‘finally, i feel free from anxiety’

This morning I went into my greenhouse (a lockdown purchase that has replaced the libraries and film sets of my pre-virus life as a scriptwriter and TV producer as the place where I feel most purposeful and content) and saw a tiny morsel of green poking up from the soil. This particular green shoot was from a very grand tomato seed that came from a designer packet I had planted three weeks earlier.

I had, to be honest, given up on the designer tomatoes, lowering my expectations to radishes and mizuna (a Japanese leafy vegetable), both of which seem immune to novice gardeners. But here it was, unfurling, and I was grinning like an Oscar winner. It may not seem like much, but in this stretch of time where every day is like the one before, apart from the numbers of lives lost to this cruel coronavirus, little things – such as growing a tomato plant from seed – mean a lot.

I am not a natural gardener, nor sourdough baker, nor even letter writer, but in recent weeks I have become all of those things. I am not usually in one place long enough to watch over seedlings, but now they have become my horticultural box sets – will the white chard succumb to the dreaded slugs, will I manage to pinch out the right tomato shoots and will my courgette plants ever find fulfilment?

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the warm place next to the stove is crammed with jam jars full and the fermentation in the kitchen, there is the arrival of the postman, because receiving letters is now an event. My two digital-native daughters watch for the postman as keenly as the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice –a handwritten letter shows a depth of feeling that no text can ever match. And despite almost forgetting what my own handwriting looks like, I now write letters because I want to leave some record of how much I miss the people that I love.

But the greatest discovery is that for almost the first time in my adult life, I feel free from anxiety. Of course I worry about my beloved dad and other vulnerable friends, but I don’t feel that constant corrosive drip of ‘what next’? I have learnt that there are some things I really can’t control and all I can do is wait for the green leaves to sprout, for the bubbles to swell, for the crisp thud of a handwritten letter falling on the mat.