Remember, Remember…… November 5th 2021
To me it is unbelievable the it is already November and that the world is only just stirring after the shock of the pandemic.
Frankly I am still more than a little bit wary about the state of things. My poor old head is having a lot of trouble and I cannot see any improvement on the road ahead. So many people I know have been adversely affected by the storm of illness that we have been helpless to stop, or at least, that is how it seems to me. Being robbed of a year and half of normal life has not settled on me kindly. My thoughts have been invaded and my belief in mankind permanently damaged.
Now I feel as though I am floating though life and so I am still holding firmly on to my own personal system, that has at least got me through the plague time, when during lockdown, I made every effort to fill each day, pack my days with work, writing, and creative activities. Never in my life before, has my sewing machine been so busy, have I worked on little handiwork projects to give to friends, so that they would at least have some tiny thing stuffed at the back of a drawer, that now and again would surface and they would think of me because I realise now, that I had not expected to survive.
Keeping depression at bay by filling every moment was actually good for me in some ways. I did every class that required a physical effort that I could find on YouTube: Ballet, Qigong, yoga, hula dancing, stretching. This all on top of maintaining as much as possible of my triathlon world that quickly became duathlon because all the pools were closed also. How long would it last? How long could it last.
It was all more than contrary, because as much as I was telling anybody who would listen that I never needed to buy any more clothes in my life, because I was 81 and then 82 and I have cupboards full of clothes, more than I could every wear, let alone wear out. Yet there I was working my way through the large pile of lengths of material gathered over the years along with patterns for dresses, shirts, and trousers, so that my clothes cupboards started to get seriously tight as dozens more items were squeezed in.
Never seeing my family and friends was the worst thing. That was causing me the most pain. It was unbearable. Thank God and all the angels that a handful of friends called by and stood at the bottom of our tiny front lawn and had a chat. No physical contact but just the sight of their smiling faces felt a huge blessing. Lots of people pointed out that I had not, as I was complaining so loudly, lost contact, how could that be when we were in touch almost daily by Facebook and Instagram. That was true, there were a few words and lots of pictures, but for me, social media did not cut I at all, it did not seem real. Only my dear sweet husband got me though it, joining in a lot of the classes and still keeping me training hard going out running before dawn, no matter the daily death count. We still have the daily death count though don’t we? People have got used to it. It seems to me and are being hood winked into thinking about the daily distractions drummed up by the government instead. I don’t know who I think is worse amongst that band of self-promoting monsters.
Most missed regular parts of my life, were swimming and my poetry group, ‘Scribblers’ two groups of like thinking warriors with a sense of direction. Trailing a little way behind the other groups were, the total curtailment of luxury. Having my hair done every six weeks, a cut and colour and lower down the list comes having my long acrylic nails done, both on those day, giving me a pick-up from daily life. My hair grew longer and longer, it always has grown at the speed of grass but then it also grew more and more white, until the person I saw looking back at me in the mirror, was my mother.
