Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

I’ve found it dispiriting that hymn-singing in church has been banned since all this lockdown business started.

Belting out a rousing hymn with others was hugely cheering. Even though Catholics aren’t great hymn-singers, things had improved in recent years, especially since the RCS had the bright idea of nicking some of the best in the Anglican hymnal. It’s an awful shame that choral singing, generally, has been a victim of this rotten affliction.

Still, at least I have my own private singing lessons to lift my spirits and pump some natural serotonin into the system, and these can be carried out very effectively via Zoom and Facebook.

I am not one of nature’s musical performers, but I was recommended by no less an authority than the Royal Brompton Hospital to practise singing. Singing exercises the bronchial and pulmonary area, and is frightfully good for the chest. So my regular sessions with Mrs Avril Gray, a wonderful operatic diva who retired to Deal, have kept me singing.

Lessons begin with breathing exercises, which involve stomach, arms, tongue and facial muscles. The ‘happy surprise’ facial expression and the arms stretched fully expanded over the head are strangely stimulating, and loosen up body and posture. Deep breaths and breath-holding precede scales, and then the singing itself begins. A professional singing teacher also finds even a note-specially-gifted singer’s natural range, encourages it and patiently expands it.

There are many reports of people feeling gloomier, lonelier and generally more wretched under the ‘new normal’, but I can truthfully say that every singing session has cheered me up.

It has also improved my health. For three winters now, I’ve had no chest infections, and I’d swear that singing strengthens the immune system.

Choral singing does pose problems of proximity but, once they get the ‘social distancing’ sorted, the habit of singing should be restored as a regular tonic.

It’s been a record year for migrants crossing the English Channel in rubber dinghies and other frail vessels. Up to mid-august, the toll was around 4,500 – five times what it was last year.

These refugees appear along the Kent coast, near my Deal home, at Dover, Folkestone, Dungeness, Walmer and elsewhere. You might expect these weekly appearances to be a talking point among residents of my local Channelside ports, but in my experience it is seldom an issue of local discussion.

This could just be an English thing about not being embarrassing. Or not being political. Or not wanting to seem hard-hearted on the one hand – since the picture of pregnant women washed up on a beach is pitiful – while not wanting to seem soppy about the cruel traffickers on the other.

And, in any case, the migrants are whisked away swiftly to be ‘processed’. So the problem becomes ‘invisible’.

The Dover MP, Natalie Elphicke, has her hands full, trying to coax the French to control things better. There is possibly more local discourse about whether Natalie’s ‘naughty Tory’ husband, ex-mp Charlie, should be condemned for improper frolicking with young ladies, or condoled with for paying rather a high price – divorced, disgraced and sentenced – for his misdemeanours.

Visitors hoping to do a legendary pub crawl in Ireland this summer will have been disappointed: many of the most famous pubs have been closed throughout the tourist season and it’s reckoned that a third, perhaps half, of Irish pubs won’t open again, according to the Vintner’s Association. From Dublin’s Brazen Head, established in 1198, to Belfast’s Crown Bar, adorned with stunning decorative tiles, hundreds have shut their doors.

This may presage a return to drinking in hotels – always considered more acceptable for ladies. Yet I fear that you-know-what has turned ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’ into a hostile place. I tried to go to Dublin in July, but was warned off by the Irish authorities as being a possible ‘spreader’. When I suggested that, legally, there’s a common travel area between Ireland and Britain, I got a shoal of abuse. ‘Stay away!’ ‘You’re not welcome!’ ‘Don’t dare travel here!’ A literally insular mentality seems to have taken hold.

There are two sides to the Irish character. One is the bonhomie associated with the pub. The other is the stern, puritanical side, quick to censure and to reprimand, and I fear the second collective personality is now dominant.

I collect German portmanteau words, which can so often express a complex situation in just one locution. My new discovery is zugzwang.

This is invoked in chess, meaning ‘a position in which every move is disadvantageous’. My German pen friend tells me it often means circumstances in which one is ‘under pressure to act’. But I like the chess definition better – it seems to define various situations I recognise, when, whatever choice might be available, it seems like a zugzwang!