Lockdown continues. We adapt. We cope – at least most of us do – some will struggle, fail, go under. We shall hear about them when this is all over and Lessons Are Learned.
I make plans, schedules, programmes, fill the empty days with … things. My coping strategies are as follows: I walk, bake cakes and biscuits, sort out cupboards, think about spring cleaning, decide against spring cleaning. I get out my summer clothes, wash my winter ones and put them in the chest at the bottom of my bed. I do some light gardening – deadheading and walking about with a trug, channelling my inner Virginia Woolf – except it was Vita Sackville-West who was the gardener. That’s another thing, despite doing too many killer sudokus, deadly level, my brain has taken a sabbatical.
I should be writing but new words seem hard to find and I content myself with editing old novels and short stories already written, swapping words and phrases, inserting and deleting commas and semi-colons, rearranging paragraphs … pretending I’m working.
I keep busy and try to be productive. I have taken the cover off my sewing machine and made a patchwork quilt, a pair of boys’ shorts, and almost finished a pair of trousers. I think about doing alterations to clothes that would be perfect if they were changed in some way – but it’s a step too far.
Watching telly is an option, but my choice of programme is limited. I can’t cope with violence – bad language and ‘scenes of a sexual nature’ as the continuity announcers coyly state – are okay, but violence, no.
Bleak statistics hang over us like a threat and I want to be told that everything will be all right. I don’t want realism and grit – there’s enough of that in real life at the moment, so I watch old films (black and white for preference) with happy endings. I choose my reading matter with care; I don’t want grisly thrillers, or anything intellectually stimulating, I just want to know that everything will turn out right by the last page. So, I read my old favourites, ones I’ve read many times before, those that demand nothing of me but leave me feeling comforted and reassured: Georgette Heyer, DE Stevenson, Barbara Pym, Trisha Ashley, Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen – I have bookcases full of them.
I wonder what others read for comfort.
