Lockdown

Lockdown

It happens every year at Christmas. Shops lower their shutters, the streets go quiet, everyone is closeted indoors with their family. And this hiatus is repeated a few days later over New Year. So the first day or two of the Covid-19 lockdown didn’t feel strange, or more accurately, the only strange thing was that it didn’t feel strange. By the third or fourth day, the strangeness, or lack of it, had worn off and was replaced by a weary acceptance, at least for those of us suffering no immediate adverse impacts on either health or finance. The sharper the shock, the longer the implications take to sink in; dissenting voices are already murmuring of sleep walking into a police state.

Most weeks, my calendar is studded with events which provide some traction to my sense of purpose. But enforced use of the delete button has created empty space as forbidding as the fresh white page of a Monday morning. My grip on the value of living, ever tenuous since I stopped productive (and reproductive) activities, is less secure. The carefully curated catalogue of pastimes – voluntary, leisure, social - assembled to fill the chasm left by work has been dismembered with nice precision, cancellation email by cancellation email. Death by a thousand cuts. Only assiduous attention to my regime of running and walking by the river provides some diversion.

The normal dance executed when opposing pedestrians wish to give way to each other is replaced by a scrupulous veering to the edge of the path, with communication limited to a shy smile or a grunt of thanks. Even strolling along a perfectly straight path, one is obliged to adopt a zigzag trajectory to give an adequately wide berth to overtaking runners or cyclists and oncoming pedestrians. The friendliness of strangers, which so attracted me to Exeter, has been replaced by the tense wariness practised by passengers in London tubes, where any acknowledgment of others is perceived at best as a social solecism and at worst as an incipient threat.

Marauding families colonise the byways previously the preserve of walkers and birdwatchers. Surly fathers and harried mothers trail two point four children. The disconsolate teenagers, fermenting their sense of injustice, are sulkily submissive. Parents are visited by memories of pushing buggies around draughty playgrounds, counting the minutes until the sun goes over the yardarm. 

Friends meeting by chance during their ration of daily outdoor exercise face each other across yards of no man’s land as inviolable as if it were mined. The distance necessitates raised voices so their amplified conversations are audible to all passers-by and, with the addition of hand gestures for emphasis or elucidation, give the appearance of a play. Watching this street theatre from a bench where I was resting for a drink, I was reminded of a performance of Under Milk Wood featuring Cy Grant in which the characters bawled their lines to one another from the front doors of their homes placed around the edge of the stage. I was taken by my mother who invited the daughter of her best friend with whom she was trying to match me, a bloodless creature who was no more interested in me than I was in her. The outing was not a success. To this day, I find the conceit of Under Milk Wood repellent.

Last night there was no wind. After the tumult of recent storms, the silence was especially intense. Unlike the muting of ambient sounds by snow which is calming, this silence had an eerie quality. Sounds were not being muffled, they simply weren’t there. As I stood on the bridge at the quay surrounded by darkened windows, I could hear clearly the paddling of a single swan thirty feet beneath me. One of the riverside restaurants had left lights on in its empty riverside terrace, to create an illusion of cheery normality. Passing through their reflections, the swan shattered them.

© David Thompson 2020