A TWICH UPON THE THREAD

 

It's all too easy to get lost in the constant gloom. Every day tends to be much like all the days gone by. Well. Not all. Just the two hundred and some days since the pandemic arrived to turn our lives upside down.

Lockdown three lacks the adrenaline of the first edition. Gone are the sparkling spring days and empty roads. Now there is a merciless, spirit crushing greyness. All pervading. The roads are no longer empty. Instead the emptiness is found on the faces of socially distant pedestrians. Eyes down.

Everyone seems to be huddled. All the time. Heads bowed into the endless rain. Roads make like rivers. Bedraggled buzzards peck half heartedly at run over rabbits.

Nobody talks about the new normal any more. It's just normal. What is coming next is anyone's guess, but few seem to find much optimism in the months and years to come.

So much damage. I see it all day, every day in the eyes which peer out from dark flats. Barely heated flats. The doomed troglodytes of 2021.

In the beginning the news was ever present. Not any more. Now we all kind of know the end of the story. This is going to end T.S. Eliot style, not with a bang but a whimper. The death toll will fade into memory and the toll on the living with slowly emerge from the shadows.

And then we will have to get our heads around all kinds of painful new realities. I wonder if Covid will be the full stop at the end of the five hundred year story of the West ruling the roost. Suddenly we will have to accept the hard truth of Eastern power. And all the while we will continue to scratch each others eyes out on Facebook and vote cardboard clowns into power as the rest of our planet will collectively sigh with relief. The long nightmare of our voracious, brutal greed will finally be a thing of the past.

And when our ability to print money comes to a close, we will have to get our heads round living within our ever shrinking means. It's hard to imagine it being a pretty sight. It never is when old, fading Empires run out of time and cash.

We think our foodbank is busy now. And it is busy. Really busy. How many parcels will be needed in a year's time? Five years time? Once the sheer extent of the Covid wreckage comes into view? When we all arrive into our new reality.

So we need to find flickers of light wherever we can, even though they are few and far between.

So here are a couple for a Saturday morning.

A couple of weeks ago I took some food out to a man living in the middle of nowhere with his dog. The day before he had eaten the last item in his cupboard – half a jar of cranberry sauce. The dog had gone without. So no food and no power and barely a flicker of hope. I wrote up the tale of woe in a blog and yet again the community rallied. Donations of food and cash and a brand new calor gas stove with a full bottle.

I duly delivered everything a couple of days ago and yesterday and grateful text landed. Thanks for the food and the power and everything. A picture from a cottage on top of a hill. A snap shot of a lounge heated for the first time in weeks. A curled up, fully fed dog in front of a calor gas fire. A picture of a dog who hadn't moved from the heat in hours.

A difference made. The basics of life back in place. For a while at least. A dog with a fire to lie in front of in a world of bone chilling grey. Hard damp grey.

An e mail from the mother of a family of seven. The man of the house had lost his job thanks to Covid. Every word spoke of someone trying to find some understanding in a strange world. Here was a family unfamiliar with the bitter realities of being unemployed and poor in Britain 2021. She had assumed there would be a degree of humanity in our much fabled Welfare State. She was learning the hard way. The ghost of Clement Attlee exited stage left many years ago.

Seven mouths to feed. Which we took care of. And we rustled up some cash for emergency power.

On my second visit, the oldest son told me his dad had an interview. And he told me this with a voice filled with conviction. Because for him, the idea of his dad not being chosen was utterly inconceivable. I nodded along, even though I had never met his dad. Of course I did. What else was I going to do? And as I climbed back into the van, my heart sank a notch. There seemed no room for such ferocious love and optimism in the midst of such unrelenting grey.

Well how wrong I was. And how right the oldest son was. Dad got the job and he starts on Monday. And in a fortnight the family will once again be back on their feet.

A chink of light. A flicker. A slight easing in the endless rain. A defiant snowdrop finding a way to bloom despite everything.

A twitch upon the thread.