Yesterday in the afternoon, I felt weary and my back ached as it often does, so I thought an hour prone, relaxing with the radio as companion, would be good. A way of treating myself – the radio has been a comfort to me, from the early days of childhood when I lay in bed in my grandparent’s house, Edith and Jack’s, with the smell of bacon wafting upstairs along with the shipping forecast.
I caught the end of Paul Muldoon on Poetry Please – I couldn’t quite connect with the poetry, too much thinking it seemed. Then came File on 4, A Year of Covid, Jane Deith talks to the medics who fought the first wave of Covid 19.
I immediately think about turning it off because I have been filtering Covid news, most news in fact. I have been living in my own bubble of detachment and self-preservation, cloistered in my house, in my writing room. But I don’t, the voices are too compelling, they demand to be honoured. As I listen, I find I am overwhelmed with grief, theirs and mine, all the emotion I’ve been keeping at bay, the sadness, the disbelief, the fear. The memory still strong of my father’s death in hospital.
I listen on, and I am also filled with gratitude for these people whose voices are recorded here and for their sacrifice. What of their trauma? How will they survive and come to terms with it all, when it’s over? Please God it will be over. I want to make them cakes, scones, flasks of tea. I want to write them stories, write their stories. I want to give something back, but I don’t know what…yet.
I thoroughly understand the ‘don’t know what’, -there’s a good chance my trouble is long Covid. When is it over, when do we have the platform we know as society in which the mourning can even begin? Times like these I try to turn from the universal, to pay attention to the details of the dust I scratch around in and make something of it. And on a positive note, Romania, just so a place full of idiosyncrasies one can fill a notebook with, Cabinet Sauvignon and the dust in chicken feathers! Over the moon about a copy of the Pamphlet- thanks so much.
Warren please send me an email with your home address – mine email is amjoy@hotmail.co.uk then when I have the pamphlets ready I will send you yours x (I don’t seem to have your email any more.)