Saturday 6 June 2020

BACK IN THE COVID - The Lockdown Diary Day 75

Our dishwasher puffs as noisily as any steam train on its way through one of those English idylls which John Betjeman might have eulogised. Aided and abetted by double glazing which effectively excludes today’s sharp breeze scurrying amongst the trees beyond the window, my imagination  conjures a weary looking gaggle of anticipatory fellow travellers. We are off to the coast.

I am a little frustrated by Sudoku puzzle number 168 in my little book of Altzheimer's antidotes. It will not yield to my determination to prove something. I am not quite sure what or to whom. It could be me.

A frisson of disappointment lingers from yesterdays revelation that my favourite chocolate bar of all time, Fry’s Chocolate Cream, might have wheat in it. I bought them often in my childhood at the corner sweet shop two doors up with Auntie Pat’s shilling on a Friday night in the 1950’s. How dare they.

After a breakfast of stodgy, cold, homemade, oat-based muesli tummy stability did at last return this morning, the start of a day which has so far not been marred by any untoward events and a day at least when we expect a calm sea with a dream clearly visible, albeit a long way off, and still only just above the horizon.

Coffee on board turns out to be quite palatable, wifi works and our companions are smiling and laughing excitedly amongst themselves spread evenly along the deck like regularly engineered lifeboat installations. They are each of them lifeboats after their own style, watertight and ready, ever ready. They know there are arrivals after departures and ends as surely as there are beginnings: that some waves are easier to bear than others: that we are moving and motion is all that matters. They know there will be waves but perhaps not today, hopefully not today.  Where there is movement there is change and all that need concern us is keeping the propeller turning.

Time in lives stood still is a window of opportunity for renewal and meditative refreshment in an empty silence of uncluttered self but below decks engines thrubb waiting, charts lay marked and gear stands by ready. We sail with more good fortune than many others, we are all in the same boat.

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