Category: Self isolation

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Shopping in Interesting Times

Okay, it’s now day three of writing something every day and…  I need to think of something cheerful to say, because we all need that right at this moment, right? Well, it’s lovely and sunny, I’m looking out the window behind my monitor and thinking: ‘I should go to the beach, walking to the beach will make me feel better’ but then I’m also thinking: ‘there’s loads I can do here that will also make me feel better’. There’s always great drama on Radio 4 and 4 extra on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so get everything else done and out of the way now, and then spend some time on my chair in the bay this afternoon, crocheting or weaving with all that lovely afternoon sunshine coming in the window behind me, and Miko purring on the chair arm, or on the windowsill watching the world go by.  

I was going to say something about shopping. I live within five minutes walk of ‘local’ Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Co-op, health food shop, greengrocers, pharmacy and pet shop, and as they’re all so close I tend to just pick up what I need as and when, rather than doing a regular main shop – anyway, as I walk, I can’t carry too much at once, and sometimes it pushes me into going out on a day when I wouldn’t otherwise bother. At the beginning of the week nothing was noticeably different about any of them, though odd things started to go missing – eggs, for example, and potatoes (I bought sweet potatoes instead). Yesterday I went into the Sainsbury’s Local for the first time since Monday, and was shocked at how much things had changed in those few days. Where have all the fruit and veg gone? It’s not as though those are things that can be easily stored – unless you cut them up and freeze them, of course. I managed to get a bunch of under-ripe bananas, but there were no oranges.

Makes me think about how fragile our supply chains are if things can get this bad so quickly. Also, it has to be said, not a great sign for what’s likely to happen a few months down the line when current trading arrangements come to an end, and who the hell knows what’s going to happen then, when we’re still trying to manage the aftermath of… well, the aftermath. Talk about a double whammy.

Ah well, I was going to try and be cheery and upbeat.

I’ve started (for the third time) reading ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantell. It is a big beast of a book, hard to notice at first when you read something on Kindle. I’m glad I don’t have to hold the whole thing in my hand to read it. I’m getting into it now, just read the passage about how Cromwell’s wife died suddenly from a ‘summer plague’ and the household went into isolation afterwards. Almost 500 years later, are we really any better at dealing with crises?

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500 Words

Sun shining today. Will I venture out for a walk? Or to do some gardening? Hmmm. The eternal conflict between what I ‘should’ be doing (what would ultimately be better and more positive for my wellbeing in a general sense) and what I ‘feel like’ doing (back to the su doku again). Living alone gives me enormous freedom to ignore many of the ‘shoulds’ without suffering under anybody’s judgement except my own – until such time comes as I’m forced to interact with the outside world, or even (god forbid) allow anybody from outside into my home.

What am I saying here? What am I trying to say? I decided that writing 500 words a day would be a Good Thing for me. So I am trying. Because I know I can do it. This is what I always say (I’ve said it many times, in many ways, to many people), I know I can do it, because I’ve done it in the past, but nothing good has ever come out of it – well, wait, is that strictly true? If I look back fifteen years, I could argue that it has changed my life fundamentally in startling ways – but never in the way I once hoped for, ie turning me into a professional novelist.

So much of the advice I’ve received down the years has stressed the need to write, write, write regularly, write often and write at great length. Write spontaneously, do a brain dump, draw up all the rubbish from your writing well and that’s how you make yourself ready to write the Good Stuff. But, congenitally lazy as I am, all I ever want to do is keep writing the easy stuff. I don’t have the self belief, tenacity, staying power – let’s face it, guts – to face the difficult stuff, the hard work. And however much of this easy, spontaneous stuff – this drivel – I write, it’s not going to miraculously open the way into the source of ideas that I need.

I don’t think like a novelist – or a short story writer, come to that. Sometimes I think like a poet. Mostly I think like a confused woman approaching the end of life with the sense that I’ve never worked out what I should be doing, never made use of whatever talents I might have had to make a difference to myself or others or the wider world, amid the consciousness that I am now running out of time and options, and without the energy, enthusiasm or motivation to follow any of those options even if they were pointed out to me.

That isn’t quite 500 words. Do I keep going for the last fifty or so? It’s just an arbitrary challenge I’ve set myself. I can say I’ve done it, but like the 50k words I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2018, it’s worthless because there is nothing there – well, nothing I haven’t said or thought or written a million times before. That’s the story of my life.

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Killer su doku

‘Tomorrow’ I thought to myself yesterday ‘tomorrow, I’ll start blogging again, and stick at it for as long as it takes’. But I found myself over breakfast getting deeply engrossed in a killer su doku (number 53 in the monthly book, which means it is designated as ‘Tricky’, and further into the fiendishness than I usually get).

No danger of running out of killer su doku. A book of 100 is delivered every month, I currently have four on the shelf unopened, and eight which have only been completed as far as the mid-50s, saved because if I keep honing my skills, maybe one day I’ll be able to progress as far as the 60s (Extreme) or even 80s (Deadly). No, I won’t run out of puzzles, though possibly I will eventually run short of pencils and erasers.

Don’t assume this is a joke; I can seriously spend days on end doing one killer su doku after the other. I realised this during my previous period of self-isolation, three years ago. At that time, of course, the rest of the world just carried on as normal, as I sat here in my kitchen (or, when the summer came, in my garden), drinking coffee and scribbling numbers into small printed squares (with a good deal of logical deduction and mental arithmetic going on in the background).

Well, I’m not completely self-isolated yet, though I am arguably in a high-risk category (over 65 with an underlying condition, ie asthma, though that very rarely bothers me these days). I don’t feel ‘at-risk’, though maybe that is naïve of me. I’m not worried about getting sick, and I’m not particularly scared of dying (I went through all that in 2017). What bothers me more is the memory of how I felt after that time of intense medicalisation (well, it felt intense to me, though nowhere near as bad or as long-lasting as many people have to deal with). That sense of: well, I’m still here, for an indeterminate period, so, woo hoo, shouldn’t I be waking up every morning glad to be alive? (Erm, actually, that never happened). Waiting for all that energy, enthusiasm and motivation to come back (though if I’m honest, I haven’t been too hot on any of those for years), when I felt more like: ‘Naah, I know the kitchen needs cleaning/stairs need hoovering/fence needs painting/grass needs mowing, but I can’t be arsed with all that, I’ll just sit here with my coffee and su doku/crochet/weaving’ (the latter two being arguably more constructive, but not all that when you see the piles of blankets and scraps of weaving in my cupboards and drawers).

So here I am at my laptop, spewing out the verbal equivalent of a su doku or an unwearable sparkly shawl, and maybe I’ll just carry on and on and be back here again tomorrow with more of the same – you lucky people! (Who used to say that? Ahh yes, Tommy Trinder. Thanks, Wikipedia.