In it together.

Shaun has just been out to buy the Christmas goose and turkey. 

Yesterday I bought a whole deer for the freezer, so excited was I at my family’s coming home. 

Months ago, I turned down a booking of our house for Christmas – money that we desperately, desperately need this year – because I judged we needed each other even more…

And London and Bedford have just been put in lockdown, minutes ago, so no Christmas together after all.

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE!

None of us has Covid-19 (yet) and we’re not at war.

And… um… I haven’t just lost a leg. Er… or a million pounds. The dog hasn’t died. I haven’t been sick today. Nor has anyone else in the family.

I expect I could keep this up for quite a long time and bore everyone a lot.

Anything you don’t thank God for today, you should be willing to lose tomorrow.

And if you’re free at 6 o’clock this evening, or any time hereafter, you are most welcome to join the choir I sing with for a compilation put together by our brilliant son Ben. 

Who, incidentally, was recently commended in the Royal Philharmonic Inspiration Awards for one of his earlier compilations.

Adventures II. And weather...

… Is what I was talking about before being interrupted by an all-nighter in A&E two hours’ away.

Apologies. (Oh no wait, I’ve done that.)

I was about to tell you how much I love traditional English weather. And Irish, Scots and Welsh weather, come to that. And Cornish, since we’re about it, given that it’s country all of its own. (And probably Norfolk meteorology most of all: its wild winter storms; as much as the glorious breezy July beach weather, which gave rise to the original “sand” in “sandwiches”.)

The case in point, I seem to remember, being the weather on the North West coast of Ireland.

So there we were, the five of us (one not being born yet; and another not well enough to join us) with five horses, one map, one vast desert wasteland stretching along the coastline, and ten opinions as to which direction to go in.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There were only really two opinions. The cartographical one, as expressed by Shaun.

And the equine one, as expressed by all five of them.

It’s definitely inland, Shaun insisted. No doubt about it. The path that’s been marked for us goes into that wood.

Nope, all five quadrupeds contradicted in unison. It’s along the beach.

We argued about this for approximately half an hour. The humans all throwing their weight behind the map-reader: through the trees.

The equines all adamant the other way: along the sea.

It was slightly unnerving. I mean, they’d done this very many more times than we had. This was the way they’d always been, always would go and were going to go today.

As we all know, the Good Lord shoved humankind on the earth to manage, care for, steward and particularly subdue Creation, right? Including horses. (And slugs, leviathan, Labradors &c. Everything except mosquitos, which nothing seems able to subdue.)

So obviously, we exerted our God-given authority; demonstrated good, decisive leadership; referenced the superior powers of Homo Erectus to read a map.

And graciously went along the beach.

Well anyway, there was a lot of weather in that holiday. On account of that this was the West C of Eire.

Though that wasn’t the only thing. There was also:

1. Hunger. (I cancelled all our dinners to economise… before finding ourselves in countryside so remote that we didn’t see a shop or pub for several days. Never in the field of travel journalism has so much been eaten at so many breakfasts by so few. Nor a travel journalist been so unpopular.)

2. Hospitalisation. (For some reason lost in the telling, young Ben hadn’t packed his half-chaps. So Shaun, being such a selfless parent – I wouldn’t have done this; not in a dozen riding trips – heroically gave Ben his… and ended up with such a severe sore on the inside of one knee that he needed medical attention. There were other things wrong with our packing that holiday, too. Serena chose to fill one of only two small saddle bags available to her, with a hairdryer. In order to ride many long hours every day in the saddle, with only the briefest of overnight stop-offs in the most Spartan of conditions, in between taking her hard hat off before a late and non-existent supper, and putting it on again after breakfast next morning.) And of course, finally,

3. Humidity. In the form of relentless Irish rain.

By the end of the ten days, there were only two of us still mounted. 

Ben. With his father’s half-chaps.

And me. With mine.

And the two best raincoats of the party.

It didn’t so much rain, that last day, as teem. Pelt. Gush. Cascade. Disgorge. Vomit forth. Evacuate the sky.

All day.

And long into a very long, dark night.

And it was wonderful.

As we all know, “There’s no such thing as bad weather…” Ben and I had the perfect clothing.

Hour after darkening hour, we rode along muddy lanes, between wet thorns and under dripping branches – towards the others, warm in a pub – singing the rebel Republican songs of Shaun’s childhood.

Drizabone under our riding macintoshes.

Glorious.

So never say, what a miserable day.

It is never a miserable day. 

It might be a wet day, or a cold day, or a snowy day, or a really excitingly rough stormy day. Or a day when you are pelted with bullet hailstones by some mischievous little weather god in a cloud.

It might even be a hot day or a sunny day or a lazy day or a hazy day.

But it is always a lovely day.

(PS There is a Caveat to this. The only weather I don’t like is unnatural weather; much as I love the sun… Weeks and weeks of tropical heatwave in what should be a temperate England, signalling the sickness of our dear, precious planet. And no one can do anything about that except we ourselves.)

Apologies

Dear kind Readership,

I apologise profusely for abandoning you all in media res. And not even very interesting res at that…

I was interrupted before I had time to edit or complete the last posting, since when a member of the family was taken into A&E in the middle of the night and my writing schedule was knocked off its little perch.

I will resume soon. I hope.

Keep Calm and Blame the Virus.

Adventures

I love weather. I just love it.

I particularly love English weather. Correction. British weather. Sorry: correction again. The weather of the blessed British Isles.

Because arguably, the weather I love most of all is that of Shaun’s very green and very pleasant – and very, very wet, which of course is why it’s so green and pleasant – Emerald homeland.

Years ago I organised for us an amazing family holiday in Ireland. To be honest, I’ve often organised amazing family hols in Ireland. 

And one of the many wonderful things about that beautiful country, as well as the songs and lyrics and poetry and booze and craic and all the rest of Shaun’s heritage, is that the rain isn’t just capable of defying gravity horizontally, by 90º – as if God were practising his fly-fishing casts with rods of rain, right under your nose – but 180º. I swear, Irish rain can rain upwards from the ground to the sky. Through smiling sunshine, nothing! Irish rain can rain up through the floor of your horse-drawn caravan. With all the windows and the door shut.

It can rain through six foot stone walls of mediæval castles, no doubt.

Anyway, for this particular holiday, one of many, we embarked on what was known, and of whose fame we had heard years earlier, by the name of The Donegal Trail.

But first, let me tell you a bit about Atkins Family jaunts.

One of the first things to note about the Atks Fam generally, is its lack of dosh. So our annual summer break, presumably like many vicars’ families’, would either take place at our parents’ houses, or in pretty cottages very generously lent to us by kind parishioners or friends.

Until, in around the mid 1990s, when I started writing for various press publications, and hit upon a new kind of holiday.

Known in the trade as The Travel Article Holiday.

What this meant was that the author would 1. Spend several months beforehand persuading Travel Eds that what they needed most on their pages was a few photographs of the Atkins Family having fun. After which 2. The author’s family would go off and Have Fun. And finally, 3. That same author would come home and write it up.

I didn’t get paid much for it, as such. (If anything at all.) But in between steps 1. and 2. – step 1a. it were step – was for me to spend a load more hours and weeks contacting various holiday providers, airlines and so on, finding out what deal they could offer in exchange for the publicity this would generate for them. (You’d think it might be simpler just to get a real job and pay for it in the normal way. And you’d be right.)

For a family of six or eventually seven.

(This is all perfectly kosher, by the way. Next time you read a Travel Article, ask yourself whether the impoverished journalist, in exchange for a few hundred quid on a good day for writing the thing, honestly could have afforded to fly him- or herself to New Zealand and stay in all those swish mountain lodges and eat all those 5* dinners.)

There were a number of advantages to this wheeze. 

One. I get to pitch the piece. So I get to decide what kind of holiday we get.

Two. Obviously, to catch the Ed’s eye, the idea has to be unusual, adventurous, whacky or lunatic in some way. And it just so happens that I love adventurous, unusual, whacky and particularly lunatic.

(I also love horses. An uncanny equestrian theme often ran coincidentally through these works of meticulous research.)

Three. The more things that go wrong on the holiday, the funnier and more entertaining the copy.

So the happier I am.

The observant among you may have spotted a trend, here.

You know how opposites attract? True, married couples, like dogs and masters, often end up resembling each other, yes. Eventually. Usually after several centuries of wedded bliss. 

They don’t necessarily start that way.

I realised this on the first holiday we could actually afford after I started writing for the Telegraph, years ago, when we accepted a friend’s 40th birthday party invitation in Istanbul.

I say afford. The other guests all stayed in the top ex-pat Edwardian plush hotel in the City of Seven Hills, with sweeping staircases and deep red carpets. We could just about afford to stowaway in the back of a lorry and put up in the nastiest, tackiest, greasiest, most cockroach-ridden dive to be found in a dark back alley.

So that first night, Friday, we got back from dancing on the tables with the rest of the party at around midnight, to find our bags thrown into the middle of the rubbish-strewn urine-smelling street, the proprietor shouting in furious Turkish at the top of his voice at everyone who would give him the time of night, our passports confiscated if not actually already sold on, and no one on hand to translate this bizarrely unfolding scene.

I was so incapacitated with hooting delight at such a terrific opportunity for a good story (even though I wasn’t commissioned, on that occasion, to write it up on my return) that it was a while before I straightened up and caught sight of Shaun’s face.

He was suffering from a massive shortage of what they call, on dating sites, SoH. He didn’t seem able to see the funny side at all.

Where Will We Sleep?

How Will We Get Our Passports Back?

Will We Be Able To Return Home On Monday? (Or Ever?)

Seemed all that was going through his mind.

Not a thought to the wonderful anecdote this was going to prove at the party tomorrow night and indeed for ever after.

That must have been the moment when I realised that, though we had fallen head over heels in love with one another decades before and indeed were doubtless still in the same blissful besotted state, we were nonetheless Completely Incompatible.

Anyway, roll forward a few years and that time in Ireland I was telling you about – one of many – in which weather paid so large a part.

Actually, blow it, it’s nearly lunchtime.

I’ll continue the story tomorrow…

Spartan living III

Ok we aren’t completely reformed characters. I couldn’t quite claim that.

But the proof is in the very obvious lack of pudding.

Shaun is now svelte as a Sumo.

And I have given up tea.

I realise you, in the caffeinated comfort of your own familiar environment, are struggling with this concept…

I have a mug at home, bought in a moment of tacky and clearly desperate soppy taste, which says something really radical, wise and succinct like, Do The Impossible Because It Might Just Turn Out To Be Possible. One Day. You Never Know. (Go On: Give It A Go.)

For years I’ve been standing in the garden, holding that mug in my hand, wondering why I’m not sailing over the fluffy clouds and heading in the direction of the nearest misty rainbow.

And all along, the answer was within my grasp. (Not that you’d want to grasp tea, necessarily, but you get the idea.) In the mug.

The Impossible that God had in mind for me to achieve was not flying without the benefit of wings over the rooftops. But giving up tea.

Ironic that it’s a tea mug. One of life’s little witticisms I suppose. Even more, that the writing on said mug is very slightly at an angle. Clearly the normally Possible task of placing a motto horizontal on a mass-produced item of inspirational crockery turned out to be Impossible.

So now, our day goes a bit like this…

Well, you’ve already got my pre-dawn sussed. It leaves the Royal Marines’ toughest training regime at an amateur standing start.

Sprinting off towards the horizon. Plunging under icebergs. Taking a hound who would stand seven foot in his stocking feet (if he were ever allowed to stand upright on his little tippie-toes, which for obvious reasons he isn’t; nor permitted on sofas, since you ask; nor to help himself to the Sunday joint which sits somewhere lower than his copiously drooling mouth on the average dining table – I often tell guests, It’s fine: he won’t steal your food; just dribble all over it) out for his non-stop-five-minute half-gallon morning pee.

Then it’s back to the house for a big spotty pot of Ayurveda Fasting Tea. I’m not kidding you here. We now drink this stuff. Bought in bulk from my favourite tea supplier (hurry: they’ve still got their Black Friday deals on, for the rest of today) whence I normally, in a decent year, place a proper, large, biannual order for mid-season Assam, Breakfast Blend, autumn-picked Darjeeling, Garden of England midsummer tea, Spring Blossom Easter tea, Autumn Berry tea, Christmas spicy tea… oh, why did I ever start on this achingly nostalgic list?

And occasionally we go wild and splash out on Detox Lemon and Ginger tea (a vile lie: it’s nothing but grass) and quaff mug after half-pint of this insiped concoction because we also have to consume four pints of water a day, which is a heck of a whack to put away if you aren’t diluting it with whisky. And herb tea counts towards the tally.

We also drink sparkling water at breakfast. Water. At breakfast.

(Which is easier, actually, if you’ve been for a puffy run. Just sayin’.)

Then we have a couple of eggs each.

On spinach. Or around mushrooms. Without butter. Or just neat and naked as they come, in an eggcup. (Again without my normal blob of butter on top: what has become of me?) Or occasionally, on Sundays say, we really let our hair down and it’s raspberries with yoghurt. I know, I know. Raspberries are not in season and it’s really wicked and unecological to eat them in Advent, but most fruits are as forbidden as the one on the tree in the middle of the garden.

Then nothing till lunch.

Actually, that’s not quite true either. 

The friend who put us onto this said she used to ease her regime with one square of 90% chocolate a day, and a glass of wine on Sunday. And still lost three stone.

So Shaun and I break it with a splash of cream in our coffee. You’ve got to take your pleasure somewhere.

It continues like this for the rest of the day. Lean meat and greens. That’s about it. Set meal times. No snacking.

And loads of water. Unadulterated.

And then at around nine thirty at night, Shaun looks at me and I look at him and he finds a bottle from somewhere, and we each have one tot.

That’s it.

This is a blog about finding comfort in the most dire situations, right?

That is the really odd, surprising, extraordinary thing.

I feel fantastic on it.

Not necessarily as fantastic as I will feel when that first splash of champagne hits my tongue on Christmas Day.

But seriously. 

I feel kind of… well, healthy I suppose.

Spartan living [cont]

Well, we tried everything.

The Atkins Diet.

The Ketotonic Diet.

The High Fat Diet.

The Eat Fat Get Thin Book.

Eat Keto.

The Have as Many Steaks and as Much Clotted Cream As You Like Diet.

Ok, fair enough, we didn’t try quite everything. Not Weightwatchers, for instance. (Too complicated.) Or Calorie-Counting. (Too finickity.) Or Ryvetas and dry pasta. (Enuf sed.)

Thing is, there are some things I can kiss goodbye to without a second thought. Mainly because they’re so mind-numbingly boring.

White rice. White pasta. Mother’s Pride. (Other brands available just as boring.) Cheap shop vanilla catering-style ice cream made of thinly disguised whale blubber and chemical oil. White sugar. Nice Biscuits. 

Let’s face it, nobody’s life is any the poorer without these foods, right? I mean, they’re not even food, most of them.

Other deprivations, however, can cause serious hardship. 

Suppose someone offered you a juicy, well-matured 8 oz piece of rare fillet raised on the Devonshire hillside… or dessert-spoonful of fresh clotted cream with the yellow crust glistening at the top… or a glass of Moët full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim…

Way I see it, I don’t mind going without the pancakes as long as I get the Peking duck. With all the crunchy bits.

I’ll go further: I don’t even mind giving up skimmed milk in my coffee as long as it’s got plenty of double cream in it.

So obviously, I mean obviously, the Atkins Diet is a no-brainer. Because you don’t have to give anything up that you actually want to eat. (Except, perhaps, apples. And alcohol.) It’s just, like, normal.

So far so good.

Except that after about twenty years of this regime of roast beef and red wine, Shaun still hadn’t lost any weight.

Personally, I think this is because he never quite got the hang of the whole diet philosophy thing. He would dutifully eat all the things in the Atkins book that we were supposed to eat.

But then walk past a bowl of Kettles Crisps and just check that they were every bit as tasty at the bottom as they were at the top. That’s not a meal, right?

Or conscientiously eat the full ketotonic English breakfast… but then get a bit bored before it was not quite time for the cappuccino with triple cream mid-morning, so just open the fridge to check there were no chocolate brownies in there that were in the way and needed getting rid of.

In other words, he didn’t have any problem eating all the right things. It was eschewing all the wrong ones that he seemed to consider a bit fanatical.

And then, last year, we went to the Ruby Wedding of a friend whom I’d adored since she was a lovely cuddly seventeen-year-old… and my word! She had lost three stone and looked utterly amazing.

How? I said.

Well, we tried her method too. Paying someone to ring up every week to check that you really haven’t been cheating.

Which is all very well, but it just makes you cheat twice. You eat the contraband. And then lie about it afterwards.

Actually, that is a vile slur: Shaun is a man of the cloth.

Did you tell Rachel you had a slice of pavlova? I would ask. In a totally unnaggy-just-being-a-supportive-wife, way of course.

Certainly not, he would say. She didn’t ask.

Fair enough. Ahem.

The main difficulty, though, was that some evil genius inspired Ben to use lockdown to progress from a really, seriously, very good cook indeed, to being so far above and beyond, that not to eat his meals would have been like throwing one of Anatole’s creations into the Empress’s sty.

I can’t do this alone, Shaun said. And actually, I thought that really was pretty reasonable.

So given that we were going to be away on our own, for some weeks, it seemed like now or never…

Spartan living

And of course (the “and” in this sentence being akin to δε in Ancient Greek: absolutely meaningless except to get the sentence off to a bit of a kick-start) when you’re a Centre Forward (scroll back a few days, to the trainers-post) you start the day with half a dozen pizzas before you’re even awake.

Which is fine when you’re taking as much exercise as a mediæval knight limbering up for the annual joust.

However, eventually – assuming Shaun’s trajectory is typical, and I have no reason to assume it’s not – you get to the age of thirty-ish, look around you, realise with a shock of pain and pleasure in equal measure that you have four little nippers under the age of being able to launder their own nappies without prompting, and suddenly breaking your neck at this stage of your career doesn’t seem quite such a smart idea.

The flaw in this argument being why it ever seemed such a smart idea ten years earlier, when you were an undergraduate at an establishment where they are supposed to test the correct functioning of your little grey cells before admitting you.

But hey: life is full of little mysteries.

So, understandably and very responsibly, you kick the habit of going out and risking quadriplegia every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons.

But habit is a funny thing. You may have dropped the amusement which burned calories in seven figures on a tri-weekly basis, but your body is still in the swing of your daily eight thirty am black pudding, farmhouse sausages, baked beans and mushrooms, half-a-dozen rashers and two slices of fried bread topped with eggs of a morning. Main course. After a porridge appetiser.

Which… well, you’re an intelligent readership.

Two plus two equals whatnot.

Now, the thing is, I’m not particularly nervous about international killer viruses (or even viri, for the ignorami not among us) as a general rule. Never having suffered ill-health in my life.

(Except, arguably, mental ill-health, as a result of one or two life-experiences that haven’t been entirely a barrel of l.)

But it hit me one day around last March, when we were supposedly isolating (what’s the difference, someone please tell me for the love of the English language so precious to us all, between “isolating” and “self-isolating”? And when did “distancing” become a verb and please why do we prefix the adjective-now-hijacked-as-adverb “social” when we’re all on Zoom night and day and it’s the last thing we mean and we have a perfectly good word that we actually do mean… I know I know, it’s an occupational hazard: to want words to be used to convey their dictionary definitions instead of something randomly plucked out of Dominic Cummings’ bizarre and now unemployed imagination… As we were then: isolating) having shut ourselves away because Ben had a little temperature, asked the neighbours to shop for us and never put a foot outside the door for a fortnight… that we had a lodger who went out half a dozen times a day no matter how often we explained to him.

He simply said, I know, I know, and went out again.

Whereupon it suddenly occurred to me, much as we needed said lodger’s rent in these dark times, that if he brought said virus into the house and Shaun happened to catch it… well, all the rent in the seven oceans of the world wouldn’t make his stay worth it, if Shaun were no longer around to give a bit of oomph to one’s existence.

Or, more accurately, his pertinent little quips and observations on life that make Eeyore seem manically cheerful.

I got over my momentary fear about five minutes later, when I reflected that more people probably die of traffic accidents on a daily basis when we aren’t all in lockdown.

But it left a lingering inclination to asses the risks.

Tens of thousands of calories in, to a few hundred calories out, over a decade or several, being one of them.

Which is how it came about that I decided to take a good long hard look at what we ate.

And if Shaun and I were going to be away together, with no one to tempt us but the dog and none of Ben’s curries to die for, it could be a good opportunity, so to speak…

Ghastliest Tip of Them All: No Three.

You are going to hate me.

I’m afraid you are all absolutely going to hate me.

As I’ve established: here we are, some hours’ journey from home. In a fairly wild place. Near running water which, as we all know, is hugely good for the mental h.

(Isn’t it counter intuitive that it’s the negative ions that are so good for you? But there you are. As you are beginning to discover, this blog is full of the sort of useful scientific tips that you might otherwise have to search through a set of very cheap Christmas crackers suitable for five-year-olds in order to find. Let this be one of them:

Moving water is provenly more beneficial for the system than Prozac. Loads of research done on the subj. Which I can’t quite immediately currently put my fingers on right now this minute, but must be out there. Curiously, it’s not quite so effective if you simply stand under an overflowing gutter or even just next to a roaring kitchen tap.

For some reason it has to be Niagara or similar, for honeymoons and so on.

Anyway, back to my immediate environment…)

If I listen very hard at night, I can just about hear moving water in the distance. Sometimes. In my imagination. When there’s a storm rushing about.

I’ve also established that it is turning out to be very beneficial for us, being away from the run-of-the-mill ups and downs of what life had become at home.

For the first week or two here, so far so good…

Then, sadly, some business followed us and my PA, reading my emails for me, had to tell me that there was an issue asking for my attention.

Wham! Smack in the face, not so much with a wet haddock as a sandbag. Full of lead cannon balls. (Does one make cannon balls with lead? Or is it too soft? I seem to be having a bad morning: I can’t find my handy cannon-ball-making instruction leaflet either. Anyway, for the purposes of my story, these ones were made of lead. Or something equally contraindicated for the cranium, on impact, anyway.)

Lurching as I was, sick to my stomach as if I’d just been kicked in the nether gut in a pub brawl, I said to my exceptionally wise and smart eldest daughter, There must be something one can do to alleviate this feeling? Drink half a bottle of whisky, or something?

(To which my second daughter, the ill one, said, Yes! That’s how I feel almost all the time… How do I step out of my own skin and stop the screaming?)

There is, my eldest said.

Go for a swim, she said.

You what? I said. A swim? I said. It’s NOVEMBER!!

(Yes, ok, I know I talked about venturing in a tame swimming pool in the garden in September. But that was a long time ago and I’d since seen sense and put the winter cover on.)

As I tried to explain yesterday, this blog is not about discipline but desperation.

I also said I don’t use the word “unbearable.” This feeling, however, was.

Proof of this outrageous claim is that, not very much later, I found myself facing the wild water in a swimsuit and towelling robe, wondering what on earth I was doing there.

As did two passersby.

Well done! they said.

I may not get far, I said. Possibly just a toe, I said. But my daughter told me I had to, because I’ve just received some rather difficult news.

You’ve got to then, one of them said. If your daughter told you to.

And I plunged.

I even, actually, swam. About ten strokes. And even went under again. I appeared to be still alive.

As I came out I saw one on her telephone. Did you take a photo? I asked.

No, she said. But I will. For your daughter. You’ll have to go in again!

So I did…

Three times. I went in that November water three times.

There’s been a fair bit in the news over the last few weeks about the benefit of freezing swimming. I mentioned it in my blog about our daughter’s illness a year or two ago. Beats dementia, depression, all sorts.

My father swam in the North Sea till his late nineties, and died earlier this year aged a very alert indeed hundred and two. And a half. I once, as a child, saw him go in the sea when it was snowing. And considered him seriously nuts. But you know. Hundred and two speaks for itself. And a half.

That, and a tot of very cheap and nasty whisky every evening, with more and more water as he got older.

It was even on the radio this morning: Today Programme, Radio 4, just after twenty past eight. And that was cold swimming before dawn.

So please don’t hate me too much.

I didn’t really do it on purpose. 

Think of it like self-harming: when you’re in that much mental anguish, you have to do something to take your mind off it.

But the truth is, it made me feel so fantastic that I’m now doing it most mornings, after my little jogette.

Ten mins pounding the pavement. Back to the house. Swimsuit on and out again and plunge. And then taking the dog out. Routine.

Certain rules here:

Not on Sundays.

Not when it’s dangerous.

No feeling of obligation.

And it’s not so much a swim, as a dip. Water up to the shoulders, just once, absolutely counts.

And honestly, you come out and your whole body glows. It really does.

My new friends, cheering me on from the bank, said after that first time, You’d better rush home: you must be freezing.

Freezing? Never felt warmer.

Or more on top of the world.

Outdoor Swimming Soc

Helpful book from helpful reader (with a tad more science than a Christmas cracker)

Escape...

This is beginning to sound like a blog about discipline.

It’s not. It’s about desperation.

Or rather, its antidote.

I don’t use the word “stressful” as a general rule, because we have a daughter with a very, very severe anxiety disorder for whom stressfulness defines life. (And yes, although I loathe unnecessarily lengthened or complicated words, I do think stressfulness is a little more specific. “Stress” is about engineers and bridges and steel and so on. Stressfulness is more of a lifestyle.)

Similarly I almost never say “depression”. Which can cover anything from a vague melancholy or malaise or even deep sadness, to such torturous screaming agony its victim doesn’t know how to live another minute.

And sometimes can’t.

Nor “unbearable”, for reasons too obvious to insult you with.

So let me not say, life at home had become any of these things.

Let’s say instead, that when we were given the opportunity to use someone’s house, because it had no lettings for the long and dismal duration of an economically-crippled Covid winter, it was a Godsend.

Which is a word I can use.

So when this most recent lockdown was announced, we poured and poured over the government website. First filled with dismay that we couldn’t. Then realising with tentative delight that perhaps we might… we maybe… we checked with others… yes, we could!

It was legal to “finish a UK holiday”. 

(And checked again. And yet again.)

Yes, we could stay where we happened to be, when midnight fell on that imprisoning (or in our case, liberating) lockdown Wednesday, 4th November.

So here we are… Far from home

Indeed, it wasn’t until a week or two after that, when Shaun realised he needed all his papers from home to do our tax returns, that I realised I had to stay here.

If we went back for anything, we couldn’t come away again: that is the current law. And I couldn’t go home: I simply couldn’t.

I should explain that being without Shaun is something I hate almost more than anything I ever have to face. 

In 2005 and ’6 we were apart, on and off, for eight very long months. As a family we were homeless, and had to shift where we could. The details are tedious: it is enough that for much of it Shaun and I were hundreds of miles apart, in different countries. I, where a generous friend had lent me a house: Shaun initially sofa-surfing and then staying with other generous friends, a forty-five minute drive from the church where he was employed.

That period of our lives was (for us) a lot worse than this one…

By a long, long way.

I totally understand that nothing can be more desperate than this dire Covid-19 2020 for those whose lives have been permanently diminished by the dreadful disease. Some have lost livelihoods; jobs; presumably homes.

Worse, for some, their health.

Worst of all, loved ones. Sometimes without even a goodbye.

For some, the war never did come to an end. My father lost his best friend, and his tears never dried for him, even decades later.

But thank God, for most of us this pandemic will not last forever.

Whereas for us, when we were homeless, we couldn’t see a definite end at all.

When it did finally become less awful – we hadn’t escaped, and weren’t housed adequately for another three years, but we were all under the same roof – I laid my head on Shaun’s shoulder, in the bed we were sharing together again at last, and swore I would never let myself be separated from him again.

And yet, when he said he might have to go home for bank statements and we wouldn’t be able to return until 2nd December, I thought about it overnight and the next morning said I was really sorry but in that case, I would have to stay here alone.

For most of us right now, distance feels like a curse. A lifesaving one, perhaps; but a curse nonetheless.

But please forgive me, at the moment distance is proving a healer for me. Or a soother anyway. (Sometimes, when we haven’t the luxury of physical distance, we have to find distance in our head. I admit that would have been a lot harder.)

But at last, thanks to heroes in white coats with leaky lab biros in their breast pockets all over the world and throughout this most extraordinary and blessed human race, that distance is getting smaller and the light is getting larger, and an end is already in sight.

Probably in the first half of next year. Lambent in a very dismal darkness, at a distance now very slightly closer, shining in a sky which will burst gloriously upon us, surely sometime in 2021…

Ghastly Cheerfulness Tip No Two.

To recap.

Tip No One was be outside before breakfast. More accurately, before eight am.

I got this (more or less) from a Sleep Consultant.

(Have you ever wondered why “consultants” get loads more money than the rest of us? Or, indeed, what on earth a “consultant” is? Our son-in-law is a “consultant” and I still haven’t a clue… I sometimes get described as a “broadcaster”, which is even more meaningless and which, as far as I can make out, simply means you’ve occasionally been shoved in front of a microphone. Though not quite as meaningless as “religious commentator” which means absolutely nothing at all.)

Anyway, it’s all to do with Serotonin, Melatonin, Melania, all that kind of thing. (We don’t need to get too scientific about it, given that the Pres of the US can cure an international pandemic by gargling bleach. I don’t know why these Oxford chappies are putting in so much work, staying up all night, when it’s so simple.)

Or, in fact, blinding common sense.

Go outside as soon as you wake and it’s daylight, both, and your body goes, oh, right: I know this one. Daytime, yes? Then, come nighttime, it looks at the stars and says, yeah, got it: this is the other one.

Whereupon you sleep like a baby.

(As long as you haven’t been Messing About With Screens, of course.)

Not like a modern baby that wants to do jigsaws and discuss Nietzsche all night, but a decent old-fashioned baby that you put in its cot at 6pm and it doesn’t wake up until 8 the next morning. All ready for its bacon-and-eggs and fully potty-trained.

So that was our Really Irritating Cheerfulness Tip No One.

You’ll be pleased to hear that Tip No Two is considerably more irritating.

A few weeks ago, when such innocent pleasures were not capital offences punishable with another six years of lockdown, we were having supper with friends. Two of us and two of them. One of whom I was at school with in a different era altogether when more than six girls were allowed to go to the same school and sit in the same classroom.

And she happened to say she’d run “5k” that morning and felt rather pleased with herself.

Now, I’ve always been lousy at running. Even when I was a slip of a thing in gym culottes and actually quite sporty, I always came last at running. No idea why. I could play hockey, ride a pony, serve at tennis, score in rounders and swim for a very long time indeed… but not run.

Later in life I cultivated a loathing of anyone zipping round the park with wires in her ears puffing and pounding. Poor thing, I would think. You’re causing yourself joint-wreckage, heart-attack, misery and depression, when you could be wrapped up in a thick woollen coat like me enjoying a lovely walk with a dog and admiring the rusty leaves against the cobalt sky.

So when my friend told me this, my first reaction was to say, how ghastly, in sympathy, except I thought it might be a tad rude.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps she had actually chosen to do this.

And that, instead of wishing she could sink her feet in concrete so she was never tempted to again, she had actually said it made her feel good.

And then I reflected that, if we’d once been at school together, perhaps what she considered possible might not be out of the question impossible for me, too.

I’m not quite sure exactly when the penny dropped or why, but the final breakthrough in this realisation was that, as a student, I had gone round Christ Church Meadows every morning before college breakfast, and I must presumably have done that voluntarily.

And the only reason I stopped was because one morning I did so with Shaun, before we were even engaged, and he was so utterly scornful and dismissive of the pace at which I didn’t go – saying he could barely go so slowly if he ran backwards, and didn’t I know I had to raise my pulse to do any good at all – that the next time I did as he said and when I finally stopped thought I’d killed myself.

Shaun was a Centre Forward and not so much fast, as disappeared.

Oddly perhaps, instead of telling him to jump in the Isis and never speak to me again, I instead accepted his offer of marriage and never ran again.

Until a few weeks ago.

As if in a trance the next morning, after unearthing the trainers I’d wanted to chuck years ago, I left the house in the direction of the park at a humble little trot along the pavement. Which only lasted until the next pavement before I was heaving huge sobs into my lungs and doing what my mother called Scouts’ Pace (you run until you can’t, then walk until you can again) and by the time I reached the park and started trotting round that I realised I was, quite involuntarily, smiling.

I could still see the cobalt sky. And the leaves spiralling down from the sun. And the trees waving on the horizon.

And I was smiling at these sights. My whole face suffused with delight at the glory of the morning.

Every morning.

(To be fair, I’m not sure I’ve noticed other joggers’ faces jerked into automatic grimaces of joy… but it’s what happens to me.)

Fast forward to now.

I don’t run fast. I never have.

I don’t run far. It would put me off.

But every morning, as soon as I’m properly awake and have got bored of the latest professional opinion on what we are or are not allowed to do at Christmas (which doesn’t take me long) I pull on a pair of old jeans and a thin tee shirt and leave the house at a run – or, let’s say, little jog – and come back ten minutes or so later, still at the same little jog.

And still smiling.

Take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again...

Three people in as many days.

Where is Anne’s blog?

Haven’t heard from Anne in a while.

Why have you stopped writing, Anne?

If you have followed me at all, ever, you’ve probably picked up that I’m an extremely irritating and unrealistic fan of über-super-positivitiness, optimism against all the odds, hope over experience and all that J.

But even more, of honesty.

I haven’t written for a while because life has been a bit s***, frankly.

And I’ve been a bit drippy.

I may not manage this time either, but let’s give it another go again together. If you’re game, I am.

Let’s face it, life is being quite s**** for quite a lot of us. 

Loss of income.

Terror of a killer virus.

Loneliness to the point of suicide.

Redundancy.

Even bereavement, for some. Perhaps without even being able to say goodbye.

Pick your particular s***.

Or maybe (as it was for a friend of mine at the very beginning of the first lockdown) this is proving quite a good war for you?

I wouldn’t tell anyone this, she said. But Tim [not his real name, obv] is working in the next room instead of commuting to London at six am. The children are all home from school and university respectively, and playing tennis in the garden. And I am on eighty per cent of my usual earnings without going into work, catching up with everything around the house that I’ve been longing to do for years.

Well yes, you’ve guessed it. If you have a garden with a tennis court in it and some of your children are away at school and your husband commutes daily into the City, you could be having quite a good Coronavirus. (I think she might even have been by the pool as we spoke.) But before you seethe in flumes of loathing, she is also one of the loveliest creatures on God’s earth so please don’t resent my gorgeous friend. It’s not her fault she is blessed.

You and I are not having such a good Covid, I assume.

(Funnily enough most of the slime I’m going through is not actually to do with the Covid. Except the loss of income bit, which is slightly less fun than being kneecapped in a dark alley on your birthday.)

I think that’s probably enough of getting-back-on-my-horse-after-it’s-thrown-me-off for one day.

Last time it was: get outside before eight am.

So tomorrow how about we have: Really Irritating Tip No Two for Not Killing Yourself? I’ll try to be here if you will.

(The picture? I’ve recently discovered that pewter can come up really nice and shiny. I always thought it was a dull, depressing metal. Just thought I’d share that.

Look, give me a break, ok. Sometimes there genuinely isn’t much to write home about.

And the dog? What’s he for? Same as all them clergy in Tom Sawyer – or is it Huck Finn? Somebody find the quote for me…

“Him? He’s just for style.”)

Free Tip.

It’s not just me. Or you.

The world is feeling very fragile.

Two days ago I rang a dear friend, just to keep in contact as we hadn’t spoken for a while. 

(Fib alert! I actually rang her because I’d run out of pencils to sharpen in lieu of writing the next chapter.)

She’s about the most cheerful person I know. She has indubitably had more than her share of tragedy. But she puts it all behind her and greets every day with a smile of gratitude and has ever since I’ve known her in our teens, and is always full of effervescence and joy and praise.

How are you, I said.

Very fortunate, she said. Gorgeous husband, glorious home, adoring children, grandchildren living a skip from the doorstep…

I expect you, like me, can hear a big galloping But coming over the horizon, clopping its coconut shells together…

And? I said.

Sad. Low. Don’t know why, she confessed. I know I’m being ungrateful…

She then admitted to having spent a day in tears last week, over what seemed objectively a very trivial piece of news.

One of ours rang yesterday. She often does.

How are you? I said.

A bit depressed today, she revealed. It’s all so overwhelming.

I’m depressed, Shaun observed last week as we drove to the seaside to be with family. Some days I’m fine…

D’you know why? I asked. Which is rather a silly question given the list I gave you yesterday as to what’s been on our plates. (And quite a lot more stuff I can’t go into in a public place.)

After enumerating the obvious, he said he believes lockdown is very deflating. It’s the uncertainty, he went on. Simply not knowing is very debilitating.

We can’t even look forward to Christmas…

Maybe, for all I know, you spring from bed every morning with a song on your lips and delight at not having to drag yourself into an office.

Good for you!

But if you’re experiencing this all with a bit more reservation, you’re in the majority.

I was about to say, we’re in it together. But of course, we’re all in our own separate bubbles, in our own separate spaces, simply longing to break out of the skin of them.

So, I thought. Here you are, I thought. Completely free advice from a former professional agony aunt:

CHEERFULNESS TIP:

I have a new regime. It is to be out of the house before eight in the morning. 

Not necessarily dressed, but outside. In the open air, dew on my feet, sky above my head. 

In fact I’m not dressed for a very good reason, peculiar to me… which might cheer you up just reading about it simply because it’s not part of your regime.

When we moved into this house, our first ever own home (well, you know: ours and the bank’s) eleven years ago, we turned down the offer of a smashing skiing holiday with very much adored friends and instead spent Easter digging out the bottom of our garden and building a pool.

And (I’m sick of answering this question to prospective Airbnb guests all summer) of course! It’s solar-heated. That’s right. (In other words… all right, no it’s not. We love our planet. And I tell the family that a hardy attitude does exactly the same job, for free.)

Since the early summer I’ve been telling myself every morning: just get in! It’s very difficult to be depressed if you’ve been swimming outdoors before breakfast.

And this principle applies even more in late September than in mid-June. Every morning I do a lap or two and feel I’ve conquered, if not Everest, something really quite impressive anyway. And probably colder. So if you have a river near you, or the sea, I heartily recommend it. (Though maybe start in summer, next year, and build up to it…)

There you are. My tip for today.

Outside before eight in the morning. In the garden. On your balcony. In the street if you don’t have either. Barefoot is absolutely fine.

The morning sunlight recalibrates your body-clock and helps you sleep at night.

And the cold water, if you can find any, does something similar to the frontal doodah of the brain.

There you go. I bet you never thought to get good, hard, evidenced, incontrovertible scientific whatnot in this blog.

Now press the Comment button and add your own Cheerfulness Tip. If I remember to enable it this time…

Starting again at my beginnings

Ok, I admit it.

Cheer is a good thing. Optimism. A positive attitude. Looking on the bright side and expecting life to be good to you. I am the Tigger in our marriage… indeed, family.

“You’re so negative!” I said to Eeyore yesterday. Not, I confess, for the first time in our decades of wedded bliss. I can’t remember whether he’d said it would rain, or the toast would burn (probably neither: it didn’t rain until nightfall; and we don’t have toast for breakfast as we are Being Good so it’s just an egg each from the only hen laying) or that we would be bankrupt by Christmas (much more likely).

“No: just realistic,” he corrected me patiently.

Well yes, Lord Copper. Sort of.

Anyway, I was here to concede defeat. (So far; it’s only SO FAR, isn’t it? The fat lady is still blasting out tuneless drunken ditties at the top of her voice, blast her eyes.) Not to defend myself.

I said this blog was going to be about Cheer, and yes, Cheer is a Good Thing.

But perhaps honesty is better…

See, the reason I haven’t written a post since April is because I couldn’t. I couldn’t scrape myself together to be ruddy cheerful.

What with having lost:

1. All our income. (All? Did you say all? What all my pretty chickens and their dam, in one fell swoop?)

2. My father. For whom I haven’t yet shed a single tear, life has been so ghastly in so many other ways.

3. The performance of my very first play, in a very, very good and reputable theatre. Due to delight a packed audience on my son’s and the Queen’s birthday, in late April. Was it only a week before lockdown, that I drove back from my meeting with the theatre administrator, singing louder than the Fat L and hailing my new career as a successful playwright?

4. Our daughter, who walked out months ago, ill as she was, and hasn’t been in touch since.

5. A close relationship… so painful I can’t possibly talk about it here.

So, life hasn’t been particularly cheerful and I made a mistake in setting myself the rule that it has to pretend to be.

(Oh yes and 6. All our hens but two, our real chickens, what with a new young dog fox and his family born far too near our garden and brazen enough to show off by day.)

Anyway, under my new regime, started this morning, I am due a coffee break in ten minutes and have to do another writing exercise before then, so I’d better wind up. 

And funnily enough, now I’ve been honest, I do actually feel cheerful enough to share something happy with you.

Penultimate item on this morning’s Today Programme was with a couple of brides one of whom, poor thing, has had to reschedule her wedding five times already. I think it was the other who had an original cast list of three hundred and fifty for her marriage. And because they are a good Muslim couple they are not cohabiting until they are wed.

Agonising about a wedding with only fifteen, when four of those guests are the officiant and photographers and presumably are two the couple themselves and huge families on both sides, to be somehow squeezed into the remaining nine spaces left.

And I wanted to tell them, go for it. Please, go for it.

My parents were wed at twenty four hours’ notice with only two people (whom they barely knew: family friends) as witnesses, and were happily together for seven decades of deep, true love.

Here they are. My father not looking nearly as handsome as usual, in his bare khaki, unable to be promoted beyond corporal because he was a despised Conscientious Objector. My mother in the beautiful silk veil I wore, as did my daughter.

I know the current situation is heartbreaking but so was the war.

Just go for it.

x

PS Sorry guys: it’s so long since I wrote a post I forgot to enable comments. (I wondered why some of you were commenting on my Facebook page – thank you!)

Fraternal fondness

One of the most touching aspects of lock-down being, of course, the unfamiliar affection the British are now showing one another in their appreciation that their near ones are still well and alive.

Take this bouquet of flowers, for instance, which appeared at dawn – by Youngest’s standards – for Second Youngest, from Eldest, two days after he was dashed into hospital, the inside of his face was turned outside, the back of his throat pierced with a number eleven-and-a-half darning needle, a pint of poison drawn out from under his uvula and he could talk, eat and swear again.

Brother and sister who seldom openly pass an outwardly loving word to one another, when it comes to the crunch showing quite how precious the life and health of the other are, and dear and close to their hearts…

Online learning. And teaching.

One of the many positives about the current challenge is witnessing online learning.

And teaching.

(Youngest has been told to send a photograph of the view from her bedroom window, to share with her cohort. And of her pet or pets. Obviously, like, obviously, she hasn’t done this. I know she’ll kill me if I send photographs for her, I said to her teacher. Don’t worry, said the teacher. All the mums have done it.

So, here is the view, this evening, from her bedroom window. To be fair, she did call me to see it, she said it was so beautiful.

Then, Could you please hurry up and get out of my room so I can do some work?)

The teaching is even better.

Second Youngest: I have a pupil here who has just told me that, because it’s Ramadan, she can’t do any music: she wants to know if I, her music teacher, can set her any music that doesn’t involve music.

Youngest: Why can’t she do music?

2nd Y and me: Some very strict, orthodox Muslims consider music unIslamic.

Y: What?!!! How do they go clubbing???

In it together

(Apologies that my last post wasn’t working properly: hazard of being both in a hurry for tea, and techno-useless always. Now fixed by Second Youngest – thanks.)

My next awareness of Covid-19’s having an impact on my own life (that is, apart from the extremely virulent ’flu I experienced in January – never before have I spent a whole day in bed, surely – which I jokingly referred to as Coronavirus and now suspect really was) after Rose’s wonderful ten-day school music trip to the Far East was inevitably cancelled in late February, was the day after my father died.

17th March.

I get back from broadcasting Thought for the Day in Cambridge at around breakfast time. Will this prove the last time I ever have to travel to a studio for it? I’ve been campaigning for this for seven years: 62 miles spewed out into the planet for the sake of 2 3/4 minutes… unbelievably, the BBC has proved even more unreconstructed than I am.

My father having died just after I left the evening before. Now laid out upstairs in his room by his loving carers.

I didn’t go in.

When husb was eventually free to be with me, I wished I gone in sooner. So peaceful, he was. His much-loved much-thumbed leather black Bible in his very still hands. (The carers had suggested a flower. Shaun was right: his Bible meant much more to him.) Music – was it Bach? – left playing softly on the radio or somesuch. I could have stayed with his body for a long time.

2nd Y – all work cancelled – kindly went with me, round the corner to the nearest undertaker.

The undertaker was an eejit. Enormous, in morning dress.

Have the funeral as soon as possible, he said. In case there is a lock-down.

Ok, I said. What’s the earliest date we could go for?

Well, what kind of coffin do you want, he said.

What? I really don’t care, I said. What’s the soonest we can have the funeral?

We need to start in the right place, he said. Oak or beech?

Anything you like, I said. Cheapest you’ve got. My father chose lots of music, and we’ll need to organise musicians as soon as possible.

How many cars?

Cars?? The church is just round the corner.

You shouldn’t drive, he said. You may find yourselves more distressed than you expect.

I wouldn’t dream of driving a few hundred yards.

After an hour of this nonsense – Well, this hasn’t quite gone as planned, the undertaker understated – he said the earliest he could arrange a funeral would be in a fortnight’s time.

Shall we find a sensible undertaker, I said to Second Youngest the moment we hit the pavement. My head screaming in frustration.

Do you think any of that might be your fault, he said. You seemed to confuse him a lot.

No, I said.

We did find a sensible undertaker: the next one I tried.

There has been much talk of the distress of death in a time of Corona. Many losses, indeed, sound more than to be borne. Saying goodbye through the crack of a hospital door. Not saying goodbye at all. The worst, a wife told her husband was dying, no one knew when, days, weeks, and she was permitted to visit him once. No more. You choose.

How? Sophie’s choice indeed.

The truth is, for me I suspect my bereavement has been a lot easier than in normal circumstances.

Much of the grief of death, surely, is losing the familiar.

My lesson with him every evening at six thirty. (We finished Οἰδίπους just before Christmas and had recently started – again: I am slow of study – on Ænead VI. Most apt, indeed: the grim and ghastly Chiron and the wretched waiting shades. Thank goodness, on Sunday he asked me to read the glorious Revelation 21 to him, to wipe this drear hopelessness and fill his vision with a shining shore.)

His cheerful carers coming through our kitchen with his laundry.

Popping in to say goodnight and share a whisky with him before bed.

Reading my Thought script after sign-off: he could could no longer hear radio words clearly. 

As soon as my father died, everything changed. 

All routine gone anyway.

As if the country mourns with me.

Nothing is the same. Why should Daddy still be here?

It has made it easier: much easier.

I have not yet shed one tear. (Not for my father. I still weep for my mother almost every day.)

Tea!

You’re not doing very well with your blog, said Second Youngest the other day.

I’m afraid he is right.

Having promised good news… and having written a (fairly gruelling) blog last year when I posted every day without fail… and which I never got near to finishing but I’d completed my contract with myself of a year and a day… and having taken on this blog for fun… (and I confess, sometimes now not finding what I am passionately committed to as much fun as I always have…)

Well, here I am back again anyway.

Having a tea party at 4 o’clock, to celebrate VE Day and all our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did for us.

And here are my father’s poppies (sorry about the photobombing: occupational hazard of being a Great Dane) which he wore every Remembrance Sunday until the last one… and never will again.

And the only weapon he would agree to bear, his Red Cross arm band… as he served in the Medical Corps.

(One grim night he fully expected to be shot, for refusing to carry more.)

And the only medals he was ever entitled to, for long service… as an oft-shamed and so-brave Conscientious Objector.

So proud of him my heart could burst.

Please join us!

Don't panic! (Part II)

To be perfectly honest, having quite shamelessly made you wait in suspense (several friends have contacted to ask if he’s ok… and what does he do but wreck my carefully-crafted cliff-hanger by responding to one of them himself?) the rest of that day was a bit of an anti-climax.

They measured his pulse. Gosh, they said: that’s seriously impressive. Then his blood pressure. Wow: even more impressive. 

Well, he said, almost modestly (I’ve never seen him like that before), I do aim to keep well.

And then spoilt it all by telling them exactly what his heart rate usually is first thing in the morning; half way through a bike ride; after a bike ride; when he’s asleep in bed… and all the other figures you’d only know if you were a real saddo fitness freak.

And after a while, eventually, they left… rather reluctantly. On the way out admiring Shaun’s dog’s comically sad clown-face looking out from the dining room where he’d been shut away according to instructions.

I used to have a Great Dane, said one of them.

And faced with the news that he wasn’t dying after all, 2nd Y pulled himself together and made us a delicious barbecue on Friday evening.

I should have known. Really I should. Looking back, 2nd Y has never, ever, ever in his life complained of pain before.

Not when, aged twelve, he did an overambitious forward-flip on an Alp and was airlifted away in a lovely red copter, with a dislocated shoulder which meant he could never really play school contact footie again.

Not when he had an op in Ely thinking he could bike back afterwards to sing Evensong in Cambridge and had to be told by the consultant that he must call his mother to collect him (and bicycle).

Nor when, just before lock-down, he had his frenula surgically slit and couldn’t speak then, either.

Not even when his best friend died in traumatic circumstances did he actually talk about the pain he was in, though it was pretty obvious to all. Just joked and joshed in his usual robust way about how much Jonny himself would have laughed, that when he finally went to the park for a good old cry in the gloaming a few weeks later, a bloke came on to him.

But he had been saying his throat was hurting. We should have taken it a bit more seriously.

Yesterday morning I received a text message before breakfast saying he really thought he needed a doctor. He mentioned tonsillitis.

The lovely ambulance chappies (surely trained to know if someone has tonsillitis?) had told us that, contrary to popular conception and mine, there are still GPs in this country available to answer the telephone.

Saturday. Please ring NHS one one one.

I sigh, brace myself to be asked whether it’s an emergency and get someone who can only talk to the patient.

Name? she asks him.

Uh, he groans.

Are you breathing?

Uh.

Have you lost a lot of blood?

Uh.

(Have you died and gone to Heaven?

Uhhhh!)

Eventually someone rings back who asks a few questions which I answer on his behalf, says the patient is fine and I will eventually get a call from a “clinician” about taking him into a “centre”.

I’m sorry, I say, but I don’t know exactly what a clinician is.

A doctor, he says as if to complete idiot. I’m a clinician.

Are you a doctor? I ask.

No, he says. I’m a trained qualified specialist pharmaceutical advising consultant.

Thank you, I say.

And hang up and dial nine nine nine.

He didn’t tell you to do that, Youngest queries.

No, I say. He was a moron.

Doc rings back pretty quickly, before ambulance arrives. 2nd Y has dragged himself out of bed now, and every time he is asked a question he bangs the furniture violently in howling agony.

The house shakes with the pain he is in.

Quinsy, the doctor pronounces eventually. Complication arising from untreated tonsillitis, needs to see an ENT specialist immediately, you’ll have to take him to Stevenage A&E.

Fortunately, Bedford Hospital had an ENT specialist on call and we were there within minutes.

(Also fortunately, for me – don’t ever tell anyone I said this, and certainly not any members of my family – I am not allowed to wait with him, because of contamination issues. I’d rather drown myself in the Ouse than hang around a hospital ending my life slowly expiring out of sheer boredom.)

TELL THEM YOU’RE A SINGER!! I suddenly text him in wild panic at the loss of his career.

What on earth for?

So they don’t damage your vocal chords (I’m a tad dyslexic), duh.

They aren’t going anywhere near my vocal cords. (So is he, but obviously not quite as dyslexic as I am, coloured spectacles and all.)

Duh.

Few hours, prods, jabs, more howling agony and the lancing of an abscess the size of a golf ball in his throat later, I pick him up and he is home, his skin the colour of parchment, arms full of pills, shaking slightly and still not up to his usual offensive banter… but able to talk; and quite soon afterwards, eat.

Admittedly, it’s not particularly brilliant that because all of us (including doctors, NHS one one one and paramedics) are only thinking of one thing, a case of tonsillitis went untreated for several weeks.

But there genuinely are beneficial side effects to this dreadful, evil, wicked plague that is sweeping the world. 

When I put the key in the ignition I honestly wondered whether I could remember how to drive. 

(Yes, yes I know: my family thinks I must do that every time I put the key in the ignition and the answer must be somewhere near the negative end of the spectrum… it’s true I don’t believe in cars. But even so, our motor hadn’t had any exercise for over a month.)

Which is seriously good for the world’s health: it really is.

We got to the hospital quicker than it would take to walk.

No parking charges.

He was seen almost immediately.

I wouldn’t wish any of this on anybody. But given we are here now, wouldn’t it be lovely if our cars just stayed put. Except in an emergency?

And we all only went to A&E when it is a real, genuine emergency?

And let’s face it, what could be more pleasant than 2nd Y at home, well enough not to die but not quite well enough to swear and insult us all?

A phase which, sadly, didn’t last very long.

Don't panic!

So here’s a thing.

I kicked off this blog by being grateful for gratitude itself. One of the truisms of the human race is that we really do need the dark to appreciate the light, sometimes…

Now, it so happens that the way our Second Youngest shows affection is by being jaw-droppingly offensive. All the time. About everyone and everything close to him.

The last time he said anything openly affectionate to me was ten years ago. He was living in Dublin, singing in one of the cathedrals there, and nine months in he had a rare flash of homesickness. He sent me a text. I know this is inappropriate for a Brit, he said…

The Irishness of his paternal heritage must have rubbed off on him because he then said something almost fond.

It caused me such a shock that I can’t remember what it was.

Just over a month ago, as I have indicated, 2nd Y experienced some symptoms associated with Covid-19. He had a temperature, for instance.

Which meant that we all had to stay in for a fortnight. Thanks mate.

Typically (you’d think he’d done it on purpose; no… really, you would… if you knew him) he himself was allowed out after a week, provided he was free of symptoms.

Being responsible and playing safe, instead doing anything useful like go shopping, he went for an insanely vigorous bike ride so he wouldn’t be in contact with anyone.

Came home.

And collapsed .

(You may not agree with all the Prime Minister’s decisions but at least he didn’t do that to us.)

After which he had a raging sore through for a week. As if trying to swallow razors.

Then he got better.

Until yesterday, when he couldn’t get up. Or move. Or speak.

Or – get this – even swear insults at any of us.

The really curious thing was that, faced with our 2nd Y six-footer lying immobile in bed, not even telling me to eff off in that affectionate and witty way he has towards all of us, it rather brought it home to me that the household wouldn’t be the same without him.

Well, no.

Quieter.

More peaceful.

A lot more civilised.

And we wouldn’t have to watch all the ghastly films he’s been inflicting on us since lock-down.

And yet, somewhat counter-intuitively really, I thought it might be a bit of a shame if he left feet first, rather than off to have a real life somewhere, not living rent-free with his parents while he stings his own tenants for the cost of his mortgage.

Hello this is NHS one one one.

Hello. My son… very sore throat… can’t talk… great difficulty swallowing…

Is it an emergency?

(Isn’t that what you’re for?)

I have to know whether it’s an emergency, so I know whether to advise you to hang up and ring nine nine nine.

How would I know?

Is it life-threatening?

Wha… um…

Because if it is, you should hang up immediately and ring for an ambulance.

This farce went on for several minutes.

I thought of him lying under the duvet completely immobile… and took the brave decision that it would be a shame if he went on being like that for ever.

Do you know what? I said to the NHS one one one person. I’m going to hang up now and ring nine nine nine.

So today’s positive life lesson is that even being told on a daily basis that you have a face like a traffic accident and being asked who’s just been sick on the table every time you serve a meal, is better than not.

If you see what I mean.

I really might miss the old bean. Anglo-Saxon expletives and all.

Emergency told me to expect a wait of several hours, so I went outside to do something… and there it was, on our pavement.

Crikey, I said.

We were so bored, they said, sitting on the Embankment with nothing to do.

And they loved my NHS friendly banner!

[To find out whether Anne’s son lives or dies, tune in to the next nail-biting episode… when the supper hasn’t just been put out in the garden.]

Far East Music Tour

My first real awareness of Covid-19 – by which I mean, selfishly, the first time I was conscious of its being anything other than an item in the news, in a land far away – was at the end of January.

Youngest had been invited on a swanky school music tour to the Far East for the first ten days of the Easter hols. The cost of this being far in excess of the reaches of the Atkins pocket, extremely generous funding had been obtained from her from elsewhere. When she was first invited to go she said she couldn’t possibly: she had far too much academic work to catch up on. (To be fair, her housemistress said the same.) Youngest has decided, with extremely irritating moral superiority, to rebel defiantly against the rest of her family and eschew a calling as a busker, poet, preacher or any other such virtually useless for the purpose of earning a living (or indeed harpist, at which she could easily make ends meet) and become a doctor. And not just any doctor but a doctor to the developing world or a war zone or somewhere where they really need doctors. For which she will need to pass exams.

Anyway, we told her, with even more irritating superiority, that having been invited on said school tour, plus funds from generous worthy, she really should go. Being a goody-goody, she said, ok.

End of January, email from school.

We are monitoring the situation in the Far East carefully…

The last time anyone in this family was funded for a school trip we couldn’t afford, it was Second Youngest, to Turkey. All his friends were going, he hugely wanted to, and the kind and lovely Chaplain found dosh from somewhere.

A week before they were due to gather at St Pancras International (or wherever) a bunch of Turks, in Turkey, decided to shoot and bomb each other with the kind of gay abandon which really puts schools off and the accompanying get cold feet at the prospect of explaining to miffed parents why they brought back fewer boys than they took out, however educational the experience might prove to be.

How sad it would be, I thought – not really expecting it, being the incorrigible Tigger I am – if Youngest’s even posher educational experience gets called off too.

How long ago that seems! How trivial, to care about a music trip!

Her Summer Term is cancelled. Her friends in the years below and above have their public exams cancelled. The top year in her school has had Speech Day, Leavers’ Ball, all the farewells they have been anticipating for five years, cancelled. Her Asian schoolfriends left the school in a hurry while they still could, and many have had the rest of their English education cancelled.

Half the country’s jobs have been cancelled.

Even if, in same strange lunar fantasy parallel existence, her music trip somehow hadn’t been cancelled, by the time the trip was scheduled to start she was far too ill, anyway. So that even the silver lining – “Oh well, at least I’ll be able to catch up on work in the extra ten days of holiday” – was cancelled. Instead, she was lying in bed unable to stand without risk of falling over.

But this is a blog about silver linings.

Yesterday was Eldest Son’s birthday.

And do you know, it was really good fun.

A week earlier it had been Eldest birthday (I decided to have all my children at this time of year, because I was born at New Year and that’s a grotty time for a birthday when you’re a child, though I love it now) and we hadn’t quite got used to the idea. It took about two hours to get the Zoom thing working. The Norwegian in-laws were there on the dot of 5 o’clock and the Atkinses all trawled in around two hours late. Some of us with laptops because we hadn’t finished work for the day. We struggled to understand how to chat to new people, and the drinks-sharing was a bit haphazard.

Eldest Son, however, said his party was only a toast of fifteen minutes’ duration (before the Geek Party of Boardgames) so we were all on time. We had the bubbly. We saw all our friends and relations and fellow geeks and new colleagues he hasn’t even met yet, and it was a scream.

I could get used to this.

It’s cheaper to buy our own bubbly than to drive to South London.

You only have to dress down to your waist. (My cousin was in black tie, going straight to the opera afterwards: Tosca live-streamed from somewhere. “Can’t be live-streamed,” I said pompously. “You mean pre-recorded.” “Live-recorded, previously” his wife explained.) I’m convinced he was in boxers below the shot.

If you can’t be bothered to wash your hair you blame it on bad internet.

It only took forty five minutes of our time (he kindly extended it) and, as Youngest said, as soon as you get bored you’re home again, instantly.

And the reason for the Great Dane in the picture?

None whatsoever. He likes photobombing. Or rather, it’s quite difficult for him not to photobomb because he takes up most of the house.

And, oh my word! I was just about to post when I heard clapping and cheering from the street. Is there a football match?

Crikey it’s Thursday and 8 o’clock and I nearly missed it!

First week, we hadn’t even registered.

Second week, neighbours told us, there were four of us clapping. Plus two in the distance.

Then a few Care Home staff joined us. Then a passerby. A car drove past and I thought, you could have stopped

Now?

All the Care Home. Six neighbours. Three in the street. And the one and only car pulled in, wound down its windows and clapped too.

I love this country…