Skating on black ice

It struck me last night that anyone reading my blips recently from some future standpoint - perhaps a researcher into the social history of the pandemic - might wonder at the apparently carefree existence followed by this daft woman who wrote endlessly about walks and baubles while the entire world seemed to be skating on the very thin ice of survival. So apart from explaining that my beautiful blue sky was shining on sheets of treacherous black ice wherever there was a smooth surface (ie not grass or pebbles) so that we had the most frustrating of walks and ended up on the pavement at Kilmun in order to feel we'd had a leg-stretch before we went home (my extra for today) I'm not going to talk any more about that...

However, the fact is that our lives at the moment are only slightly inconvenienced by all that's going on. Not doing my own shopping means that I don't know why we have no coriander or fish this week, and the travel and meeting people ban means no family and no hairdresser, to say nothing of no winter sun abroad. But daily life is, essentially, the life of the retired - a life in which you have to make a framework for yourself, or find one into which to slot. You have to concoct some reason not to stay in bed all morning, or not to slob around in your dressing-gown till lunchtime; you have to do things that give structure and meaning to the day so that by the time evening comes it's still a pleasure - and it is - to sit down with a glass of wine and a nice dinner, and not just the space between sunset and bedtime.

But it strikes me that this is something I've known since childhood, this need to make days count. Because I had this strange literary life, with parents who quoted Shakespeare and Browning as though it was just a part of everyday discourse, I knew from primary school that "If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work" - so it was obviously partly a function of my upbringing. I do, however, remember all through my life the pang almost of panic if a day felt pointless. 

Because I have inherited my parents' way of integrating other people's words into my thoughts, I have to mention at this point that I'm thinking of a poem, Next Please, by Philip Larkin, and his take on our habit of saying "Till then..." , because we are "always too eager for the future." If ever that were true for me, it's now, as we wait for our Covid_19 vaccine, wondering when and which and how. It made it seem just a little bit more real, this idea that we'd be vaccinated, with the arrival through the door of the Scottish Government/NHS Scotland glossy leaflet telling us to be patient and wait our turn because we'd be called, and explaining possible ill effects. I have stashed it safely, more like a talisman than anything else.

And then there's politics (there are politics?) Tonight I saw Michael Gove on the news, telling us how he told us already that there would be teething problems before we moved onto the glorious sunlit uplands of Brexit freedom (ok, I tarted that bit up a bit, but that's what he meant.) I wanted so badly to give him a slap ... And I found myself worrying about the transition to sane government in the USA, hoping that they protect the incoming administration from the lunatics who seem to have taken over the streets of Washington. 

So what am I doing now to try to introduce some meaning into my life? Now that my singing is reduced once again to recording a couple of hymns a week? Well, I'm thinking of doing a series of online poetry study workshops - like a senior literature class - which immediately made me feel more energised just thinking about it. And there's always the memoirs of my early, post-war childhood to get back to ... or does retreating into childhood send out the wrong signal? 

Do we still send wrong signals?