Lockdown has taught me the value of life’s simple rituals
If I were to summarise my experience of the past few months, it would be with the stoic British idiom of my grandparents’ era: “Mustn’t grumble.” In many ways I have been lucky: neither I, nor my partner, R, have caught the coronavirus. Our families, including my ancient parents and R’s newborn grandson, are well. Our plans for the future have been brutally altered by the economic impact – but whose haven’t?
To say that I feel fortunate to have been so lightly touched by the pandemic is not to say that I am emerging from it unscathed. We both work from home, so there was no jolting retreat from office life, and to be locked down in a spacious apartment overlooking the Thames with a lovely park nearby was a tremendous privilege, as we kept reminding ourselves. Still, there have been plenty of low moments, together with time to reflect on what we would like to retain from this long, unexpected pause in everyday life, and what we could dispense with.
First to go were online facsimiles of first-hand experience. My fondness for shopping died when the shops closed, and my experimental forays into online deliveries have proved purgatorial. When it came to the arts, I thought virtual would be better than nothing, but I was surprised by how little nourishment I derived from the gallant online content of theatre, dance and opera houses. The Wigmore Hall’s recent live Radio 3 performances to an empty auditorium feel like a restirring of artistic life, but how I long for real galleries, real performance – or just to visit a library again. I worry, too, for the university students I work with: shall I be as good a teacher online as face-toface? I hope so.
In fragile moments, micro-gardening has proved wonderfully steadying. Our outside space is a windswept, north-facing balcony, and at lockdown I had nothing to plant but three supermarket peas and an ancient packet of chili seeds. Amazingly, they thrived, joined by tomato, fennel and burgeoning melon seedlings grown from a supermarket cantaloupe. Evening drinks in the balcony garden have become a comforting ritual of the past months. Other rituals have been easier to relinquish: R and I have re-embraced the hairstyles of our early teens (me, centre-parted Patti Smith curtains; R, floppy Hugh Grant waves). We both miss sport – for R, football and golf, while for me, the disjointed feeling of not being around horses has made me wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t wandered into a stableyard on a whim, 25 years ago.
To counterbalance the lack of physical activity, the most important thing has been learning. R has been grappling with Beethoven piano sonatas; I picked up my rusty Russian. Those brief periods of absolute concentration turned out to be some of the most hopeful of lockdown, exceeded only by unexpected moments of pure joy, such as last Saturday’s Radio 3 Sound of Cinema interview with 90-year-old composer and life force, David Amram, who wrote the score for (among many others) The Manchurian Candidate. The secret of a good life, Amram confided, was endless curiosity. Also, the conviction that good manners “are not necessarily a character defect”. Which, along with an adequate supply of potting compost, is pretty much the lesson the tricky past few months have taught me.