Broad Thoughts From A Home

I've run out of words to say how crap things are at the moment, and it's crap for everyone else too so it kind of feels self-indulgent.  At least I'm relatively healthy, and employed, and have a roof.  Not to be sneezed at, nor continuously dry-coughed at.

But things are pretty crap.  Living and working in a 20 square metre studio, and seeing very few people, is doing my head in.  I will soon resemble a badly hollowed Hallowe'en pumpkin.  

Life seems to be going on (or not going on, or going off) elsewhere.  I hear the woman across the hall's pealing laughter often.  Somebody cleans the hallway at about 7am on a Tuesday morning, quite noisily.  I've yet to peep and see who it is.  Living nearest to the front door, I tend to take in parcels, for the company if nothing else.  People slam the front door when they go out but I don't have the heart to be angry, because they are a presence.  Well, an absent presence.  

Everything is filtered through screens.  Facebook and Instagram and Digital Spy Forums are little windows to live in.  I'm also part of the Next Door neighbourhood platform but that can be less than comforting.  It's actually a bit suburban gothic horror:  a white worm found in tap water, tales of drug-dealing by the Co-op, screenshots of men in hoodies caught in back gardens.  

Each weekend I promise myself I'll catch up on work so I don't start the week feeling lambent terror at how behind I am.  Each weekend I never do.  Perhaps this one will be different.  (It won't be).

  

365 Days Later

A year ago today I folded away my Belgian life and got on a train.  Under normal circumstances I might have been settling quite well into a London rediscovered, friendships newly picked-up.  But these are not normal circumstances.  I've now being doing my current job for longer at home than I did in the office.  Apart from the obvious shift in location there's been a huge shift in the nature of my work, and not for the better.  I imagine many of us have experienced that.

One thing that has become clear is that for all the well-being mailings we have received from Work, the only person who is going to mind me is me.  Various health conditions, none of which are particularly threatening alone, have decided to form a gang and make life really quite shit.  So I'm getting up early, doing gentle pilates, and a bit of spiritual stuff before the buttered toast.  Drinking vastly less wine, vastly more water.  Trying to bung in a bit more pilates later in the day.  Eating a reasonable amount of veg. Trying to sit properly (I've discovered that the lateral hip pain that has bugged me for a year may be due to sitting with my legs splayed and feet tucked back under the chair).  Taking breaks and fiddling with plants and beads during the day.  Watching Tom Cruise films.  Nothing revolutionary but it helps.  Small gentle things.  

Perfect health is not really a destination as you get older.  I'm not going to wake up one day in excellent fettle.  But if some things can be mitigated or undone, that is progress along the road.

So one year on, any regrets?  That's hard to answer.  I had to come back to the UK, it was a compelling feeling.  Whether in retrospect it was the wisest decision remains to be seen.  At the moment it feels a bit like living in a poorly directly horror movie.

The Comfort of Strangers

I've developed two minor obsessions during lockdown: one is Tom Cruise and the other is the Reddit relationship advice boards.

The Tom Cruise thing is not your standard crush.  It's more that he feels like a safe pair of hands, if you put the slightly odd faith to one side.  COVID-style life feels so unwieldy and unceasingly stressful that you just think "Tom would know what to do."  Indeed, he's negotiated with the UK Government to continue shooting on his latest film, even though the industry is pretty much shut down.  Because he's Tom Cruise and no-one's going to say no.

He sends his co-stars birthday gifts, year after year.  He not only stops for traffic collisions but pays people's hospital bills.  Most people who have worked with him say he's a really good bloke.  He's probably an utter nightmare to live with but, fortunately, I don't have to.

I've never had the Rapunzel syndrome thing where rescue is to be desired.  If I were Rapunzel I'd weave ropes from hair and abseil down the tower.  I've got my own set of Allen keys and can handle stuff.  But just occasionally you want someone to say "It's OK, I've got this".  The world just feels like a safer place with Tom in it.  No idea why, especially given that he'll sit on top of the Burj Khalifa for a laugh.

The Reddit relationship advice boards are the other extreme.  I am reluctantly drawn to the drama of other people's lives.  They get some wonderful advice and one woman in a particularly horrific situation was offered money and transport by strangers, so she could leave.  It's both heartening and distressing simultaneously. 

I suppose what these things have in common is the management of situations and the setting of life back to a benign neutrality.  And we kind of need that now.  A nice, warm, friendly neutrality.

The other night I dreamed of being in Tom's bed (on my own, naturally).  It was all pale and expensive, with a ridiculously fluffy duvet.  I spilled a whole cup of black coffee and he just said it was fine, put everything in the laundry.

Finger Food

I've been up and down to the Royal Free so many times recently that they are likely to name a wing after me soon.  Nothing particularly serious, just this slow-to-heal finger.  I take particular delight in the fact that when asked to show it, there is almost no option but to swear.  Although it's American swearing, so slightly ersatz.  Although one might argue that the middle finger has taken the place of flicking the Vs, much-beloved of those in the UK over a certain age.  There is nothing quite as casually contemptuous as a lazy V flick.

After clinic, x-ray and clinic, I was desperate for cheap starchy refreshment.  They've got a cafe but with all the distancing lark, the queue was huge.  I put desperation on hold until Paddington, where I had clocked there was a Pret open.  Paddington is still very odd, lots of staff in bright pink gilets hanging about, but few travellers.  With my first shop-bought coffee in months I sat on a station bench and shovelled down a slightly burned Danish pastry.  The coffee was nothing to write home about but it signified a world outside still functioning, albeit behind perspex and without seating.

It takes nine minutes to travel from Paddington to Ealing.  On a wall just out of Paddington Station is the instruction EAT DA RICH.  No recipes given, mind you.

Flipping the Bird

My middle finger was signed-off at the Royal Free on Friday.  Prior to the signing-off, my temperature was taken and there were questions.  This did not happen on the two previous visits.  I'm not sure if it was the mutual masking or the strong accent of the nurse, but I simply could not understand the last question.  It ended with "...coronavirus?" so after the third attempt (any more would have been embarrassing) I just said "I don't think so."  It is interesting to postulate that whole lives might turn upon such misunderstanding and embarrassment. 

The finger still looks like it's been in a fight and lost, but it works, and is the right colour now, at least.

As always, I thought I'd take the weekend to get a jump on my week's work ahead, and as always I did not.  A life's habits are hard to change.  Instead I spent the weekend on Netflickery and wondering how my tiny flat got so disgusting when I don't appear to have moved.  Perhaps there exist the opposite of Disney birds that come in and fuck things up for you.

Sunday afternoon I took a walk through Walpole Park, trying to identify where we had waded thigh-deep in the pond during the ladybird summer of 1976, and had squealed at the thought of possible leeches. 

Spare Change

Today I took a walk to the south, down Barnes Pikle to Mattock Lane, around Ealing Green and all along St Mary's Road.  People were out in short things and scanty things, grouped in the long pale grass on the Green.  Shops are on the fulcrum of reopening and there is a feeling of our being nearly through it.  Let us hope.

I've not been down St Mary's Road in a very long time.  Forty years ago this September, at the college that has since been digested by the University of West London, I started and did not finish an art course.  As an extremely poor student in all senses, I would go to the New Inn or the Castle and drink bitter lemon, unless someone else was buying.  The New Inn smelled of creosote, and had sawdust on the floor, so memory tells me.  Peering through its windows, there was no hint of sawdust; the trend for faux Dickensia probably passed a long time ago.

The chippy is now the Kebab Delight.

Several later-famous people passed through the rather plain doors of the college under its various names, but what struck me today was a plaque not to any arty rock stars but Lady Byron (mother of Ada Lovelace), who founded on the site a school for working-class boys, in 1833.  Generally progressive in her views, she insisted the school be run without use of corporal punishment.  Given that my school headmaster was still handy with the cane some 140 years later, that was quite forward-thinking.

Then I walked up to the Tesco Metro where the beggars hang around.  Nobody carries change these days so they are often disappointed.

Ball Handling

I want to tell you about my two companions. 

Much of my life has been spent not achieving.  There is a good reason for this, and it's only partly laziness or not-arsedness.  I look at other people in awe; what they have done, what they undertake,what they have the sheer balls to throw themselves into. 

Every life decision is, for me, underwritten by anxiety.  If you have ever played in the position of goal attack in netball (as I did at school, poorly but enthusiastically), you will remember how the opposing team always had someone tall in goal, blankly looming, blocking your every attempt to shoot.  This is what anxiety does.  It blocks your every attempt to shoot. 

An example of how this works in everyday life:  I'd like to sign up for Zipcar or similar but anxiety says what if you bring the car back and someone else has parked in the designated space.  A person without anxiety would either not consider this, or not be bothered.  It stops me signing up to Zipcar.  It's no good saying this is not reasonable.  Obviously I do find ways around this bastard anxiety quite often or nothing would get done.  But it's exhausting.

So that's my everyday chum, looming over me, standing rather too close while I flail around with the ball, in laddered tights (ah, netball).

The other companion waits down the road, like a very unmotivated, lumpen stalker.  Just waiting for everything to go tits.  And this one is called depression.  Depression has no face, just a powerful vacuum, and it waits until something goes wrong and sucks me in.

These two rather shitty companions tend to get in the way of doing much because all of one's energy is spent trying to be normal, rational, and getting on with life in a relatively productive manner.  And that can be bloody tiring. 

I can and do give them the slip when I can, and that is lovely.  They are not great company.

But in case you wonder where I go from time to time, I'm probably stuck with one or other of these boring bastards, trying to breathe them away.  Oh, you may wonder, what about medication?  Trust me, I've tried.  The problem with taking medication for anxiety is that it tends to be like applying a lump hammer to a pin. 

Life is actually fairly normal, considering.  But like I say, these bastards do get in the way a bit.  That's my excuse anyway.

Nailed It

A hospital during a global pandemic would not be first on my list of places to go on a sunny weekend, so of course I have ended up going to two.  

Over the last few days I noticed that my left middle finger was swollen and painful.  By Saturday morning I could not bend the finger, or make a fist (for righteous anger, for which there are so many reasons).  The red swelling was creeping down the finger and going a bit purple.  So to Ealing Hospital Urgent Care, where marvellous people gave me antibiotics and codeine, and a referral to the hand trauma clinic at the Royal Free for this morning.

This seemed a bit over-zealous, but the marvellous people at the Royal Free stuck needles in me, swabbed me with iodine, and then removed my whole fingernail.  Somehow, I am managing to type with a bandaged sausage finger.

Things noted:  Hampstead might be the loveliest place in all of London.  Also pretty much nobody on public transport is wearing face-covering.  I, with my cut-off leg of legging, felt quite overdressed.  Even the doctor who did my hand was wearing no mask.  Clearly I didn't get the memo.  I will continue to wear something when I'm around people in an enclosed area.  Apart from anything else, it makes me feel mysterious.

Going to have a lay down now.  My manicure had exhausted me.

La Rentrée

I'm a vital player in putting together a plan for phased re-entry to our Laboratory.

What this actually means is, I am getting a lot of emails from people and I have no idea how to digest all the information and communicate it to our people for a possible re-entry starting next week. 

I say just open the doors.  Just let people come in. 

Those living far away will probably stay home.  Those with childcare issues will stay home.  Those who are a bit scared of the tube will stay home.  I can go in and do my job.  There is a lot for me to do but, ironically, there is as yet no plan for admin staff to return.  This plan was obviously drawn up by someone who doesn't understand who actually runs things.   Apparently I can prepare the Lab for everyone remotely.  I have skills but this is a stretch.

In the meantime I live on coffee, and snooze in the afternoon watching re-runs of "The Thick of It" because it seems like a fairy tale compared to our actual government.

Whose Line

The anxiety continues; gallops almost.  One of the horsemen of the apocalypse.  Good to know that something is moving.  I'm still breathing into it, as that seems to be the only weapon I have.  I push the breath down, through the worst of it.  This works for about thirty seconds.  Fortunately I breathe quite often.

Today I took a different walk for my shopping/foraging, which seemed bold.  Trees have bushy legs like a fluffy cat, and the grass is out of control, heavy-headed with seed.  I am taking Benadryl on the daily, as the youngsters say, just so that I can go outside without sounding like a broken accordion.

I spoke to a lady in the supermarket about succulents, and then had a brief chat at the checkout.  It's the most talking I've done in ages.

Yesterday, Tony Slattery liked a Tweet that I'd made on one of his Twitter posts.  I've always had a soft spot for him. Now we are both old and resembling burst sofas, I just wish for him to be well.

We of a certain age are somehow bound to Tony Slattery.  Dark and seal-like in his youth, with a dangerous edge, he has become slightly undone with age.  Those of us who are a little unhinged recognise a kindred spirit.  Many years ago I saw him the worse for wear on a train and my heart lurched.  And then I met him through mutual improv friends one night at the Phoenix in London. He said "I'm Tony" and I replied "I know".  Because it was a fucking Richard Curtis film.  And then we moved to Notting Hill and I had his floppy-haired babies.

Actually I moved to Brussels.

Sweet and Low

I doubt that many of us will come out of this as heroes.  There are those who every day put their well-being at risk in order to do their jobs and while this is nothing but heroic, I suspect that they don't feel like heroes either.

Most days I feel like anxious fudge.  And, appropriately enough, I'm fudging most things.  Not quite as badly as some heads of state, but fairly badly.  Earlier this week I gave myself a talking to in the hope that breathing through the fudge would calm the anxiety, and allow me to work.  This was effective as long as I remembered to do it.  The trouble with being anxious fudge is that this who you are.  Fudge is not, for example, a serene mint cream.  We'd all like to be a mint cream. 

Most of most days is spent trying not to lay on the bed watching true crime documentaries, or something about Mary Magdalen, so that I can nap.  Right now the urge to nap is overwhelming.  This is all so damned exhausting.  I would give anything to go back to work, even it means wearing a pillowcase over my head.

Heroism on a very, very small scale will be just getting through this bit.  And then we can get back to fires and floods and Brexit for some light relief.

Allergy in the Time of COVID

This is not a romance, be strongly advised of that.  Today as I woke from a nap while watching "The Elephant Man" an email was read to my eyes, ending...and I cannot tell you why.  Somebody in my nap-dream had broken off with me by email and although it was disappointing, it was not entirely surprising.  I would probably break up with me too.

I have dreadful allergy symptoms at the moment, even when indoors.  Seeing as there is little to be allergic to in my flat except dust, most of which is my own dander, it seems I am basically allergic to myself.  This seems to be taking the auto-immune response a bit far.

This weekend, the world has apparently gone back to some semblance of normal, choosing to believe that sunshine proffers immunity to a prickly, somewhat deadly virus.  It is understandable, in a way.  We've all been locked up, or down, for so long that it would be easy to think "Well, I'm either fine or I've had it and anyway, look, a park."  I had a dog like that once, she would go nuts when she saw grass from the car.

I shall continue to stay indoors with my violent skin flakes, not because I'm good at following rules but because I want a future, and to see you all again.  When the time is right.

Go Figure

You know you've been indoors too long when you see a figure on someone's doorstep and wonder, in all seriousness, why there is an Antony Gormley sculpture standing there.  It was just a bloke in a hoodie, of course.  I suppose it could have been a visiting art installation, but it's unlikely.

My walk to the Co-op takes me past the fire station, where other figures of note might be seen.  Although all I saw today was a fire-tender and some trousers and boots on the floor.  I know it's for speed but it does look terribly untidy.  I've just realised, only now, that fire-tender means something that tends a fire and not whatever other definition of tender you can imagine.

The man in the Co-op gave me a recipe for chicken.  This is the most contact I've had with an actual human being in so long, I could fall in love with him.  Or his tattoos at least.  I did quite a lot of work today and took no nap.  The vast, overwhelming exhaustion has gone off now, hopefully for good. 

The highlight of my day apart from going to the Co-op was putting the bins back.  Every time the bin men come, I put our many bins back in line out front. It gives me a sense of control. And then I wash my hands.

It's Clearly A Sign

Outside, some non-specific roadworks have been moved slightly west so that the temporary traffic light with the large red sign saying WAIT HERE UNTIL GREEN LIGHT SHOWS is right outside my house.  It seems very appropriate.  Because what else can we do right now except wait for the green light? 

I'm still having weird days of illness but it's all sort of merging into general porcine lethargy now.  I do a little work, faddle around a bit with stuff in the house, do a bit more work, have some lunch and then nap.  Do a little more work, and so on.  Try to unblock the sink.  There isn't enough boiling water, vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, Mr Muscle (and his various associates) in the world to unblock this motherfucker.  It's going to have to be snaked.  It is currently making belchy snoring noises after being fed several kettles, a lot of vinegar, and then vigorously plunged.

A delivery guy today told me that it was hush-hush but that lockdown was likely to end on 11 May.  I'm no more likely to believe a delivery guy than someone on Twitter or Boris Johnson (wherever he is) but it's a nice thought that 11 May might be the day we get green-lit.   In the meantime I should probably do some work.

 

The Power of Ealing

I took a walk tonight past the house I moved to in 1983, and along surrounding roads, where I have visited only in dreams since then.  I don't remember it all being so grand, but the buildings are the same, just a little botoxed and primped.  At 21 you tend not to notice buildings much.

There is Castelbar Hill where I was pushed in a supermarket trolley, coming to a perilous halt just short of the road, laying on the pavement laughing.  The large cocktail bar in a converted garage (which I suspect was called The Garage) that served goblets of sweet creamy booze with umbrellas on Springbridge Road, is long gone.   It's now an energy consultancy, whatever that is.

I walked across Haven Green at dusk.  It's been allowed, as have we, to run a little unkempt.  And we've been locked up so long the daffodils are now just brown shrouds.  To Tesco, on Haven Green, even though I don't really need anything.  It's well stocked for the time of night.  I have noticed a quiet but confident resurgence of toilets rolls and Lemsip recently.  Presumably because those who stocked up with thirteen 48 packs are still diligently trying to shit their way through them.

Fannying About

One of the worst things about the Lockdown is that one cannot tell hypochondria from genuine illness.  This morning I woke up feeling as if heavy pigeons were fighting inside me.  I've had waves of weirdness several times over the last weeks and either it's mild C-19 returning for another little crack or it's just me catastrophising, or both.

So the beef stew is back in the oven, augmented with falafels and a slug of Canadian whisky.  This crisis will make chefs of us all.  I suspect I'll be more Fanny Cradock than Nigella.  If I start dyeing eggs blue please disconnect me.

Today I am planning a walk around the ghost streets of Ealing.  Ghostly not only for the lack of people but for the fact that every road is loaded with past, in my head.  Perhaps someone lived there at school, a boy or something.  Not a boy on every road, obviously.  I was never that popular.  The ghost buses go past my window, ferrying empty seats to Greenford. 

I'm planning Co-op potato slices with the stew and then I will sit and wonder about the pins and needles in my arm, for hours.

Life in the Old Bitch Yet

One of the many things I learned since coming back to the UK was how to live in a small space.  In Belgium I had places that were ridiculously large - in one flat, an entire room for dining and an entire room for sitting and an entire room for bed.  So many rooms.  Now, I'm pretty much in one room.  I have a toilet/shower room to the side.  It's what might once have been disparagingly called a bedsit.  I think of it as a cosy studio.  It's going to be jewel-like and tiny and beautiful once sorted.  But cosy means I currently trip over things a lot.  It won't be COVID-19 that gets me, it will be the fucking un-unpacked boxes.

I've also learned something approaching patience.  I returned to the UK only with possibilities or lack thereof.  More lack thereof than anything.  There was a lot of crying in the shower.  I gritted my old amalgam-filled teeth and carried on, not really with any sense that it would work out, but it did.

What does this all mean?  Maybe that you can teach an old dog new tricks.  An old bitch, strictly.  And I can now walk on my hind legs and do presentations to 30+ colleagues via the internet. 

Another space-saving trick there.  Woof.

Going Viral

My, that was a fair old pause.

As you might know, I'm now happily and permanently employed at a university, and have moved to a tiny flat in Ealing.  That should have been a couple of neat bows to tie things up, should it not?  The -after tagged onto happily-ever.

Then covidity arrived.  Within the space of a week we went from having jolly drinks at work together and joking about people going off precipitously sick with man-corona, to being in seclusion, working from home until further notice.  I'm adapting slowly to co-ordinating 30+ people from home (who are also at home) from my bed, with my computer resting on boxes.  Because I just moved, and have no furniture, and am basically camping.

Today is Mother's Day and my birthday.  It's fine (I'm not saying that in a Ross from Friends way).  It really is fine.  My best present will be that you all stay well and keep laughing at my lame jokes.  I can celebrate after these projected months of enforced solitude are over.  I've been much heartened by the goodness I've seen displayed, and the willingness to help vulnerable people.  I've been much disgusted by the sheer cuntery that can clear a supermarket of all its staples with piranha rapacity.  I don't care how worried shoppers are: every unneeded item bought is leaving someone else without.

We'll get through this.  Thank god we have the internet to help us, and connect us.