Move along! Nothing to say here! Move along!

I’ve spent the week writing/editing/scribbling on a printed-out draft of a long-ish (12,000-ish words) short story titled Wolf (A Journal of the Plague Years). Also reading Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society, which “explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing”.

I agree with Mr Douthat. What he said.

Everything from political sclerosis to long-running film franchises, explained. My occasional extravagance is hardback books, so I can even tell you that I like the paper this one’s printed on. Published recently by Simon & Schuster.

My short story, which I started because I’m one short (in my estimation) for a planned collection, has reached the important stage where the print-out joins the assorted debris on my desk (kitchen table), surfacing occasionally, becoming dog-eared, gathering coffee-mug rings and (when I see it floating past and pick it up) scribbled corrections, notes and shopping lists.

I might post it on Medium, where I found the other day that another short story has earned all of 7 cents since posting – or I may not. I like the format at Medium, and there’s something agreeably game-like about such tiny sums of money*.

I’ll just add it to the collection. Late in the running order, which feels right. Coming shortly, et cetera.

Ahem. I did say last week, didn’t I, that I was going to stop my regular habit of posting here every Friday?

What are you doing here?

What do you mean, what am I doing here?
 
*On Medium, you get paid according to how many people read and “clap” your post. I really should think this through, preferably before revealing that my other story got paid 7 cents.

Maybe I should put this on hold for a while.

I’ve launched into something else, and while the self-imposed obligation to post every Friday does come at a convenient moment this week – need to stick the GW in a drawer for a while – it does feel like an obligation.

GW for Great Work – although just the initials are what I use: lifelong nickname for whatever current piece of writing-in-progress is under discussion at any given moment. Picked it up in an editorial office years ago. My GW of yesterday needs to be put aside so that I can come at it fresh, er, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow, so I’ve got time to write this.

But the part of me that writes this is the part that’s writing that. See, officer, I’m not drunk. The part of me that’s writing this, that’s writing that, has got stuck into writing that, and writing this – I’m doing it deliberately now – is taking up head-space.

It’s a distraction. Besides, we’re living through such interesting times that all the commentary has become predictable. No, wait. That doesn’t make sense. Yes, somehow it does.

We’re living in bubbles. In my bubble, the government was too slow to impose the lockdown, is now prioritising The Economy over The Virus – and the shops are open again! Yippee! We’re all gonna buy!

Somewhere out there, no more visible than the hypothetical dark matter in space, is the hidden mass of people who (for example) voted Boris into office despite Labour winning The Argument, and who voted The Donald into office as well.

Out here on the surface of the bubble, so far as I can see, we’ve given ourselves a binary choice: stay locked down; go shopping. Out there in the darkness, further out than I can see, I’d have to guess that people are adjusting the way they live to suit the new normal. Shop-owners are working out how to sell more effectively to socially distanced customers, for example, rather than just obediently switching the sign from Closed to Open.

Griping on about the government misses the point that the government is just the government.

Never mind all that. The surface of the pool may be choppy, but these waters run deep.

I have nothing new to say about These Interesting Times, and capital letters won’t hide that. Shopping patterns seem likely to change, and I’d guess the layouts of high-street shops will change too.

The virus is showing us up for who we are, exposing the flaws in the way we live, blah, blah, et cetera.

In the life I’m not living at the moment, my diary tells me, I’m off to Scotland on Saturday for a week’s holiday. That shadow me is packing the kitbag he bought pre-lockdown at Mallett’s in Truro, and I’d guess he’s made a booking to break his journey with an overnight stay at Tebay Services.

My shadow self will enjoy the journey. He’ll take the direct route, M6, and he’ll listen to music, stop regularly, daydream and occasionally scrabble around on the passenger seat for the digital recorder he carries in the belief that the best ideas come at the most inconvenient times.

For the last twenty miles or so, he’ll be sad that the journey’s not just a little bit longer – but then he’ll get there, and everybody will be there, and his holiday will begin.

In the life I am living now, I have a prescription to collect, a new fridge to buy, and a space where I could put a comfortable chair. Facing my comfortable sofa. The fridge and the chair are daydreams of the lockdown that might become real; the prescription’s an opportunity to join Queue A and look forward to joining Queue B.

Making things right. I was irritated by that queuing system, I remember, back in the early days of the lockdown, but I now realise my dispensary was ahead of its time. I take it all back. Sorry. [To the extent that this blog is an ongoing self-portrait, as I think it is sometimes, je delete rien! Embarrassing as some of it might be.]

In the life I’m living now, and considering that this post is my current GW, I should probably say that I’m letting my LP sit in the drawer to cool off for a while. Lockdown Project, although I only started it … a month ago? No idea, actually. Feels recent, but you know how you get into the habit of saying something's new, even after it isn't? That kind of recent.

[I imagine myself in an old people’s home, reading all these posts and thinking: this was me? Wish I’d spent more time at the beach.]

Ha! “Should” probably say. Picking myself up on that. The future is about “could”. I believe that.

“Believe” is the word we use for “hope”.

Half of me thinks that in three weeks’ time, the bubble will be alive with the sound of people complaining that the government released the lockdown too early. The other half thinks the virus will hold off now until Winter – or Autumn, when we can tell each other that Winter is Coming, ha ha, black humour.

By then – whichever “then” I’m talking about – I hope I’ll have my chair and my fridge in place. In most of the fiction I’ve read over the lockdown, there’s a “me” character – not a character that I identify with, necessarily, but one who comes fairly close to sounding a bit kind of me-ish in his habits.

He may be the Dad. He may be the Co-worker. He may be the Detective’s Partner, the Vaguely Bad-Guy Neighbour who complains about the dog, or if we’re talking about Anne Tyler (start with The Accidental Tourist or A Patchwork Planet), he’s often the younger-than-me-but-I-can-overlook-that central character.

Whatever his character flaws, morals, quest for redemption, contribution to the plot, the “me” character almost always owns a chair in which he sits in the evening with the cold bottle of beer he’s just taken from his fridge.

Even if his only role is to deny the existence of the Supernatural Threat until it walks up to him and eats him – he gets at least one chance to sit in his chair and drink his beer. Even if he dies in the end, he gets, et cetera.

The chair is often identified as a La-Z-Boy Recliner, which I’ve imagined and … now look up online and ... Cor!

I’m gonna need a bigger space.

And either a charity shop selling furniture, or a fatter wallet. The “me” character is never a banker.

In Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, not much of a spoiler, the “me” character not only gets the chair and the fridge and faces up to the threat; he also gets a quirky sidekick.

Huh! Some “me” characters get all the luck.

I have a feeling that any quirky sidekick I could get would point out before long that (a) I need to Hoover the stairs, (b) I can’t leave the washing-up overnight, (c) I need a haircut, and (d) she’s actually now the Central Character and I’m just the Old Guy Who Writes That Blog.

By then, we’ll only be talking because she dropped in to check that I’m eating healthily and taking exercise.

So the issue for me is type-casting. I haven’t even got the chair for it, but I’m still the “me” character around here.

[Memo to self: dump the patched jacket and the avuncular manner, vacate the corner office in the faculty building with its shelves of ancient leather-bound volumes and strange amulets, and stop giving five minutes to every young detective passing through with a mysterious clue daubed on a fragment of parchment.]

I admit the beer-drinking is attractive.

Feel free to stake out this space – “me” characters always return to the scene of the blog post (or to whatever else they do to fix themselves in the reader’s mind). I’ll be coming back here again.

But not quite so regularly for a while. I have an LP to finish.

Yeah, I wasn't going to do a picture this week. Nor a second post below the picture. But I'd just hammered the final full stop into place on the post above, when the phone rang.

Usually, I keep it muted. There are (were) campaigns for real ale, slow food, et cetera, and I'm running a one-man campaign for phones like they were in the nineteen-seventies. I haven't bought one of those rotary phones you can get now, with the proper rotary dial, but I've come close once or twice.

My campaign doesn't involve me in doing much, except feeling free to mute the thing at times when I wouldn't have had a phone next to me in the nineteen-seventies, and then forgetting to unmute it, but the curious, perhaps serendipitous, consequence is that I no longer hear from scammers.

I occasionally receive phonecalls (and more often return calls I've missed) but today clearly is a receiving day.

"Hey, what's up?"

"You're posting this week?"

"Er - yeah. Why?

"You've sounded a bit down over the past couple of weeks, and I just wanted to check."

"I'm okay, thanks for asking. Bit weirded out by it all. But distracted, not down. I've been working on something else, which is probably what you've picked up. It's a [REDACTED] with razor-sharp [REDACTED] and an extra set of [REDACTED], and of course I'll tell you all about it when it's ready. But yeah. Certainly posting."

"Okay, great. Don't tell me what it's about."

"I won't."

I'm pretty sure you are reading this. Thanks for the call.

Just for the record, the 7am news on the BBC World Service this morning told me that the virus is “spreading exponentially” in countries and states where lockdown restrictions have been removed.

There was something yesterday – Radio 4; I was cooking not listening – about the lowest number of something – Deaths? New cases? – since some significant date early in the year, in the UK.

One or other of those is either mistaken, or fake, or evidence of a spectacular change over twenty-four hours. Or maybe there are countries where the virus is just worse and/or people are getting closer to each other. Or it’s our turn next.

Spaghetti Carbonara, since you ask.

I think I’ll just stay at home. The World is still on my doorstep, and I watch it. Occasional activity, occasional puffs of smoke. The maintenance crew chose a Pope the other day – white smoke instead of the usual black.

The world’s largest privately owned yacht is in for a three-month stay. The Captain, or the Customer-Services Manager, or the Landlord, I forget which*, looks forward to welcoming back the owners of the apartments on the vessel, craft, boat, ship, but for now, it’s empty pending the end of the coronavirus crisis.

Empty but for that maintenance crew putting out the smoke signals. In the deep channel upriver, where the cargo ships are laid to rest – laid up, I mean – there’s the quiet hum of enough power to keep the lights on and the berths warm – like the hum of a fridge in a silent house. Comfortable life, if you like maintenance.

I remember one evening, seeing a group of young men jumping onto the quay from an orange plastic life-boat. Going out for the evening rather than arriving home from a shipwreck.

Not that I was going to write about any of this, but I don’t suppose Covid-19 would agree to wait while I write about something else. “Spreading exponentially”. We’ve all been looking the other way lately, so maybe I should bear witness to what I heard rather than assuming that we all hear the same news.

Speaking of which. That statue pulled down in Bristol. It was put up in 1895, 125 ago, and yeah, maybe there are democratic ways of agreeing that a statue should be removed. But 125 years? That’s almost as long as it takes a public inquiry to produce a report exonerating a government.

Black lives matter. Of course they do. It takes a death – another death – to show us that we behave as though they don’t.

We’re not prejudiced. But somehow, judging by what we do, we are prejudiced.

I’m not talking about single police officers.

Different -ism, but I remember being astonished a few years back, when the BBC finally, reluctantly revealed that it paid its prominent women less than its prominent men. They were going to fix that by 2020, I think I remember.

No individual at the BBC would set out to discriminate against women, but somehow they all do. Did.

Back to racism. I wonder if collective racism, “institutional racism”, is what you get when you deny or suppress or don’t even recognise “individual racism”. I wonder if individual racism is such a simple thing anyway. Hardly anybody would use the words “I am a racist”, and most of the people who said the opposite would mean it. But.

Like everybody else, I’m a complex and complicated evolving bundle of upbringing, experience, expectation, nature, nurture, peer-group pressure, education, instinct, being picked last for the team, getting an A for my essay, mustn’t forget Stress, learned attitudes, memory, idiosyncrasy, sheer good looks and remarkable charisma (I made that last bit up). That suggests my attitudes to myself and other people are determined by a head-full of “stuff”. In double inverted commas.

There’s no clean-slate William. My head’s full of what we might as well call -isms. Most of them benign, I hope. But many of them difficult to detect, never mind change.

Okay. Stop for a moment. At no point in human history has a big moral question been solved by an overweight late-middle-aged man sticking his hand up and saying “Here’s the answer!” I’ve even got a (long-ish, grey-ish) beard at the moment, thanks to the lockdown – but even that won’t do it. Even if I write a book about my answer and start an -ism of my own. Racism is too big an issue for me, or even you, to fix.

What we’ve done throughout history is, we’ve built up mythologies and fairy stories, moral tales, around our most difficult issues. The most successful of those have come down to very simple conclusions.

Do unto others. Do all those things that, as instinctive creatures, we find most challenging.

It would be impossible to train a baby out of the startle reflex.

It would probably be impossible to replace Fight or Flight! with Group Hug! But it’s worth a try.

Difference evaporates. We’re all victims; we’re all having a hard time.

There was/is a saying – “less is more”. Difference is similarity.

Watched a TV show the other night, on Freeview. People looking for houses to buy. They had budgets.

In every house they were shown, the pitch wasn’t “This’ll do” but “If you knock down this wall, extend here, punch a window through here, make this room a bathroom, this’ll do."

And watching that statue coming down, I thought: this isn’t our house. This is the house lately vacated by the Victorians. Statues of slavers, streets named after colonial administrators, monuments to centuries-past victories.

We need to knock down some walls.

Let’s move all that Victorian stuff to the attic – sorry, the museum – and live in a stripped-down modernist interior with huge windows to bring the light in and all the communications technology we could possibly need to share our deepest feelings and find our unsuspected prejudices.

Let’s talk. Let’s open up. Let’s trust each other – and be trustworthy.

That’ll do for today.

*There was a report about The World in The Packet, which is Falmouth’s answer to The Washington Post.

PS: Now there’s a group of MPs “calling on the government” to relax the two-metre social-distancing rule because it’s hindering The Recovery. Their “call” is gaining traction in the media. I say: No. Don’t “call on the government” to do it. Take responsibility. Stand very close to each other. Breathe into each other’s air. Take responsibility for your own little corner of The Recovery.

What holds the attention at a time like this?

The wind in the leaves of the big tree. Bird song. The muted roar of the docks.

It is a roar – and it’s got my attention – but it isn’t very loud.

A sudden flight of geese!

But I can’t see them behind the trees.

An argument, just on the edge of hearing. A man shouting, a woman shouting back.

Seagulls. A wood pigeon. More seagulls.

The sun is high enough off the horizon to be properly warm on my face now. There’s a collective noun of small birds in the catkin bush down the slope from me. Hazel? I’m not very good at naming things on the fly.

If I wasn’t sitting out here with my first-thing mug of tea, those birds would be at my Wild Bird Feeding Station, scattering seeds as they get breakfast. I have the makings of a harvest below my bird feeder, my WBFS, heads of corn fully formed but not yet yellow.

I won’t bother grinding the corn between, say, two pebbles from the beach. But I could. A very small loaf of bread. Dough left to rise in a thimble? Fairy story in there somewhere.

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m sitting out here with a mug of tea and yesterday I did the same and everything was so absolutely just right that here I am again.

Wood pigeon.

“Never get used to this,” we said to each other a lifetime ago, sitting in the car in a deserted North Coast car park at night, watching a Winter sea. I think we’d driven there – detoured there – to be there.

For a while after that there was a ferry I needed to catch every morning. It touched the other side of the water at the same time as my long-ago commuter train probably still draws to a halt at Liverpool Street Station in London.

Cari Nazeer wrote a piece on Medium entitled Reclaim your morning commute. “Set aside a commute’s worth of time to do whatever used to keep you busy on your morning journey.” I like that idea. Sit out with a mug of tea listening to birdsong.

I want to say that the muted roar of the docks is over the horizon, but it isn’t. It’s just not foregrounded. “Send to Back,” as Photoshop puts it. I always notice when it isn’t there, so I guess it’s just blended in with the birdsong and the rest of the morning. Behind their layers.

Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold. “But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…”

Which isn’t exactly the feeling I get when I hear the muted roar of the docks on a Falmouth morning, but still. I like the poem.

I think I read somewhere that Arnold’s roar can be taken to symbolise the withdrawal of all the Victorian certainties in the face of the twentieth century.

Maybe. Convenient if so.

Suddenly, an aeroplane. First I’ve heard (consciously heard) in a long time.

The docks make a comfortable sound, and I wouldn’t like to be without the occasional experience of opening the shutter in the morning to see some vast ship arriving outside my window.

 Often, they’re built for some mysterious deep-sea purpose and festooned with accessories such as helicopter pads and/or (I looked this one up; ships have web pages) heave-compensated gangway solutions.

The sheer ingenuity of the human mind when presented with a practical problem.

Sorry, challenge. Practical challenge. We don’t have problems any more.

I wonder what the noise for our time would be. The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of that aeroplane?

My friendly neighbourhood conspiracy theorist tells me that They want the second wave to come during the Summer months, when it won’t be as bad.

So that’s okay, then. There is brain activity behind the decision to tell us all to go back to work despite nothing else having changed. Same old workplace, same old virus.

And long sunny afternoons. And a mellowed-out virus that's kinder to us in the sunshine.

Wait – a virus that encourages sunbathing? I feel another twinge in my sense of the unreal.

Sunlight, said my radio the other day, has both anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties. Well, of course it has.

Just about every component of the modern world forcibly ground to a halt – and now the thing wants us to get some sun.

I can take a hint, but isn’t this weird?

Maybe it’s my cognitive bias going a bit wonky, but if They offered us a choice between (a) a media scientist explaining the R number again and (b) a media atheist giving us a Rational Explanation for the weird fit between Covid and everything we’ve been doing wrong since about 1959 – I’d go for the less patient one.

The atheist, I mean. “How can you believe such nonsense?” is always such a great start to a relationship.

Scientists only get out of bed because they know they don’t know everything, but atheists.

Atheists are inside the box with the rest of us, but they absolutely are not going to let anybody find a lid and try to open it.

Sit down! This is all there is! Tiny little wriggly microbes are causing it!

That’s not a lid! Don’t open it!

Scared? Me? Nonsense!

But don’t open it!

Was it G K Chesterton who said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything”? [Spoiler: yes, it was.]

There’s so much on Google and Wikipedia about belief, and faith, and spirituality, and Gaia, and Mother Earth, and The Goddess, and affirmations, and chanting, and shamanism, and healing, and astrology, that it’s actually quite difficult to find that quote about God.

But yes, it was G K Chesterton. [Told you.] He meant, I think, that we either hold to our faith in the one Divine Entity that hardly gets a mention these days, or we become credulous fools.

A variant on Hilaire Belloc’s “And always keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse,” I suppose.

Let go of Jehovah, and you get Cthulhu.

Nonsense! Don't often say it, but - nonsense!

There’s something better, not worse, about today’s more forgiving Divine Entities.

[No, I don’t know why I keep using capital D and capital E. A primitive part of my brain has taken over, clearly. Nurse! Help!]

Never mind whether they exist or not. Never mind whether you’re a hard-line atheist or ready to accept the geneticist J B S Haldane’s “suspicion” (his word) that, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Doesn’t matter. We’re facing a deadly global pandemic that’s not only killing people; it’s killing the way we live now.

Whatever form they take, and even if they're just words for a way of treating the world, we need the DEs now.

I caught myself planning a vegetable garden yesterday.

I wonder if the “gift” of this terrible virus has been a greater awareness. [Greater, transformed, different, awakened, woke, perhaps even pagan - feel free to alter that sentence.]

We’ve all confronted our own mortality. We’ve all heard the government say that it’s safe to send our children back to school – and the parents among us have made their own decisions.

We’re all looking for the comforts of Normal, but we’re doing so with our eyes open.

We might believe in Gaia and the angels but we have absolutely no faith in Them.

That's healthy, right? They might think they can instruct us, or nudge us, or even deceive us back to Normal. But that was the Old Normal.

The New Normal isn’t the old normal with added face-masks and social distancing.

The New Normal is us, working together, making our own decisions, growing our own vegetables, watching sunrises, casting aside differences.

Making our own economies.

Not making the same old sacrifices and paying the same old taxes to the old one.