Started my time off with as low key a day as could be managed, even by recent standards. Felt like picking up a good book, which this is, very much so: even if not a very long one. If you’ve never read this, you really should. Pictured also in the foreground, the reading glasses that I now need to make sense of it.
From Wednesday this week I am off work for the rest of the month. But until that day is reached, I am like this pen. Just about still functioning but there’s very little left in the tank.
21 years ago today I did not walk down the aisle with Clare, because we didn’t get married in a church: instead the venue for our wedding was the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster. Either way… happy anniversary.
It is getting difficult to sustain the (my, your) interest over the endless, repeated days of lockdown. Particularly when they are cold, grey and wet, like today. I sorted out and dusted the CD shelves: this is as exciting as it got. The extra decorations have always been there.
Staff ‘awayday’ for us today — which in geographical terms, of course, meant little more than a different Zoom URL and, for me, the latest in a series of shots taken in Clare’s treatment room. It was a big day for me in a way as copies of my new book arrived, but all played out on the same stage. And not even with a very clean screen on the Mac.
Three months ago, as lockdown started, I presented a picture from inside the private tutoring service from which Clare rents her room in town. Today when I went in, there were, for the first time since then, signs of life; these pencils laid out on a desk, a hand sanitising station at the front door, etc. I welcome these greatly, as I did today’s announcements from the Government announcing the easing of lockdown from the 4th July. There was a shocking negativity about this from some quarters if you ask me, but that has nothing to do with pencils.
My last picture taken outside England was captured on February 2nd, 137 days ago in Bucharest. That span of time isn’t all that long, I know, but it is nevertheless now the longest period I have spent only in England since I started doing this blog: and I guess it is due to go on for a little while yet.
The nice people who put me up in Indonesia in November (UKSW in Salatiga) did want to hear from me again however, hence the webinar I did this morning — to an audience of 500+, according to the counter of ‘Participants’ at the bottom of the Zoom screen. I, on the other hand, just talked to a computer screen, as I have been doing for the last three months. Like the Premier League footballers who restarted their well-paid activities last night, I made do with a bunch of artificial ‘fans in the stand’, namely Clare’s Russian doll collection.
137 more days from now takes us until the end of October; will sanity have returned to the world by then? I’m not taking bets on it.
This is very Hebden Bridge. Strictly a one-person only library, however — which I guess at the present time is seen as healthy.
I did two things today which I have not done since 21st March — 1) get on a train 2) go to Manchester.
A tabloid headline seen yesterday exhorted me to “SHOP FOR BRITAIN!” and who am I to ignore the clarion call of the redtops? There weren’t many other people who accompanied me, as evident from this shot of the epicentre of the Manchester Arndale Centre, but I guess that’s something we should approve of, at this time of doublethink.
The heady feeling of freedom engendered by three days in a row out of Hebden was decisively brought to an end. I had to work — which means, these days, staying at home (it is now over three months since I was last on campus on March 8th). And it was cold, too: cold enough to put the heater on, anyway. In the background, Lego guy turns his back in disgust at this lack of moral fibre.
Being 42 