In the immortal words of Rick from Casablanca, ‘I never make plans that far ahead’. Actually, that’s not entirely true. But I’m conscious today, as I have been for the last few days, that setting myself any kind of commitment or expectation feels unnecessary, uncalled for. Unfair on my future self who’ll have to act on it.
Today, I just don’t want to. And that feels like something to pay attention to.
Oh, I have a growing list of things I want to do When It’s Safe To Do So: ‘go to the cinema and watch more films’ and ‘take actual skating lessons’. Will that be in 2021? I hope so, but I’m not going to pin a year to it. I have plenty of vague thoughts about ‘more piano practice’ and ‘showing up to morning prayer’ and ‘finishing the next book, maybe in time for Christmas’, and other things like that. But the thing about things like that is that I’ve been adding more and more of those. It feels like time to stop. I expect the ones I really want to do something with, I’ll do something with.
So, as things stand, with three days left of 2020, my only commitment for 2021, is to make space. And that feels like plenty.
Didn’t we do this just a few days ago? No, not quite. Well, has anything changed between then and now?
Yes. An eleventh hour Brexit deal. A lousy one, admittedly, but so much better than the alternative. And, it turns out, for me, better than the eleven months of things being more or less the same as they’d always been but knowing they were about to come to a screeching and painful halt. Well, you’ve been through this year, too. You know about that grim, resigned, fatalist waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop, wondering how and whether what’s going to happen next can turn out to be anything other than awful, wanting things to be different, goodness knows, but maybe not given how awful they might end up being…
2020 has taught me about change.
I wrote earlier this month about my self of eleven years ago and her inability, or stubborn refusal, to imagine that things might possibly get any better than they were. I’ve been thinking about the landscapes I’ve lived in, the way they’re shaped by time and tide, of how human intervention can only hold back so much of that process. It took me a little while to make the link with Goldengrove unleaving: a lot of this year’s depressive funk seems to have come from the realisation of my own mortality. Today I’ve been given occasion to remember my sixteen year old self, how resistant she was to change, how insistent on holding everything she could (precious little) in place, while all the while everything went on changing around her. This year I’ve felt just as helpless; it’s just been on a bigger scale.
This year, we’ve been sitting in this strange stasis, waiting. Waiting and hoping, waiting and dreading. I’ve hardly been travelling hopefully, but goodness knows I haven’t wanted to arrive, either. I haven’t wanted to know the news. And yet, when I’ve looked, it’s been awful, but not universally awful.
Will I remember this, next time I get stuck? Probably not, going on past form. Will I ever learn how to let myself imagine that things might change for the better? I fear that I might not. And yet it’s been the signs of change that have been the most comfort to me.
I am not a great one for slippers. I generally go barefoot, assuming it’s warm enough; slippers are more a way to save my socks when it’s not. I’ve tended to find fluffy moccasins too sweaty (it came as something of a revelation when I tried wearing them with socks and found them deliciously cosy). The ones shown here – purchased, as best I can remember, at a car boot sale in Exeter some time in the early 2000s – are spectacular; they’re also a little too small for me, so that the ends of my heels hang off the back, and the soles are a little slippery on tiles. Nevertheless. I don’t think I’m ever going to find the perfect pair of slippers for me, so I’m going to enjoy the imperfect ones.
One year ago, I was somewhere in Bedfordshire, or Buckinghamshire, or possibly Hertfordshire, visiting in-laws and in-laws’ in-laws. I’d taken the train straight up there from London, and I think we all hopped straight into the car and went to pick up my stepmother-in-law’s brother and then all went to see her brother. There was a lot of travelling that afternoon, anyway. No planes (I haven’t flown since 2007), but trains and automobiles, by all means.
This year, not so much.
It occurred to me earlier just how much travelling there is in the Gospel accounts of the nativity. Mary, going to the hill country to visit Elizabeth. Mary and Joseph, travelling to Bethlehem. Or from Bethlehem to Egypt. The Magi, travelling from the east, via Jerusalem. Even the shepherds go even unto Bethlehem to see this thing that is come to pass. The Gospels disagree about who travels where, but they both agree there’s a lot of travelling. Matthew and Luke, both knowing that Bethlehem is important, both knowing they’ve got to get everybody there somehow, but not sure whether to start them off there and move them to Nazareth later or throw in a census to get them out of Nazareth. I sympathise.
As my Playmobil crib figures hop from bookshelf to bookshelf, traversing the length of the sitting room, I don’t seem to be going very much further myself. This evening I’m travelling vicariously with NORAD Santa. In a normal year I’d be clocking up over a hundred miles every weekday. That all ground to a halt in the middle of March. Actually, I hadn’t done so badly. Work had sent me to Manchester, and then I managed a dash to Bristol for what must have been one of the last full-scale weddings. I’d gone north. I’d gone west. South would come later.
I’m sad not to be seeing people. My in-laws are in tier 4 now; we’ll be in it ourselves from Boxing Day; and such of my family as wasn’t in tier 4 will be moving from tier 1 to tier 3. This isn’t such a wrench as it has been for some people, as we’ve done Christmas on our own before. And goodness knows I’m well off compared to the poor hauliers waiting at Dover. It’s more the not knowing when I will see people again.
this time is reminding me very much of my childhood: all the household is at home all the time; there are columbines and copper beech and swelling fruit in the garden; I can hear a cock crowing. Encountering civilisation is a bit of a palaver. I spend most of my time barefoot. Going on holiday is a very remote possibility and will be the Isle of Wight if it ever does happen. People who I love very much are a long way away from where I am, and there’s no prospect of seeing them soon.
I did make it to the Isle of Wight; my middle brother drove up with his fiancée and picked me up. And the journey was the way they always used to be: leaving very early in the chill of a clear summer morning that’s going to be hot later, heading south through long shadows.
Until we got to the ferry terminal, where they were still advertising the Isle of Wight Festival which was never going to happen this year, and there was another brother in the queue…
Soon, soon, we’ll be able to do all that again. And it’s worth waiting for.
Sparkling. Sparkling wine (no, only the non-alcoholic stuff). Sparkling water (no, can’t stand it). Sparkling conversation (not tonight, I’m too tired). Sparkling wit (see above).
The lights our neighbours have in their tree? No, those twinkle rather than sparkle. Same for the stars, not that you can see them tonight. Candles glow. Our Christmas tree isn’t decorated yet. I suppose I could show you any one of several pairs of earrings, including the ones I’m wearing now (miniature stockings, with a sparkly trim). But what would I say about them?
Sparkling. Sparkling implies movement. It implies that something is reflecting light without necessarily producing it. And this feels rather reassuring. I am not called upon to produce something from nothing, merely to reflect back what is already coming my way. Nor do I have to move all that much. No sustained effort, just going with the flow.
Raindrops on green leaves, a barely perceptible breeze, a bright light in the darkness. That’s the closest to sparkling I can get tonight.
I have made some progress since the last time this prompt came up. I have replaced the desk I was talking about back then, and have obtained a proper adjustable chair. (I’m wearing the same jacket, though.)
It took me seven months of working from home to get round to getting that chair, seven months of telling myself it wasn’t as bad as all that. Probably it wasn’t. I’m very aware of my privilege in being able to work from home at all, when the people whose interests I represent are out on the front line, in hospitals and care homes, collecting the rubbish, giving schoolchildren lunch.
And this makes me think of an older meaning of the word ‘comfort’: comfort as in the Comforter, the one who stirs up, encourages, equips. Today I’m tired, too tired to express myself pithily or eloquently. I have two and a half days left to work, and I’m looking forward to the break. And if I were less tired I would want to say something about how taking a break, sitting in a decent chair, allowing myself to take comfort, equips me to do my job better, write better, serve better. As it is, I’m making this a short post and calling it a night.
… this lovely stretch of river. If you were to walk along this path and follow it around the bend, you’d see the railway cross the river on a big green-and-white painted steel bridge. If you were to leave the path just before you got to the bridge, turn right at the road, turn left just before you got to the level crossing, take the first right, and walk until you got to the first street light, you’d find yourself opposite the flat we lived in for almost six years.
It wasn’t meant to be that long. We hoped it was going to be the last place we rented before we bought somewhere, but I’m glad I didn’t know back in 2014 that it was going to take us that long to save up a deposit. That’s what comes of living in a place like Cambridge. That’s why we don’t live in Cambridge any more.
But six years of this wasn’t so bad. Six years of walking or cycling alongside this stretch of the Cam to get to the station or the shop or the pub or the church. Following the river upstream into the city, or downstream just for a walk.
I miss the river. I’m not that far away from it, really: the Cam flows into the Ouse, and the Ouse is about a half hour’s walk from where we are now. But it’s not there, the way it used to be. I’m glad I enjoyed it while I had it.
Ely cathedral. Not for the first time – I’d had my fingers nibbled by a duck on the cathedral green back in April 2014, and sneaked in after hours at the Christmas fair when I was doing my Cursillo weekend – but it’s different when you live in the city.
I’ve lived in a few cathedral cities in my time. None of their cathedrals has had quite the same imposing quality as Ely. I was born in Winchester, but we moved away when I was small and came back for bus running days, so in my mind the centre of the city is the statue of King Alfred on the Broadway. I went to university in Exeter: it was there that the ‘city on a hill‘ parable really started to have resonance for me, but in my mind the light streams out from the windows of the university chapel, not the cathedral. Guildford: yes, that’s a cathedral on a hill, but it’s rather remote from the city (not a city, but never mind). I used to sing at the church that served as the pro-cathedral before they built the new one; that’s on a hill, too, right in the middle of town, but surprisingly easy to miss.
But Ely is a small city, a city on a hill in the middle of flat, flat land, and the cathedral is the tallest building, and it’s very much in the middle of things. You can’t quite see it from everywhere, but you can see it from all sorts of places. A corner of the west tower and a corner of the lantern, from our bedroom window. The lopsided west front, as soon as you look up into town. Head out towards the river and look back over your shoulder, and it looks like a fairy tale castle across the water at Roswell Pits. Head out the other way, into the fens, and it joins the earth to the sky. Head up Downham Road and look back over your shoulder, and there it is rising from the swell of the ground. Not so much the Ship of the Fens as the Submarine of the Fens.
I’m still coming to understand what it means to live in this landscape that’s so flat and so much shaped by human intervention, where just the other side of the road the height markings on the Ordnance Survey map have minus signs in front of them. I know about cathedral cities. I know about agricultural landscapes, too. I know about living on the edges of things (the border between England and Wales; the south coast of the Isle of Wight), and I know about living in places that are vulnerable to the elements (bits frequently drop off the south coast of the Isle of Wight). But this particular combination, a cathedral on an island in a swamp that was drained for farmland, that’s something I’m still feeling my way into. It feels like all the places I’ve lived before, and it feels like none of them.
And the cathedral feels very much like the centre of things. This year I’ve been much more aware of the compass directions, being orientated, if you like. I’ve noticed the morning sun coming in at the front of the house and the evening sun lighting up my study. And I’ve returned to Slow Time and the monastic hours. Gratefulness.org restored the Angels of the Hours. The calendar was strange this year, but I marked the quarter days and the cross quarter days.
The cathedral, and particularly the octagon at its crossing, has felt like the centre of the compass. North, North East, East, South East, South, South West, West, North West. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. Christmas and New Year, Candlemas, Lady Day and Easter, May Day, Midsummer and St John the Baptist, St James and my birthday and Lammas, Michaelmas, All Saints. I pack a lot into each of the eight sides; and they’re definitely sides, not points.
I don’t feel quite settled yet. This year, this unexpected nine months’ grounding, has made it easier to get to know this new city in some ways, but much more difficult in others. And after a lifetime of moving and an adulthood of renting it feels very odd to have finally bought a house in a place where we intend to stay for a long time. I haven’t quite got used to that, but I don’t think it matters. The sun’s going to keep on rising in the east, just beyond the far end of the cathedral.
The pear trees were what caught my imagination when we viewed this house. The first time, back in November last year, I think I only noticed that there was a garden that someone had clearly worked hard with. The second time, I noticed that the bare trees that had been trained against the garage wall were still wearing their tags: Williams Bon Chrétien; Concorde. Pears. The Twelve Days of Christmas went round my head well before and long after the twelve days.
We moved in half way through March, and things were beginning to happen in the garden. There were no bulbs (there are now) but there were plenty of other things to find. I discovered plum trees at the back; the trees growing up against the trellises turned out to be apples. I found a self-seeded holly and decided to let it stay. The pear trees blossomed. I took photos of everything I didn’t recognise and asked Facebook for identification.
I planted out the faithful herbs that had come with me in their pots from the old flat. I sowed nasturtium seeds in a pot. I know how nasturtiums can get. The garden centres were shut, but I wouldn’t have been able to get to them anyway. I bought plants from tables with honesty boxes (or letter boxes): cosmos, lady’s mantle, passionflower, foxgloves. I started runner beans off in eggboxes in the conservatory.
Digging a hole to plant the foxgloves, I found another label. Morello. The thing I’d written off as a boring shrub turned out to be a rather sad little cherry tree. Growing up around an actual boring shrub were some raspberry canes. The thing that was climbing up over the pergola was a wisteria. The other thing that was climbing up over the pergola was a grape vine.
The thing that I’d thought was a hart’s tongue fern flowered and was an arum lily. The things that Facebook had told me were Peruvian lilies flowered and were red and beautiful. The wisteria and the grapevine climbed everywhere, making the whole back wall startlingly bright green. I pulled ivy down from the back wall. I planted out the runner beans.
The cherry tree yielded just enough fruit for a sauce. The raspberries ripened a few at a time: some I froze, some I ate. The plums went into crumbles and chutneys and the freezer. Apples became apple sauce and crumble and chutneys. The pears came later: more puddings, more chutneys, and the occasional one that was so perfect that the only possible response was to eat it. The grapes were small and sour and full of seeds. I considered a home winemaking kit. Maybe next year.
The roses came in ones and twos, one bush with white flowers, two with pink. The white one put out a shoot from its rootstock and shot up skywards. The ladybirds came and marched along the leaves and the stems.
I bottled the last of the pears and blew the fuse on the oven.
The dark shiny leaves of the pears turned to astonishing reds and yellows. The apple leaves were quieter about it. I trimmed back the wisteria and the grapevine, the apple trees, the pear trees, the spiky shrubs.
Now it’s almost back the way it was when we first saw it. Except for the extra rosemary bush. Except for the tubs planted up with bulbs. Except for the decrepit greenhouse which isn’t there any more. Except for the Peruvian lilies, which are determinedly continuing to bloom, even after the snow and the frost we had the week before last.
One would assume that after the first year there won’t be anything new to discover, but this garden has surprised me enough times for me not to be too sure of that.
I used this photo earlier, posted it as number 350 of my 366 days of delight.
If my difficult day is today, it’s because 2020 has been kinder to me than it has to many other people I know, or know of. And it’s because I can be sad and slow even on beautiful sunlit afternoons with clean blue skies. If this is as bad as 2020 gets, then I will have got off lightly. And I would also have liked to have been able to take a shower this morning without crying about it. No morning walk for me today. No morning prayer. If today has not been very difficult, it has not been easy.
It may be that strange thing that depression does to memory, by which I can only bring to mind a very narrow now and the current emotion convinces me it’s permanent. I went back through my diary, looking for other difficult days. There were plenty in which I felt more or less like this – 16 July, for example, reads:
presumably this day happened? (i was not happy)
reading all of the internet
Zoom mimealong to Steal Away
I didn’t write, but I remember, that I had to go and cry on the stairs halfway through that.
On 17 June there’s:
FEELING ABSOLUTELY AWFUL
which I think was fatigue rather than anything to do with mental ill health.
There was a Monday in which I broke my phone and a kitchen knife and received an unsolicited review request for a deeply distasteful lesbian Nazi mystery novel followed by a Tuesday in which I had to deal with an ant infestation. There was the week clouded by worry when my father was in hospital back in March.
(And I know all of that’s very small beer compared with what some people have had to deal with, this year in particular.)
But today, because I’m in it, feels like a difficult day, if not the most difficult day. A slow day, a sad day, a day in which it took me an hour to get out of bed and tears to get me into the shower. The first day in a long time it’s been as bad as that. A day in which I did some little work, but also read a lot of irrelevant Tweets.
A day in which I wore silver shoes to go to the postbox. A day in which the sky was a clean clear blue and the trees were as lovely without leaves as they were with them.
Kathleen Jowitt 