As alluded to in yesterday’s journal Hide & Seek With The Pathogen, I’ve aspirations of a Pepysesque chronicling this era at the mercy of COVID-19’s conniption. Consequently, for the duration of the viruses brutal grip, I’m treating these daily journals as diary entries of how Gj Strachan’s emotions fluctuate during these unprecedented times.
Links to these observations collated on my website writesaidfred.org on the page The Corona Essays.
I find penning my notions during major life events both cathartic and memoir evocative in retrospect. For example, reading essays written the few weeks before and after my father passed in October 2017, one of the most dreadful times in my existence, evokes my ever changing moods during that era.
These memories I’d forgotten under the emotional collateral damage resultant from grief at losing a parent. Work I look back on with great pride; at times causing me to ponder in awe ‘Blimey, that’s good!.. How did I think of that?’. A hubris I posit unashamedly. Admittedly, to add humour I still write self-deprecatingly at times, however after half a century of depriving myself of self praise, it’s about time that nonsense stopped when it’s deserved.
The journals from September/October 2017 are written in various West Yorkshire hospitals, my dad’s hospice room and, after he’d passed, my parent’s home while sitting next to his empty red chair. Me refusing to sit upon dad’s recliner out of the reverence I held for a man I loved and, two and a half years later, still grieve for.
While scouring these daily chronicles, I’m reminded of how yours truly’s emotions and those of my family are taken on a rollercoaster ride. Causing me to ponder why, oh why, couldn’t we have failed the height restriction, barring access to this melancholic ride? Admittedly, a poetic notion, although one I realise is a Big Dipper we’ve all to endure at some juncture.
I was particularly interested to be prompted by these essays that, despite it being the most sorrowful period of my life thus far, I still managed to add whimsical literary content amongst the starkness of witnessing my old man laying moribund. One instance being a light hearted look at the differences in hand sanitiser dispensers between a hospital and a hospice.
I’m hoping my diary entries relating to the prevailing global carnage, consequential of COVID-19 virus, will henceforth provide me of a historical reminder of these times. A pathogen induced global incident which’ll receive literary journaling for as long as human’s beings occupy this dysfunctional planet.
I’m sitting in the North Yorkshire cottage where I’m self-isolating until tomorrow, when I get back to the locale of East Ardsley to practice my hermitism in West Yorkshire.
My home village not providing the aesthetically pleasing landscapes of my current abode (if truth be told, not many places can), but it’s home and I’m looking forward to getting back to the area of my roots. Along with not having grouse scare the s**t out of me with their cacophonous squawking from position stealth……. For more detail on the latter observation, see the earlier narrative There’s Wally!
Keep safe, folks!!
