Every now and then when not wandering around my residence pondering why I don’t cast a reflection in mirrors, yours truly revisits narratives penned during COVID lockdown.
Scores of my diarised vignettes, published on my website, providing retrospective insights into my thoughts and deeds under the pandemics grip. A time when I assume the mantle of a wannabee Samuel Pepys, like him journaling accounts of life during major historical events. He famously diarising life during the Great Plague, the Fire of London and how he taught his dog Reg to play billiards.
My COVID journals in 2020 an amalgam of fact and fiction, including the occasional whimsical non sequiturs aimed at thawing the spiritual chill borne from coronavirus confinement.
I’ve no real expectation future generations of my progeny will ever read them. However, if nothing else, hard copies of the prose penned while this pathogen wreaked havoc may one day provide them with firepit fuel.
Having left my marital home late in 2019, my COVID bubble was made up of my septuagenarian mother and me. My now late mater’s force of nature personality and cutting humour making that potentially fraught dynamic easier than it might appear to an outsider. Consequently, there was no jeopardy of me going all Norman Bates and introducing matricide into an already tricky existential equation.
Throughout the days under lockdown, my mum was predominantly occupied by watching TV, listening to the radio, and checking I’d washed behind my ears. Yours truly spending his time writing blogs, drawing celebrity caricatures, and learning how to whistle the Bulgarian national anthem.
Pleasingly, the blogs received hundreds of website views in scores of countries globally, and I later sold some of the caricatures on Etsy… Sadly, to date, there hasn’t been opportunity to show-off my anthem whistling prowess.
Like most of the global population at that time, the enforced loss of liberty weighed heavy. Consequently, as you’d probably expect at that unprecedented time, on occasion my prose is a touch downbeat.
However, seeking to counter starker moods where possible, I did endeavour to impart a degree of levity within these reflective passages. After all, unlike many people, at least I was lucky to have creative outlets to pursue to assuage such discontent.
Yeah, Gary Strachan may not have laden these monologues with brio. However, reading them retrospectively I’m proud to find I incorporated some whimsical colour to the stark pandemic landscape.
The following is a narrative from five years ago on the1st June 2020); three months into COVID induced lockdown:-
“…Oh June, like the mountains are blue
Like the pine I am lonesome for you…”
After bidding good riddance to the month of May and tentatively welcoming June’s advent here on planet COVID, the above sentiments from Laurel & Hardy’s refrain Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia play on a continuous loop in my head.
Like a cartoon strip greengrocer irked by a young scallywag pilfering his apples, as May departed, I shook a defiant fist exclaiming “And don’t let me see your face around here ever again!!” in its wake.
Bearing in mind the advent of June sees some relaxing of lockdown rules in the UK, it’ll be interesting to see if these minor concessions to liberties improve the proletariat’s flagging spirits.
Sitting here in my mum’s dining room, watching the digitalis swaying in a summer zephyr, I ponder how these meagre new privileges will affect Blighty’s fed up populous?
Call me cynical, however I doubt they’ll introduce a new utopian domain where, like the Ingalls kids on Little House on the Prairie’s opening credits, children gleefully run amok in meadows… Or, indeed, witness joyous scenes, akin to Coca Cola’s iconic 70’s advert in which humanity held hands to warble “I’d like to buy the world a coke’.
As I write received wisdom from many scientists is it maybe reckless to relax lockdown protocols at this juncture; boffins concerned such a move may initiate a second spike in COVID cases. Consequently, I’ve decided not to make any adjustments to my current lifestyle, irrespective of governmental assurances to the contrary.
If truth be told, I’m not even sure which lockdown liberties we’ve been afforded from today. The snippet I did catch on state TV was up to six people could mix outside, although individuals from different households had to maintain social distancing.
Under the new edicts visitors wouldn’t be allowed to venture into their hosts home to utilise the bathroom. In possession of a middle-aged bladder, a conundrum which would immediately dissuade me from visiting anyone… That is, of course, unless mein host allowed me to utilise their garden as a latrine.
Additionally, I am uncertain as to whether new lockdown edicts have closed the loophole making it acceptable to drive to Barnard Castle wearing a blindfold… A stunt undertaken by odious government advisor Dominic Cummings to, he mendaciously claimed, test his eyesight!!
Anyhow, June is here!… A new dawn, a new day and a new month… Despite cynicism this new month will be same as the old, I have resolved to embrace a degree of enthusiasm for what awaits in the next few weeks.
After all, Premiership and Championship football is scheduled to return on the 17th and 20th June respectively. Horse racing is back today, and soon a social distancing compliant new series of Man v’s Food hits the screens. After three months of lockdown dietary indiscipline, a show I’d now be possibly gluttonous enough to partake in.
Additionally, with the West Yorkshire weather scheduled to pick up, I expect contentment levels to increase. Warmer temperatures allowing more opportunity for fresh air in the back garden, subsequently improving health, solar rays affording a boost to vitamin D levels.
As Buddha advocated “The mind is everything. What you think you become.”… And if that doesn’t encourage you to cheer you up, at least thank your lucky stars your lockdown bubble doesn’t include Richard Madeley!
There, I feel better already!!
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