We're now well into our second lock-down and like many other people apparently I made the most of my last relatively unfettered day - with an early morning run to Devizes. Unfortunately the market operates on Thursdays - the day the lockdown started - so I couldn't stock up with essentials like anchovy stuffed olives, but even so came back laden with Wiltshire pasties and other things of that sort. At 0900, I discovered Devizes was like a ghost town with hardly anyone, anywhere.
Since then like everyone else who can, though I guess more than most, I have hunkered down these last two weeks and have only ventured out once to squelch across the canal and the fields for an emergency run to the village shop, this time for washing liquid. Surprisingly I met three people I know, and a couple I didn't so it was all very chatty if at a respectful distance. It was a miserable drizzly day, bleak and slippery. The little winterbourne that winds through and mysteriously under the village, the so-called Gog, was full, running fast and crystal clear, clattering over miniature waterfalls. Low clouds wreathed the hills. Geese honked on the pond through skeins of mist.
Set off by beginning to sort out my tax affairs for last year, I've worked it out and I think this is the longest near continuous time I have lived at home, with just a short 3 night break up in Yorkshire with Christopher and Beth, and other summer days in Clovelly with Team Powell for a decade or more. It's certainly the first Autumn I've seen out as that was the time we usually went to Singapore. And it's been fantastic. The colours of the trees have been extraordinary. The Acer tree in the front is scarlet, brighter than flame. Everyone keeps saying how an awakened appreciation of Nature, with capital N, has been an unanticipated consequence of the pandemic. Some truth in that I think.
I'm lucky in that I can access it simply by looking out of the window or stepping outside, and that limits the sense of isolation and entrapment. There's a real prospect of Nature making its mark on me more physically. Apples the size of Tudor cannonballs are still dropping from the cooking apple tree that I walk under every morning. They've missed me so far but I see that the tree still has some reserve ammunition up there. I've been peeling and stewing apples on an industrial scale and all three freezers and freezer compartments are stuffed with the consequences. This despite the fact that everything less than cannonball size is tossed into the hedge for the wildlife. Some of the projectiles are simply enormous and could do serious damage if they connected.
Being busy, and more importantly being able to be busy, really helps of course. What with keeping up with everything the garden can throw at me, doing some hedging work, stocking up with wood for next year (I like it properly seasoned) and the general exigencies of living there hardly seem enough hours in the day. Despite my Luddite tendencies, technology helps as well of course. Academic work these days involves a lot of it. One day last week I had commitments that involved me in four different time zones around the world. At the end of it I had difficulty remembering who I was, let alone where I was and what I was supposed to be doing.
So far then, my tunnel hasn't been particularly dark. Certainly in comparison with many other people and the prospect of a vaccine and of the promise of seeing the family properly again helps a lot of course. All the same the approach of the third anniversary of Cherry's death reminds me that there's not much light at the end of that particular and much more permanent and frankly darker tunnel. One adapts but one doesn't forget.
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