mehrunnisa, london
here is something i have learnt in pandemic times; the full force of holding competing truths at the same time. it is no longer a concept but a fully fleshed being. like the immense despair and challenge of now alongside the beauty of things. last year’s spring was so exuberant and profuse, it flew in the face of death. the birdsong was so loud, insistent and sweet. skies so startlingly blue. it is the same sky that arches over geographies large and small, brightening and darkening, showing that we are moving through. and now, warm winter sun on the heels of a cold rainy day, all within the space of hours.
i will give you a snapshot of my day today. it is a day of leave from work which translates into a day of different screens. a little bit of television. catching up with friends and family on zoom and facetime. half a dozen seville oranges bobbing in a bath of water, scenting the house as they simmer to softness. i am making marmalade.
i am alone these days, my husband and i having embarked on a commuter relationship because of work. it is nice to be at home in london, after the first lockdown and then some in zurich. cities are not the easiest places to live but what i love(d) about them is that they are like an extended living room. an endless list of choices. restaurants, museums, theatres, cafes, bookshops, public libraries, reading rooms, street markets and parks. covid has curtailed most of what made cities attractive, but i have found that the part of london i call home has held up well. my daily walk takes me around the woodberry wetlands. i have been initiated into bird watching and have seen cygnets grow and leave the nest. every few days i walk to highbury to stock up on vegetables, cheese and bread. the shelves at seasons and blossoms are heaving with brassicas in an ombré of green, sunny citrus, knobbly and misshapen root vegetables, bitter leaves and barbie pink rhubarb. sometimes, i get a take-away coffee from frank’s or finks or the coal house cafe. i have gotten used to how spare the space is. most places have lines on the floor to denote the appropriate social distance. more often it is a maximum of two people who are allowed in at a time. i feel that we social distance more naturally now. lately, cloth masks have given way to the medical ones that fit snugly around the nose.
the ordinary is the alpha and the omega with little variation in between.
i can set aside more difficult thoughts on sunny days. the united kingdom crossed what it calls the grim milestone of over a 100,000 deaths. i am shocked by the lack of rage. but then again teju cole is right when he says that we cannot comprehend this much sorrow. perhaps we are too tired to grieve, depleted by the demands that covid makes of us. perhaps the tedium of the ordinary interferes with the ability to think beyond this moment. i return to the past, to my time at university where i wrote about how nations deal with mass atrocity and lives lost through mass violence. i know we are not at war. but what i am borrowing from it is the knowledge that we will have to find ways to understand and mark this collective loss in time.
Jenny, at home (with Mehrunnisa in London)
I always used to record where I was when I was filling these pages. Coffee chains and cafes, gallery reading rooms and cinema bars, library foyers and garden squares, railway concourses, bus stations and airport departures on either side of the Irish Sea. Now that this has turned into a journal of the plague year(s) I’m always at home and, lucky as I am to be here, grateful to Mehrunnisa for the connections with London and Zurich and other horizons both in between and further afield.
It still feels like the long 2020, and yet we’re nearly into February. 100,000 people – more than 100,000 – are dead in the UK. Whether you look at the statistics agency numbers or the health department figures, the total in Northern Ireland is gaining fast on the death toll of the Troubles, and across the island of Ireland that number has already been far exceeded. ‘Grim milestone’ doesn’t cover any of this. And now there is a collision between the pandemic and Brexit, over the vaccine that is our best hope for safe passage out of the state we’re stuck in.
When it snowed last week, everything looked briefly cleaner, fresh and new. It was good to take in a scene that wasn’t the old new normal but instead looked like a kind of festival. I thought about the children seeing proper snow for the first time, and then about the people who didn’t know that they’d seen snow for the last time. There was snow on the beach, and even some ice in the sea. The day before it really came down, I had risked a run. Along the coastal path there’s an old slipway and in my heavy trail shoes I slid, and nearly slipped right off it. Whether on to the rocks or into the sea, it wouldn’t have been good. It was good to be out, but a strain to stay upright, and stressful to navigate the path with the still-weird oppressive combination of mask and glasses and headphones and headband overloading my ears and misting my eyes. One of the reasons to run is to be unencumbered and feel free but these days I find myself carrying more baggage while I cover less distance.
The next day I wondered, when we are all covered by the vaccine, will it be like the snow, and free us and show us how different life can look? Will immunity build in and across populations, like snow on snow? Will it give us purchase on slippery ground? I don’t like to think about how many seasons away that might be, but I think about it anyway, in the long 2020. All the anniversaries to be marked, all the looking where we were then against where we are now. It’s a year since … is starting already and I am finding it hard to accept how far along we are and how soon we will be facing the anniversary of that accelerating slide into the worst of the pandemic, or what I thought had to be the worst of it, then.
I grasp at dates for reference points, trying to catch a grip and take in the scale of the change from then to now. Maybe in this trial with no controls, we’re all too changed to be able to evaluate the results. Everyone has been subject to the same dreadful intervention but while some people were blighted by risk factors, others were protected. The protective effect of privilege puts variables in my favour but the long 2020 still leaves me confounded.