On Whitehawk Hill | A Corona Diary, March 2020 – April 2021
Martyn Ford
Historical note
On the last day of January 2020 two Chinese nationals staying at an aparthotel in York tested positive for Coronavirus and became the first known cases in the UK. Ten days later, a man in Brighton was found to have the virus after attending a conference in Singapore. He had stopped off at a ski resort in France before returning to Sussex. The term ‘superspreader’ was taken up around this time. On 14th March the UK death toll from the virus reached 21. There was controversy around the government’s apparent aim to achieve ‘herd immunity’ in the population. On the same day, UK retailers jointly issued a statement calling on the public not to panic buy products such as pasta, toilet paper and hand sanitiser.
11th March 2020
Confirmation comes via his daughter Anna that Alastair’s 60th birthday party is going ahead after all. A ring around of friends reveals that two camps are forming already: the sombre voices that say, “Well, we’re not going. You know what it’ll be like – everybody crammed together talking, laughing, hugging too probably. I think we’ve got to take this thing seriously.” And the other camp, that we find ourselves in, who say … well, nothing, but who think (maybe): “Oh come on, life is full of risks. Do you mean you’re really going to stop seeing people, douse yourself in Dettol and stay indoors 24 hours a day?”
Nevertheless, this division has left us feeling uncomfortable, as if we were being judged for moral slackness.
13th March
To the Ropetackle, Shoreham, with Carla and Stuart, to see Danish acoustic duo Andreas Tophøj and Rune Barslund. In the bar beforehand, I get a call from Dave D. It’s hard to hear him for the babble of voices but, he has his serious voice on and he’s saying something about Cornwall and rising infection rates. I go behind a pillar and cup my hand over my other ear. I wonder why he’s phoned to tell me this, then realise what he’s saying: we have to abandon our trip there in June. I’m taken aback, but there’s no point arguing about it now. This is an over-reaction, surely? The booking’s confirmed and we probably won’t get our money back. Çi’s 60th birthday surprise aborted too. For what? It’s not as if we’d be mingling with the inhabitants of West Penwith – in our splendid isolation at Two Chimneys, the nearest other house 200 metres away. Why is everyone getting so panicky so quickly?
14th March
We’re looking across the channel (which has grown a lot wider since the start of the year) at what’s going on in Europe. Italy, in particular, because of our friends in the north. I’m struck by the extraordinary notion that you could tell an entire population to stay at home. Italians aren’t exactly famous for following the diktats of central government, yet from what we hear, they are doing just that (apart from the initial exodus from north to south when the stay-at-home message was first announced). People here seem very worked up about the situation, though the number of cases has been far fewer (21 deaths so far, I believe). This must have a lot to do with social media and 24-hour rolling news encouraging mass anxiety. Even we have had to stop ourselves from compulsively checking the latest updates, though in Çi’s case there’s a practical reason: she’s supposed to be flying to Istanbul next Friday.
Currently, flights to and from the UK are allowed; but by then, who knows? Her parents are being quite sensible about it: they aren’t worried about her bringing them the virus, but about her not being able to get back home afterwards – an improbable scenario I’d have thought. Many of her Turkish friends are more panicky (and silly, I think) – scores of WhatsApp messages flying back and forth congratulating each other on making their children wear face masks and self-isolate (!), and telling her, rather sanctimoniously, not to come, or that she’ll have to go into quarantine for a fortnight if she does (she’s only staying for a week). And there’ve been just five cases in the whole of the country!
Evening
To Al’s party, which is reassuringly crowded with old friends apparently determined to carry on as normal. Or perhaps like us they find the idea of leaving him high and dry on his 60th birthday with trays of unfilled glasses more troubling than any supposed risk to health. Greetings are shy and hesitant at first: should we hug or not? In the end most people do, laughing at this novel (and absurd) restraint. It feels like a necessary expression of solidarity, and something like defiance.
When I squeeze my way across the kitchen, which is elbow-to-elbow with the younger set, voices already raised beyond any hope of meaningful conversation, the first person I see is Paul S. I barely know him, but he greets me like a dear long-lost friend, and after a perfunctory exchange of shrugs, comes over and embraces me. The press of bodies is even denser when, later in the evening, Al takes up a position in the hall and in his best teacher’s voice makes a speech of welcome and thanks that carries into both reception rooms and to the back of their long kitchen. He warns us that he’s sure to cry, but doesn’t; his voice is steady and the speech is funny, warm and generous and our laughter heartfelt.
Sadness too is acknowledged, and it’s there on the faces of everyone listening, because this is also a speech of farewell. It’s nearly seven years since Sue died; the family home is up for sale now and Al has already re-located to County Durham, where he was born and brought up. I realise we may never see these rooms again and look around me at the faces of people we’ve known since the mid-nineties, whom we’ve met here at so many parties, only because of him and Sue. Sadness and the pain of loss are not driven out by present happiness, they co-mingle, and we still laugh but more seriously.
We’re here – some of us, anyway – for the last time, holding our glasses, smiling and listening intently, knowing the sad back story and wondering what she’d have made of all this. Our grown-up children. Party and plague. And this leave-taking.
Later, Çi tells me she didn’t try any of the food after she saw some of the younger guests eating straight out of the dishes with their forks.
I learn that the fear of crowds has a name: it’s called enochlophobia. Well, now at last enochlophobes around the world can come out (or rather, stay in) and say, with pride, This is our time!
Wednesday 18th March
I wake thinking about my barber, Luigi. A chain of associations lasting barely a second: wash hair? Did it. Length all right now. Luigi. A week ago, I was sitting begowned in one of his chairs while he snipped, combed and explained the rationale behind the Italian government’s severe measures restricting movement and forbidding gatherings. “It’s the only way to limit the effects. Really, Martyn. It’s what the British government should be doing now. And they probably will be doing it in another week or two.” He told me about a Facetime conversation with a friend in Turin, an exhausted doctor who had described the pressure they were under at his hospital, the shortage of beds and ventilators, the sight of people struggling for breath and even dying because they couldn’t be helped. At the time, I was still in my ‘Isn’t this all rather an overreaction?’ phase, wondering if Luigi’s vehemence was emotion overcoming reason. After all, his salon was still open, he was still cutting and styling a stream of customers from all over the town, any of whom might have the virus. And today, it comes to me: He will be closed now, for sure. I remember how he gently brushed my shoulders and the little exchange of amity that flowed between us, a blend of affection and regard that has developed over the last couple of years.
What are the implications for him of closing the salon? Most salon owners rent out chairs to other freelance stylists, but Luigi employs them and pays their salaries, including the young man who sweeps up and cleans the washbasins. Now they will be looking to him to be a caring boss and he, presumably, will be looking to a caring Chancellor.
It occurs to me that in a crisis like this (except there has never been a crisis like this before) the citizenry project ‘parent’ on to a leader, and will look to them, listen to them for paternal guidance. Habitual scorn gives way to something like respectful attention: You know best. You will tell us what to do. And leaders play the role: Boris Johnson wears a new, grave expression at the press briefings, standing at a lectern with the stark label nhs.uk/coronavirus on it. He is flanked by equally grave experts like Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance (no need for scornful quotes around that word ‘experts’ now!). Gone are the wisecracks, the buffoonery: the lids of the PM’s already hooded eyes are now steeple-sloped. The language too is dignified and grave to match the face: “a profound sense of urgency” “do whatever it takes to support…” “thousands of brilliant officials already working round the clock” and most of all, “We must act like any wartime government”. Much has been made of Johnson’s identification with his hero, Churchill, a comparison that’s inevitably evoked mockery from his opponents (us included); ironic, then, that so soon into his Premiership he seems to be having his Churchillian moment. Will he be equal to it?
On the Today programme the Business Secretary Alok Sharma adds detail to that “whatever it takes …”: £350 billion in loans to help companies, mortgage ‘holidays’, £20 billion in other aid. Vertiginous figures that take us back to the Labour Manifesto last December. But this time’s no one’s jeering that it’s all pie in the sky. Rather, they are saying, “What about renters? What about freelancers? And could you make those loans grants instead?” It’s a reminder of what many of us felt during the financial crisis of 2008 — what a strange thing money is. Nothing runs without it and yet it has no material existence – it’s an idea, a promise, an act of faith. Where exactly are these billions that will be disbursed? Will they be taken from somewhere else? Will the Chinese lend it to us at swingeing interest rates? Or will we raid the piggy bank of future generations? They won’t know after all – and we’ll be dead anyway. Is that how it works?
I do a quick inventory of my symptoms this morning: headache (medium to mild), discomfort and pressure in the nose and around the eyes (suggestive of sinusitis), nausea, the runs (mild). None of which are associated with Coronavirus. But I’m chesty too (no cough yet) which is slightly more troubling. At 10.30am I’m lying on the bed with my eyes closed, feeling already weary – not quite ill, but not quite well either. Decide that this is slacking and won’t do at all. Jump up and start the miserable process of trying again to resolve the cooker replacement problem. Find a number on the D&G website and phone with no expectation at all that anyone will answer. The normal rules of civil life are suspended; hardly anyone’s going to work; there’s panic buying in the supermarkets; troops may be called in: why should someone pick up the phone to answer a complaint about domestic appliance insurance? To my great surprise someone does.
My daughter Melis phones. She tells me she walked or ran 11 miles yesterday. And she’s still going in to work but avoiding public transport. We talk about empty shelves in the shops; she says it’s patchy in London, then switches to Facetime to show me live streaming of a Turkish shop in Hackney where there are abundant supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables and dairy products. But she’s surprised to see how many people are still travelling on buses and sitting in cafes. A popular take-away pizza place she passes still has its usual queue of people outside stretching along the pavement.
Take a morning walk down Elm Grove and experience a small sense of triumph at being able to buy a cinnamon bun from Flour Pot. But they’re no longer functioning as a sit-down café – the tables inside are gone and the queue for take-away feels more tense and urgent than usual (or is that my imagination?). Hilly Laine, the whole food grocer further down, still has a pretty good selection of fresh produce on the lean-to stall outside. The proprietor doesn’t encourage conversation, but today I risk a question. “Supplies still coming in all right?” He is only slightly more forthcoming than usual, and when I ask for a carton of oatmilk, he says “What – only one? Most people are buying whole multi-packs!” Then to the bottom of the road, where Luigi has his salon. To my surprise he is still there, clearly visible through the plate glass window, cutting someone’s hair. He sees me and beckons me in. We talk in Italian (it seems more discreet and I’m aware the pudgy red-faced man in the chair looking at us in the mirror).
Me: I’m surprised to find you still open.
Luigi: Believe me, I would prefer to close and I should close but, look, all the other barbers in the area are still open. If I close now, my customers will think, ‘Ah, Luigi’s infected!’
On the BBC News website the first six stories are all Corona-related. They range from the very sombre “EU seals borders” to the inadvertently comical, like “Gin distillery switches production to hand sanitiser”. (Come to think of it, we have no hand sanitiser but have four half-full bottles of gin. We might be reduced to washing our hands with the stuff.) Another troubling headline: “What are supermarkets doing about panic buying?” Yesterday my sister told me a cheering story about a young female employee at her local M&S coming up to her and saying discreetly, “Would you like some toilet rolls?” “What’s all this about toilet rolls,” my sister replied, innocently. “Oh, I don’t know, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it!” said the girl, “But I can get you some if you like.” And she went behind the scenes and brought out four rolls for her.
An email pings into my inbox announcing the cancellation of the entire Brighton Festival. I pause to try to digest the enormity of that alone, for so many people in so many organisations. My imagination fails me.
Friday 20th March
I sit on the bed going through what documents and information we might need for the telephone appointment about our wills. Find a list I made of the music I’d like played at my funeral (which will not feature in the consultation!) Rewrite it and feel rather pleased with the resulting balance of dark and less dark. The Sanctus from Fauré’s Requiem, Crossing the Bar by the Spooky Men’s Chorale, Out of this World by Loudon Wainwright III, Now until the break of day from the last part of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Passacaglia della Vita by Stefano Landi – an upbeat and spirited memento mori that chimes with the times. I think I’d like it played at the end, as mourners are filing out looking forward to that first drink –
O come t’inganni
Se pensi che gli anni
Non hanno a finire
Bisogna morire
Bisogna morire, bisogna morire
It could be printed in the order of service, with a translation. It’s quite an earworm, so perhaps some of them will sing it again later and stop feeling so damned smug about having outlived me.
I text Melis and Kerim to ask for their consent to be executors. They are uncharacteristically prompt in their replies (affirmative of course). I wonder if the request, which came out of the blue (are they even familiar with the concept of ‘executor’?), set them wondering about our mortality, or theirs?
We all think about death and how it will be to die. Don’t we? It was certainly a major preoccupation when I was young. But then it was less about dread and more about curiosity and fascination. There were periods I thought a great deal about suicide. I don’t believe I ever got close to the act itself, but there was that sense that it was always there, in the dark recesses of a drawer, like an insurance policy you hope and trust you will never need to claim on.
I picture 33 Palmeira Mansions this morning – in darkness, its doors locked. The English Language Centre, where I worked for more than 17 years, which, apart from Christmas holidays, has been open continuously since 1964. And wonder about the fate of most of its teachers, the long-term temps who keep the place running. I suppose the Chief Executive and Board of Governors will try to keep on as many as they can, doing some tuition through an online learning platform on courses that were interrupted by Covid 19. But what chance of new enrolments in the present climate of anxiety and financial insecurity? For them or for any business that depends on international travel?
Çi told me yesterday that Pret à Manger are offering free coffee to NHS workers. Not to be outdone, Dominoes have upped the stakes with an offer of free pizza.
She speaks of her concern about the little OT kitchen at the hospital, which she and her colleagues cram into at lunchtime, and the inconsistencies in the whole notion of self-isolation and social distancing. Health workers can’t avoid contact with patients or with colleagues who are caring for patients, can’t know whether they are bringing the virus in to the hospital or carrying it out with them when they go home. If they self-isolate because they have symptoms, they put extra pressure on the service bringing it closer to collapse; but if they go in to work and do indeed have the virus they will infect more patients and colleagues also bringing the service closer to collapse!
Currently the practice of social distancing seems beyond most of us: at Flour Pot the counter is about three feet from the door, and about four feet from the shop window with the display of bread. Yesterday our small queue was squeezed into a quarter of the area of the shop. A tall man next to me whom I took an instinctive dislike to (there was a certain swagger to him) poked about amongst the bread, wrapped and unwrapped. A woman in the queue recognised him and they started chatting. “Of course, you’ve had it, haven’t you?” she said. The man smirked complacently. “Yeah, you could say I was an early adopter. Not exactly pleasant – I mean I couldn’t have run up Elm Grove, let’s put it like that – but got over it pretty quickly.”
I left the shop with a large brown sourdough – unusually for me, the plastic-wrapped variety.
All the retailers expect you to pay contactless now. I would have tutted inwardly at that, only a few days ago, but there are higher priorities now than holding on (literally) to the material expressions of our national, fiscal and cultural identity. Presumably this will only hasten the death of cash (‘real money’), which is already ailing and about as salient in the lives of most millennials as fountain pens or CDs. Before long, our legal tender will be relegated to the status of collectors’ item, like first-day cover postage stamps.
No evidence of panic buying at Infinity Foods: millet, mung beans, freekeh and keffir don’t yet provoke fighting in the aisles. There’s still an abundance of grains and pulses and the sort of produce you can’t, try as you might, ever imagine turning into actual food.
So what to do next? No more brain stuff, please, like writing or reading or listening attentively to yet another speculative studio discussion about the behaviour of pandemics or the aims of the Chancellor’s multi-billion-pound rescue package. Will this be the day when yet more stringent social distancing measures are introduced? Perhaps I should get outside for a walk while the getting is good? But grey skies and cold wind discourage. Maybe later. Clean the house? It certainly needs it. But no… it doesn’t feel quite urgent enough. Cooking? Always a good distraction with a clear end-result. I inspect the scarred, battered aubergines, flaccid courgettes and three spongy potatoes I got at Infinity and decide it should be a moussaka, of sorts. Then recall that’s a baked dish and we don’t have an oven. Bad luck it didn’t get fixed before all this malarkey. If the planned delivery of the new cooker on Monday is aborted, we could be like this for months: four gas burners but no roasting or baking. Scarcely a hardship in the current circumstances, and perhaps a spur to more creative cookery. Or should we just give in and get a microwave and live on ready meals, assuming we can find any?
At midday the post plops onto the hall mat: Occupational Therapy News and the Tate Members’ Guide for April-May. The latter is a puzzle since my membership lapsed last month and all the Tate Galleries have been closed to the public. I expect to find inside the envelope an insert saying BECAUSE OF THE NEW MEASURES ARISING FROM THE COVID-19 VIRUS… but nothing. Just the pre-planned events, like the massive Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern, Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain and Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives, none of which – perhaps – will ever be seen. I suppose it was too late to stop the mail out. Or did they think, “Oh well, at least let them read wistfully about what they would have been able to enjoy”?
I try to imagine the Director, Maria Balshaw, at this very moment. What is she doing? Not at home making chutney for sure. Perhaps she’s chairing a crisis meeting with the management teams of the various arms of the vast organisation; or if that’s not socially distant enough, at her desk in London taking call after agitated call from staff, artists, curators and patrons and having to repeat patiently to each the same words, “We don’t know yet, how or when…”.
P.M. The young woman at MW Solicitors, Brighton, emails to call off the telephone appointment to re-do our wills, saying she is going home because she feels unwell. “I don’t think it’s anything serious, but…etc.” Asks if we could do it next week instead. I wonder if I might go and die in the meantime with Kerim still not named in my will.
Sunday 22nd March
Churches are closed and services are being live-streamed via Facebook. Even God is online these days. As part of a national day of prayer and action, The Archbishop of Canterbury has asked people to place a lighted candle in their windows at 7pm. As I do so, I peer up and down Whippingham Road: the street is silent and deserted: only lines of parked cars like hibernating tortoises. No one will see our lit candle; and we will not go out and see anybody else’s. Does a gesture, a ritual have meaning, even if no one else witnesses it? (It is the branch falling unheard in the forest problem.) It has meaning, presumably, if God sees it.
And we see our own flame if we glance up from our screens or books, and are soothed vaguely by its corona of hazy light against the black window pane. Corona again. That word. The long association between religious worship and candles. Light bulbs and LEDs don’t do it. It’s the business of lighting them and the fact they burn down or can be snuffed out, or blown out suddenly by a puff of wind: the symbolism of all that.
Monday 23rd March
Febrile is the obvious word to reach for when trying to convey the current mood. Too obvious, perhaps. I think we should reserve it for its literal meaning, Having or showing the symptoms of a fever. From Latin febris ‘fever’. It’s too useful now to waste in mere metaphor. For now, let’s use agitated to describe the state of mind where most of us are almost continuously texting, emailing, WhatsApping, Facetiming and even, God help us, Facebooking each other to share feelings, opinions and questions about this strange new reality and finding ourselves suddenly in the blinding spotlight of history. Thirty years ago we would have had the telephone in the hall, or if we were less fortunate the telephone box at the end of the street. Or we’d have written a letter!
Talking of words, how quickly we’ve got used to the vocabulary of this crisis: self-isolation; social distancing, hand sanitiser, ventilators, key workers, non-essential contact. At the end of every year, Oxford Dictionaries announce their choice of the word which is “judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.” In 2019 it was climate emergency, in 2018 toxic, in 2016 post-truthand in 2015, scandalously, the face with tears of joy emoji. Not hard to guess the candidates for 2020. Unless of course we have more profound social and economic shocks still to come that will spawn their own neologisms.
I notice that ‘herd immunity’ has already been quietly dropped from public discourse as policy moves at an ever-quickening pace. Fated perhaps to be a phrase that was ‘famous for fifteen minutes’.
8.30pm. The Prime Minster addresses the nation on television. It’s estimated that 23 million people watch the broadcast. We are all ‘enlisted’, he says, in the fight against the virus. Military metaphors abound in discussions of this crisis, which is hardly surprising.
A few days ago I heard a commentator on the radio wonder, “Will the man who aspired to be a latter-day Churchill end up as a latter-day Chamberlain?” An easy hit, perhaps, but many will have had the same thought. Tonight, there was no air of appeasement towards Covid-19; it was the anticipated “stay at home” message and the assurance of sanctions to enforce it. But already there are mutterings: They should have done this two weeks ago!
Has a population in a modern democratic society ever before been commanded not to go out and not to associate with others?
The awareness that you are living through not just history (that’s always true) but one of history’s chapter titles.
Peter Hennessy interviewed on the radio a few days ago thought that in the future we will divide this period of history into BC and AC.
Another word ‘new to prominence’ is going the rounds: lockdown.
Tuesday 24th March
A couple of days ago all the Apple stores closed. I lay in bed this morning thinking, Now Çiğdem won’t be able to replace the dying battery in her phone (to which she is as attached as a pacemaker to an arrythmic heart); and then – My God, Capitalism has stopped!
Anxiously waiting for Hotpoint to phone back about the replacement cooker delivery which was aborted on Monday. Then realising This is pathetic! The leader of the nation announces a state of emergency and a cessation of almost all economic and recreational activity (something my parents never experienced even during the Second World War) and here I am fretting about a faulty cooker. So much for unworldly detachment! So much for ‘the years that bring the philosophic mind’!
When my grandchildren ask me “What did you do in the Great Pandemic, grandpa?” I shall have to say, “Well, I spent most of it on the phone to Hotpoint/Whirlpool Home Delivery concerning the replacement of a dual fuel cooker under the Domestic & General Appliance Cover Plan. It involved a degree of stress you young people can barely imagine. Hey, steady on – save a few of those wild roots and berries for your poor old grandpa!”
It’s sunny spring weather for the first day of the ‘lockdown’. Yesterday’s cold wind has softened to a cool breeze. I change from winter to spring anorak for my walk up to Whitehawk Hill. There’s a hazy line where the sea meets the sky – a sfumato effect that conveys tranquillity. (Why does it?) Below, the bowl in the landscape that contains Whitehawk. From up here, on the side of this hill, basking in the afternoon sunshine, it belies its fearsome reputation. There are plenty of walkers out in ones, twos, small groups (‘members of the same household’) but the space is wide as we pass on the strip of grass that runs alongside the racetrack. Seagulls glide easily on the air currents keening urgent messages not for the likes of us. The crows are raucous and cross-sounding, absorbed in their own drama. The thought comes to me: Nature is ‘taking back control’.
Here on this grassy bank beside Manor Road, sitting on an old concrete post with a metal plaque on it that reads: RACE GROUND 105 • 0 • 30, I am almost alone. Today feels like a bank holiday, but one taken on credit which will have to be paid off with interest. I read again the information board about Whitehawk Camp, a ‘causewayed enclosure’ dating back to the Neolithic age. It’s 500 years older than Stonehenge. I can’t read the estimated date because it’s obliterated by a huge smear of dried seagull shit. At that moment a young couple pass me (at a safe distance) descending the hill, and I hear him say to the girl, Shitehawk Hill!
People are still working out the rules and rituals of social distancing. When you pass someone on a pavement, (as I just did on Freshfield Road, with a man who smiled amiably and returned my greeting), it’s a challenge to maintain the two metres of distance without walking into the road. You don’t want to scare the other person by getting too close nor incur a risk yourself; on the other hand, there is a powerful taboo against veering away from someone to give them a wide berth. It implies I don’t like the look of you and feels like shunning, which is such a negative behaviour. So you slow down, step aside, smile in a way you hope looks reassuring and walk in the gutter.
25th March
Walking out into this familiar neighbourhood aware that strange new conditions and behaviours prevail here. A Day of the Triffids atmosphere –
‘It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.’
The few people I see are quiet and compliant. Outside Flour Pot I’m in a queue of one – in front of me a woman and her toddler are being served bread while I wait outside pulling faces for the child with goldilocks curls who is clutching a teddy bear, smiling back and pointing at something I can’t see. The mother turns and smiles at me too, apologises for keeping me waiting. Naturally I smile back and say it doesn’t matter at all and isn’t it all so strange? Inside the bakery: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE COUNTER and WE NOW SELL EGGS. The girl behind the counter (which is now doubling as a defensive barrier) tries to interest me in their new range of preserves. I’m afraid I can’t concede yet that there’s a place in this world for strawberry and black pepper jam.
Much the same at Hilly Laine: a woman waiting on the pavement beside a palette stacked high with tins and packets wrapped in thick polythene sheeting. The quantity is reassuring – more there than I can imagine them ever accommodating in that tiny shop. I stand behind her at what I judge to be a respectable distance. We nod at each other, and she says, with an endearing embarrassment: “We’re compliant, aren’t we!”
A quiet triumph in small purchases: one head of broccoli, one red pepper, four spindly carrots.
The stream of analgesic pop on Co-op Store Radio is interrupted from time to time by a young voice with an uncharacteristically moralistic message for us customers: “Think of others before you buy. Let’s pull together for our community!”
The rest of the morning spent attempting to navigate the Mutual Aid Covid-19 Facebook groups for this community: scores of posts on the Hanover/ Elm Grove page, even more replies to posts, links to useful sites, free online concerts, photos, home videos, kids’ artwork, offers of free sausage rolls and gluten-free flour. An abundance of goodwill, but I left it feeling overwhelmed. Wanting someone simply to say, “Look, this is how you can help…”
A new awareness of just what little space many of our public spaces afford. Retailers conscientiously attempt to mark it out with tape on the floor, improvised barriers of string.
When I got my turn to go the check-out, a bizarre ritual ensued: the cashier said, “Put your basket down and I’ll step back.” Then, “Now you step back and I’ll scan the items.” Then, “I’ll step back and you pack the shopping.” Then, “How do you want to pay? Contactless? OK, I’ll step back and you pay with your card.” Then, “Do you want a receipt?” I said yes and he handed it to me, both of us breaching the cordon sanitaire (and could I trust that receipt?) I say to him, “You’re doing a great job!” He smiles back with a kind of weary appreciation. I move off and notice that I’m scratching my eyebrow. I probably shouldn’t do that. Touching your face is discouraged. Perhaps soon it’ll even be proscribed. I try to imagine the policing of that. Probably the Chinese have got it nailed already.
A bus pulls up at the bottom of Elm Grove. It’s habitual for people to huddle quite close as they wait to board, and the driver is exposed to all of them. This one turns his head and sneezes loudly, twice. Fortunately, in the other direction, through his cab window.
The sudden salience of hand hygiene in our daily lives. A ritual purification that looks like becoming as habitual for us as Wudhu before prayer is for Muslims. I think of the Co-op door handle I touched, the handles of the plastic shopping basket I used and left behind for the next customer. Back home I wash my hands slowly and carefully as instructed. Then hang up my house keys and think, ‘Oh, maybe they’re contaminated, and I should wash them too. And then wash my hands again. And what about my mobile phone?’ The next minute I’m at the sink wiping it with a piece of wettened kitchen roll. A smear of water slides under the protective plastic screen, spreading out like a contagion. “Water damage!” I think. The same thing that caused my last phone to be written off, barely a month ago.
Chalk graffiti on the wall outside the General Hospital on Elm Grove. Large well-formed letters, no spelling mistakes: THANKS SO MUCH TO ALL OUR AMAZING NHS WORKERS XXX. Slightly undermined for me by the PS – STAY SAFE SHARE THE LOVE
Back on Race Hill watching the corvids (another strange lexical affinity!). It’s their terrain now, not ours. We have become the untenable tenants here. Perhaps before much longer we shall be evicted. Those strutting crows remember Whitehawk Camp, the Causewayed Enclosure, back in Neolithic times. They had the same two integral tools then – beak and claw – as today. We have rather more, and hope that they will enable us to go on living.
The Coronavirus is now By Royal Appointment: the heir to the throne has tested positive.
I should have started earlier in collecting news headlines about the crisis. Two from today:
How to Carry On Dating When You’re Social Distancing
Argentina Makes Tooth Fairy Exempt From Lockdown.
I get another automated text from Park Crescent Health Centre saying, with more than a hint of alarm: DO NOT COME TO THE SURGERY! It’s like our cooker saga, but with your mind and body as the faulty appliance you can’t get fixed.
The sparrows are in a state of high excitement in front and back gardens, cheeping and squabbling. Another week or two and the cherry tree next door will be in bloom. I find a sunny spot in the back garden and sit there drinking in the prettiness of the spring, and realise I could spend the whole day writing about this alone.
26th March 2020
Mutual Aid Brighton phone me about an old lady in the neighbourhood who is frail and self-isolating, who needs a bit of shopping. The caller warns me that she’s very deaf. I can’t for the moment think how they got my number, whose list I am on and for what, but am glad to have the chance to help. She is very deaf, and I have to bellow (though her voice remains soft and modulated throughout).
To my surprise, there is only a very short queue in the Co-op and – small miracle – I succeed in getting everything she asked for (a poignantly short list of items for a stew “that will last me the week”.) Her name is Margaret and she lives in one of the flats in Langbridge Court. I buzz her number to be let into the building. There’s what looks like an office inside but away from the public behind two walls of glass – a woman at a desk looking into a computer screen. Nothing resembling a reception area. I take the lift to a first-floor corridor and find the right door. A small plastic bag with the money in it is on the floor as arranged. As I set the bag of shopping down I catch a glimpse of her in the doorway – a woman in a dressing gown and slippers, wild white hair loose to her shoulders, a walking stick in one hand, the other holding a handkerchief over her mouth (no protection against Covid-19 of course but a gesture meant to reassure both of us perhaps). There’s a brief exchange of words and thanks; I’m not sure if she hears me. I wonder what state her flat is in. She told me on the phone that she sleeps a lot of the day.
Returning home up Whippingham Road I walk into the road to give space to a man and small child coming down. He acknowledges this with a smile and thanks. I notice that the postman is at the top of our steps and, encouraged by the conviviality that has arisen between strangers negotiating this peculiar new reality of social distancing, I greet him cheerfully. I’m about to say, “You’re doing a great job!” – as I said to the check-out person at the Co-op yesterday – but as I draw near, he shouts, “Stay there! Let me come down!” I stop dead, “Oh I was only going to…” He looks panicked. “I’m doing a job here – you need to let me pass!” He’s holding a large padded envelope in his hand, too large for our letter box perhaps. “Yes, I know, it’s just that I live here and I thought perhaps that packet was for me.”
“Well, it isn’t! I need space to pass!”
Afterwards I reflect that perhaps it’s a sign the government message is sinking in: stay at home, or if you do have to go out, keep a distance of 2 metres between you and the next person (the postman was demanding 12 metres). Last week there were news stories about people gathering in parks and beauty spots, on beaches and camp sites to socialise and enjoy the unexpected ‘holiday’.
Max Hastings interviewed on The World at One (BBC Radio 4). Chiding his (our) generation who have been the most privileged in history and yet have been selfish, fighting against any encroachment on that privilege (resisting paying for TV licences after the age of 75 and not wanting to contribute to the cost of our old age care). He warns of the terrible economic impact of the measures being taken for the next generation and the one after. In his view, economic activity has to be resumed as soon as possible, for their sake, even if it imperils him and his age group (70 +). I don’t lie awake at night thinking about me or my wife, or about us dying – I think about what we’re bequeathing or not bequeathing to our children and our grandchildren, and I’m terrified. There’s a cost for everything and the cost of this is stupendous. But we’re a very sentimental people; the compassion culture has taken hold; we don’t face the fact that all these stupendous sums of spending that are coming up… they’ve got to be paid for by somebody!
Flour Pot have started selling flowers. Well, just tulips – yellow, mauve, lipstick red, standing in metal buckets on the terrace outside the shop. I buy a bunch for Julia and a miniature carrot cake in a miniature cardboard box, and a small sourdough loaf for us. It comes to £13.40. Are they profiteering from the situation? Are those tulips a discounted buy-out from some poor florist who’s had to close? Julia is stuck at home because of her cancer diagnosis, hoping to keep her appointment on Friday about starting chemo. Or hoping not to.
I knock at her door and quickly retreat to the other side of the road. She appears in her dressing gown (is that the new wig she’s wearing?). I shout across, explaining the box and the flowers; she looks disorientated and not entirely pleased. Walking back, I wonder if I have misjudged: perhaps she can’t eat sweet things, and flowers have that association with sickness and hospitals. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be reminded of that right now.
8.00. The clap for the NHS in streets and squares all over the country. I’d been dubious about this, I admit: ‘This may be fine in Naples or Barcelona, but it’s just not British.’ In the event we both went out onto our step and, sure enough, Whippingham Road, which has been deathly quiet all week, came alive with neighbours, all of us looking up and down our street, applauding, cheering, whistling, full of wonder at seeing it behave so out of character. And of course, a lump came to my throat.
Friday 27th
The tourism body VisitBrighton has changed the name on its Twitter account to DoNotVisitBrighton. Some wag has added the comment “StayAtHove”.
Before work, Çi takes advantage of the early shopping hour for NHS and care-workers. She reports afterwards that the lines were ragged and it was impossible to maintain the required distance (“People don’t even realise what 2 metres is!”). Also, of course, shoppers have to queue down the aisles to get to the checkouts, and there are two problems with that: first, others still filling their baskets have to squeeze past to take goods from the shelves; second, the little gap at the end of the aisle, which must be left clear for others to pass, provides an opportunity for the ruthless to sneak in and jump the queue. Which is exactly what happened.
Breakthrough of a sort on the cooker front. The new appliance is to be delivered today.
I had to declare that no-one in the house is self-isolating. (How could they check?). But because of the new restrictions they’re not going to connect it. That means we’ll have two cookers in our small kitchen, one partly functional the other still in its packaging. But – another small miracle – Çi has found a gas engineer, the partner of a colleague in her team of OTs and OT Assistants, who is willing to do it, willing, presumably, to bend the rules and perhaps risk his own health. On the phone to him I expressed my worry about how we’ll dispose of the old appliance. “Oh, it shouldn’t be a problem,” he says breezily. “Can you give me a hand?” “Oh. Yes, of course.”
Why did I say that? The thing is monstrous – it must weigh a ton. There are seven steps from the front door to the pavement; there are steps inside the house. I’m a ten-stone weakling of 71 and I’ve already got lower back pain. What am I thinking of?
Email to customers from Henry Butler Wine Cellar, sounding frazzled. They’re not taking any more orders online until next week. “My team need to catch up, go shopping, speak to family, rest and recuperate this weekend. Their well-being is my priority.” The tone is almost resentful. “You bunch of selfish wine bibbers – is that all you can think about – guzzling another bottle of my Albino Rocca Barbaresco Cotta (£52.99)? Don’t you realise the pressures that wine retailers are under? Spare a thought for our delivery driver, risking his life to keep you pissed throughout this crisis.”
An interesting detail in the new government regulations about who can carry on trading and who can’t: a few days after the list was announced it was updated to include off-licenses. Instead of Let them eat cake, it’s Let them drink wine.
On World at One today the advice of a man who lives in isolation with his family on the island of Gometra in the Inner Hebrides. It’s all right, he said, to find yourself talking to a fence post or to the wind (and there’s a lot of wind on Gometra). He learnt this from his father who fought in The Falklands War and told him, “Down there on South Georgia it’s OK to talk to the penguins; the time to worry is when they start talking back to you.” He said of a day on Gometra that if you managed to accomplish one thing, then it counted as a good day. It’s all about adjusting expectations and pace. I thought: Now is the time, if ever there was, to draw on one’s reserves of those ancient virtues of patience, charity, forgiveness, humility, even cheerfulness (though not sure that’s one of the ancient ones). One can only hope not to open that particular cupboard and find the shelves bare.
It’s probably a good idea not to begin sentences (spoken or thought) with, “I wish….”
Çiğdem told me of an incident at the hospital when she was sitting in one of the wards writing up her notes. There was music playing over the loudspeakers and the song YMCA came on. At one point she glanced up and noticed that an elderly man in one of the beds opposite her was moving his arm up and down to the chorus –
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA,
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
She smiled across, thinking “How nice. In spite of his situation he’s getting into the music, enjoying the rhythm…” But then she looked a little closer and realised all was not well. She jumped up and called the Ward Clerk, who called the duty nurse. The man was having a seizure. She assisted at the bedside but couldn’t do much more than open an oxygen mask and put it on the patient, while the nurse got to work.
After lunch, a semi-licit walk with my business partner, Peter, in Dyke Road Park. Much weaving and tacking to windward; I am the stricter, occasionally telling him to back off a bit. He is very much bereft of consolations: all his many activities – Saturday football, evenings at the pub, lunches out, U3A events and groups, his folk club night on Thursdays, visits to his friend Patti — all of it stopped! Not to mention our business, which occupied at least a third of his time. He’s not a great reader; true, he can watch TV, but it was sport he liked best and of course there’s none of that going on. To his credit he says, “Whenever I begin to feel sorry for myself, I think of that woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, stuck in an Iranian gaol, enduring goodness knows what. And I think, ‘if she can put up with that, then surely I can put up with self-isolation in a comfortable heated flat in Hove, with daily exercise, nice food to eat and wine to drink.’”
We find a bench in the sun and take it in turns to sit there. Presumably not good to touch a public bench. Do woolly gloves help? And when I come to a pedestrian crossing now, I press the button with the joint of my second finger (making a mental note to give that an extra scrub when I get back at home). I’m conscious that this is probably on the same level as throwing a pinch of spilt salt over your shoulder to catch the Devil in the eye and put him off his stride.
We discuss whether our publishing business will revive after this is over or whether the hit to international travel and tourism will be so hard and so sustained that we – as one tiny organism on a gigantic host – will just fade away unnoticed.
When I do get home there’s news that the Prime Minister has tested positive for the virus, as has the Health Secretary.
