Tiring, this lockdown stuff, innit? I’ve been on screens all day and although I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve done, I’m absolutely totally knackered, which is not a good mindset for writing a blog. But I need to write something, since I said I would write this blog every day of lockdown, because it’s a good habit to get into. To quote BoJack Horseman “Every day it gets a little easier. But you gottta do it every day. That’s the hard part “
So to actually make this post happen I’m going to write about The C Word. Not the actual C Word, mind you. Back when all this kicked off, I wrote that it’s going to be like a marathon swim, and that we, I, need to swim to the next feed. In other words, to chunk it, to cut it up into manageable bits and just take it day by day, hour by hour. In marathon swimming terms, that means you just fix your mind on swimming to the next time you get a cup of warm drink, or a jelly baby, or a bit of banana: the things that nourish you and warm you up and give you a moment of human contact from your boat support, the things that keep you going. So here, in no particular order, are some of my feeds* during this strange time:
A hot bath. Back when it was that cold snap, I’d been working at my laptop all day and I suddenly realised that I was really chilly and really miserable. So I ran a big hot bath and sat in it for an hour reading my book. It was bloody wonderful, so I’m repeating the exercise every week to maximise the wonderfulness.
Conversely, cold showers. Because I don’t want to loose my acclimatisation, I’ve been making myself turn the water to cold and standing under it for two minutes every morning after I’ve had my “proper” shower. It’s not an actual cold water swim but in terms of the endorphins that flood your body afterwards, it’s not dissimilar. Sadly no replacement for the Lido, but better than nothing at all, and I’ve weirdly started to look forward to it. Habit is a very strange thing.
My “commute”. I got this phrase from a Guide to Remote Leadership by the CEO of Ogilvy about how to lead during lockdown which was circulated by my CEO, and whilst your anti-capitalist reflex might dismiss it as a load of wank, it was actually not half bad. One of the recommendations is that when you’re working from home, you should replace your normal commute with some sort of buffer zone between getting up and starting your work day, and mine is going back to bed with a pot of tea and “the papers”. It’s the only time I look at the news; I also catch up on social media and generally ease into my day. It makes getting up a lot easier if you know there’s a pot of tea between you and reality.
Food. I seem so far to be avoiding Eating ALL The Food and Drinking ALL The Alcohol, but I am REALLY enjoying my food. For instance, I impulse bought a six pack of hot cross buns when I did my weekly shop on Wednesday. On Thursday I had five hot cross buns. On Friday I had four. There is one hot cross bun left for tomorrow and believe me, I am LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT BUN.
Digital connectivity. It seems somewhat strange to think that a mere six months ago we were talking about digital detoxes and the fear that Mark Zuckerberg was peering into our brains. And now, privacy concerns have gone out of the window. Faced with two boxes saying “Personalise your settings” and “Allow access to everything, drill down through my emails, mine my data, take me I’m yours, monetise my immortal soul, JUST LET ME SEE MY FAMILY NOW”, I happily tick the latter. Who would have thought that Eric Yuan** would turn out to be the saviour of mankind?
Apologies. Another intermission. This is this week’s post for my writing group; the prompt was Write about a memory that one of your senses evokes? Like the smell of something or the colour of something takes you back to a particular memory. Back to BEARS tomorrow.
One of my “theories” (which turned out to be quite theoretical) about how I’d spend my free time when I got more of it was that I’d do a lot more yoga and become flexible and balanced and lithe. I used to do yoga regularly in my twenties, in a house in Morden owned by a wonderful woman who followed the Iyengar method and taught classes in her home, until she moved to Devon to set up an ashram there, sobs. I still often remind myself of one of the things she used to say: You are your own perfection. I did another class run by the local adult education institute for several years, also Iyengar, and loved that too, and then for some reason they stopped that, at which I also stopped and didn’t do yoga for many many years, although I did always remember the Salute to the Sun. I tried other classes and they were ok but didn’t really stick. Hatha, Vinyasa, Flow – friends recommended them, but they weren’t the same.
One day at the Lido about eighteen months ago I was talking to my lovely swimming friend Ruth and she mentioned that she did a yoga class on Saturday mornings with an excellent teacher in Penge, where she lives, about twenty minutes’ drive from me on a good day. Ah, I replied, actually I really prefer Iyengar yoga. Ah, replied Ruth, but it is Iyengar! You know when you feel the universe tapping you on the shoulder? That. So, the next week, I headed off to Penge East Community Centre for my first yoga class with Cathy.
The first thing I noticed was that I’d already been to Penge East Community Centre. About ten years ago I was suffering from depression after a change in my role at work. I’d started anti-depressants and was doing my best to make the new role a success, but I was still struggling. A friend of a friend had organised a day of creative activities for adults and a bunch of us went along. I remember that Saturday very well. It was a gorgeous sunny day in earlyish spring and it was good to be with my friends. The day of creative events, organised around helping us to think through where we were in life and to express that, was surprisingly enjoyable. And the venue was (to me, anyway), quite charming; a community centre in South East London, small and tucked away and a bit shabby and old-fashioned, but the sort of place that is much loved and cared for in quirky ways by the local community. It was a small prefabricated concrete hall like an old-fashioned scout hut, set in a wide sweep of grassy gardens with small pots and containers of flowers set around the places. It was shabby but it looked cared-for in a haphazard way; there were the toilets smelling slightly of bleach and the sparsely equipped kitchen with a clean tea-towel hanging next to the shiny stainless steel sink of so many such venues familiar to me from the yoga classes and am-dram productions of my past.
At lunchtime I went out into the garden and stood in the sun and looked at the bleached plastic plant-pots with their bravely blooming hyacinths and osteospermums and realised that, for the first time in a long time, I felt like myself. It was an oasis on a journey rather than a destination, but it helped me to see that I could survive and even prosper in this new life in which I had found myself, in which I had hitherto been a stranger to myself in a terrifyingly unfamiliar landscape.
So Penge East Community Centre had previous for me, and it welcomed me as kindly and undemandingly, with its bonkers pictures of Victorian kittens (“A PURRfect cup of tea!”) and paint-by-numbers landscapes, as it had then. Cathy and the other members of my class welcomed me too; I liked Iyengar yoga as much as I had remembered, and started to go regularly. Ruth and I fell into a pleasant habit whereby I would give her a lift back to her home nearby and then come in for a cup of coffee with her and her partner Dan. Then summer returned and I stopped doing Saturday yoga because it clashed with swimming at the Lido. I told myself I’d return in the autumn but the months went by, and even when I was on sabbatical in January and February and theoretically should have been leaping out of bed on a Saturday morning to go and do yoga, I preferred to stay in bed dicking around on Facebook and doing nothing of any consequence. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t making me flexible and lithe.
Then came lockdown, and with it the peril of months of doing nothing but dicking around on Facebook with no exercise at all except a once weekly outing to the supermarket and I realised that I had to do something or it was very possible that post-Coronavirus I would never leave the sofa again. Thus I started to do a Saturday morning yoga session provided virtually by Cathy, and to virtually meet Ruth afterwards for coffee. The first morning I rolled out my yoga mat and set up my laptop with the Youtube link to Cathy’s class. The main thing I noticed was that I’d become incredibly, and I do mean incredibly inflexible. The second was that I was actually enjoying it. And the third, when I lay down on my front as per instructions for one pose, was the scent of my yoga mat, which was a sort of sweet vanilla perfume which took me straight back to Penge East Community Centre as though I was right there in the room with the rattly storage heaters and the dusty lino with Cathy telling me to lift from the sternum.
Goodness knows what causes that particular scent; it’s nothing I’m doing, and I’m prepared to believe that it’s probably something not entirely hygienic, as the delicious biscuit smell of my cats’ pawpads is apparently caused by a harmless fungus between their toes. But there it was, and there I was, reminded strongly of the place that had been a little burst of hopefulness years ago when I was depressed. I’m doing ok right now; in fact, compared to many people, I’m doing fantastically. Nevertheless, when I am, as is everyone else, anxious about what’s ahead, it’s good to be reminded of the time when one particular ramshackle, slightly crazy, and well-meaning little spot gave me a glimpse of a better times to come at a moment when I needed it very much.
So, today I had so many good intentions, including doing some exercise. I have a great online exercise class (Baz Moffatt’s Strong to the Core, in case you’re interested) plus I’m going to do some line dancing for additional cardio fitness and I thought I’d do maybe an hour of line dance today after doing some of Baz’s stretching yesterday and some planned for tomorrow. I thought….
In fact, I actually spent almost all of the day online. Work is taking up a LOT of time, as is online socialising; in fact there is a LOT of online socialising, which is lovely, but doesn’t burn many calories or improve cardiovascular fitness. Plus I spent about an hour sending one IRL card to a colleague whose birthday is on Saturday and one virtual card to a friend who is in hospital (not TDL* and he seems to be recovering, thank goodness). The latter was by far the most time-consuming, thanks to me not being totally familiar with the app in question and it nearly sucking me into an annual subscription of nearly £50. Pesky online upselling!
And here I am STILL online. However, this is in service of one of the things that I really do want to do, namely write. Strictly speaking, I’ve already done today’s writing since this does count as a blog post according to my own strange little rules – five minutes is the minimum. However, after my lovely writing group had to cancel its Spring get-together (thanks, TDL!), my friend Sabrina suggested we do a bit of writing each week and kindly gave us our first prompt. Which was “He was older than she’d thought he’d be.” So here we go…
He was older than she’d thought he’d be. She’d seen pictures of course, but they gave no proper idea of the reality of immense old age. The knots, the scars, the vast, sagging girth, the limbs grown too heavy to support themselves held up on sticks. Of course, in most of the pictures she’d seen online, he’d been beautifully covered, whereas now she was seeing him naked. She stared at him, searching for a trace of what she’d expected from her online browsing. A sense of… what, history? Ancient wisdom? Mysticism? Would it be different if she could go up to him, embrace him, press herself to his creased and twisted bulk? Of course, the barriers prevented her, but even so……Her eyes roamed over him, taking in his swollen, leathery grey reality. It was not inviting. He was so….. so different from her imaginings. She had thought from what others had written that, standing in front of him, she would feel some spiritual epiphany, some primal connection, some sense of being uplifted. But all she really felt, seeing him like this, was…. distaste. Distaste at how commercial and sterile the experience was. Distaste at him for not being what she had imagined from the pictures, the books, the movies. And distaste at herself for having wasted a morning by insisting on coming here to see him in the flesh.
Well, not exactly flesh. Funny things, metaphors. It should probably be “in the wood”. Literally in the wood, or the forest, to be exact. Sherwood Forest, home to The Major Oak, 1,000 years old, the tree where Robin Hood and his Merry Men slept. Or, she realised now, looking at him, probably didn’t. It wouldn’t be exactly a comfortable place to sleep, and you’d be totally obvious to any Sheriff of Nottingham who happened by, especially if it was winter, as now, and the trees were bare. She had imagined something like a real life Ent, and she was staring at something that looked more like a badly restored fossilised elephant. She had imagined herself gazing at him transported, transformed into a modern-day dryad, and instead she was bored and chilly and she felt like a tit. “Mummmmm! Can we go back to the car now?” Thank god for that. She could stop staring at him. She turned around. Mikey was jumping up and down, swinging on his father’s hand. “Can we go for a COKE?” Hopefully they wouldn’t realise that she’d spent the last twenty minutes dying for an overpriced coffee in the visitor centre. “Oh…. I suppose so. If we must.”
In other news, today I made myself an Athomeaccinno. To make one Athomeaccinno, brew half a mug of strong coffee in a cafetiere and pour into mug of your choice. Wash the cafetiere and put in a quarter of a mug of milk (I used full fat, but it’s not essential). Plunge vigorously until the milk has doubled in size, remove plunger and then heat in the microwave until nice and hot (keep an eye to make sure it doesn’t boil over). Pour milk on top of coffee, holding back the foam until last like a barista for extra style points. Take a picture for your blog and enjoy!