Life in Lockdown

After six weeks, lockdown is beginning to get to me a little. I was fine for a month or so; enjoying it really, relishing not having to organise anything or remember appointments, not needing to bother about rotas and timetables, just having time to myself to be introspective and of course to learn Ancient Greek.

The Greek’s going pretty well actually – it seems to reach parts of the brain modern languages can’t reach. I’m against elitism in learning but it has to be said that learning a classical language does something to your grey matter. I can feel bits of it sparking up and making connections I haven’t made since I was at school and laughing at Miss Kettlewell. But enough of that later…

Alas in the seventh week the time is starting to hang heavy and I’m going a little stir-crazy. There are only so many videos you can watch or courses you can do or Zoom meetings you can attend without some kind of burnout and basically when it comes down to it there’s no substitute for full-on human contact. I’m a mixture of introvert and extravert and whilst I enjoy company I also need from time to time to hibernate. My usual periods for doing this are Christmas and summer; at Christmas I take a couple of weeks and in the summer I go for a month. It’s very wholesome but at the end of it I’m glad to go out and see people again.

I’m lucky of course not to be living alone. I don’t know what I’d do if I were in that situation or else stuck in a flat with small children pinging off the walls. Then again they say that this period without frenetic activity has helped children to focus more – and as we found when doing Home Education, when children say they’re bored if you leave them to find something to do they usually will.

On the TV I’m continuing with Doctor Foster, a positively Greek drama with everything you could want in a modern tale of betrayal and vengeance. The eponymous doctor is basically Medea; a calm and supportive woman who, when she finds out her husband has been cheating on her for years, stops at nothing to destroy him. It’s appalling and highly compelling in about equal measure.

Reading-wise I’m between books at the moment: I’ve finished Beloved and The House of the Spirits and I tried Annie Proulx’s Barkskins again

but I just can’t get into it. The latest edition of Granta arrived on Saturday and I launched into it with such fervour that I’ve read nearly all the stories and articles. I have ordered the Booker prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other which should arrive in the next few days, so till then I am resigned to having spaces in the day with nothing to read but Facebook or the Guardian app. Ah well.

The trouble is, when a book arrives that I really want to read, I devour it within days and then I have nothing to read any more.

Back to Miss Kettlewell. I’ve mentioned her before but just in case you don’t remember, she was our Latin teacher at school. Red-faced and plump, looking rather like a German sausage in an ill-fitting crimplene dress, she cut a ridiculous figure to our 14-year-old eyes. She not only taught Classics, she spoke English in a Latinate way like a female Doctor Johnson, giving equal weight to each syllable and pronouncing every letter clearly. One day as the lesson started, her eye lit on a vase of dead flowers on the windowsill (how they got there no-one knew.) She screwed up her face, pointed a trembling finger at them and in a sonorous tone said, to no-one in particular, ‘Take those flowers away – I dislike them intensely!’

Poor Miss Kettlewell. She’s probably been dead thirty years and we’re still laughing at her.

Kirk out

What Am I Watching?

One good thing about the lockdown is that I no longer feel guilty for watching too much TV instead of going out. Going out is now simply Not An Option, so from 7 pm till bedtime I’m glued to the old box. Actually I do read a bit too and last night we went out with saucepans and spoons to do the clap for the NHS and carers. I must say I do wish the government would pay nurses and doctors as freely as they pay MP’s; god knows they deserve it.

So what am I watching? Last night we finished the mini-series Quiz (I always like to hyphenate that word because otherwise it looks like miseries) about the so-called ‘coughing Major’ on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Now obviously this was a drama not a documentary but from watching it, the truth seems much less clear-cut than it did at the time, given the news reports and the guilty verdicts. Then again it’s the defence counsel’s job to shed doubt on the evidence and this was a drama so who knows what liberties they took with the facts? Still whatever the truth, it’s compelling stuff and demonstrates the quite gob-smacking lengths some people will go to to try to win large amounts of money. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Slumdog Millionaire, the dramatisation of Vikram Seth’s novel Q&A in which the protagonist knows the answers because of the trials he’s been through.

After that I returned to Wolf Hall, the quite stupendous series spanning Hilary Mantel’s first two novels which I rate even more highly the second time around, having read the entire trilogy. The casting couldn’t be better; Claire Foy is superb as the flashing, ambitious and thoroughly nasty Anne Boleyn, Mark Gatiss horribly oily as Cromwell’s enemy (one of many) Stephen Gardiner, and Bernard Hill terrific as the outrageous braggart Norfolk. But better than all these is Mark Rylance’s Cromwell, a figure in the shadows who works his way into the heart of government by keeping his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut.

I haven’t yet got to the third series of Killing Eve but I will arrive there soon; in the meantime I have to catch up with The Nest, a Scottish drama set in a lochside house where a rich but childless couple take their last chance at having a child when a strange young woman enters their lives in a dramatic way. But there’s an awful lot about her past which she hasn’t told them…

In between times I’m still struggling with Beloved – struggling not because of the writing but because it’s so heartbreaking – and working my way through The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende’s novel which spans most of 20th-century Chile and the rise of socialism.

So that’s me up to date. How have you been?

Kirk out

Chopping Lines? Do me a Favour!

I got quite narked with the writer Toni Morrison yesterday.  I had previously had a high opinion of the author of ‘Beloved’ and recipient of the Nobel prize for literature:

http://www.biography.com/people/toni-morrison-9415590#synopsis

but on radio 4 yesterday she was heard to express the view that poetry is merely chopped-up prose.  NO!  No!  No no no! I shouted at the radio.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvs38

Consider this:

‘Mark but this flea and mark in this how little that which thou deniest me is.  Me it sucked first and now sucks thee, and in this flea our two bloods mingled be.  Consider, this cannot be said a sin or shame or loss of maidenhead.  Yet this enjoys before it woo and pampered, swells with one blood made of two.  And this, alas, is more than we would do.’

Or this:

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vale or hill; when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.’

or this:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night.  What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Do those seem like prose to you?

But let’s be fair.  Maybe she wasn’t thinking of rhyming verse.  Maybe she was thinking of free verse, like this:

Barbed brambles scour the walls.  Low, arthritic trees drop ripe apples on the ground.  Hedges buffer lawn from no-man’s land; washing straddles the long grass by the garage.  On cleared ground, alyssum makes a fresh bridal shower, and on the lawn, searchlights caught in water as a sprinkler slowly arcs the sky.  And one day, playing in the long, old grass the lumpy earth gives up an air-raid shelter; pie-crust of concrete and a hole to let the air in.  On summer afternoons the spire’s shadow slowly creeps across the lawn.  Its finger pointing at our hearts, we fold our deckchairs and decamp into the light.  Out of the sun, jets scream of foreign fields, brown bodies on the beaches.  All clear now: flats planted.

The above are, respectively, John Donne’s ‘The Flea’, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, Blake’s ‘Tiger’ and my ‘Vicarage Garden’ (I would put someone else’s free verse but they’re mostly still in copyright.)

So, do any of these sound like prose to you?

Chopping lines?  Pff – I leave that to the drug-dealers.

Kirk out