Going out for the first time in seven weeks was quite an experience. The nearest sensation to it I have felt in my life was that of stepping from a ship onto dry land. It’s no exaggeration to say I felt not quite steady on my feet and as though I might collapse and fall. I had intended to aim for natural beauty in St. James’s Park but discovered, as a true urbanite, that what I really wanted to see were our Soho playgrounds.
The first shock was not empty streets but boarded up frontages. I had no idea the Dean St. Town House, whose staff feel like family, where I ran when evacuated from home on the day a WW11 bomb was discovered on a building site next door to our apartment, where we have spent some of our happiest, most raucous times with friends and with each other, now turns a blank face to the street along with The Groucho Club and Cote.
Dean Street Town HouseThe Groucho Club
Curiously, I have spent a surprising amount of my Lockdown time thinking about the brightly- painted doughnut shop that opened barely a week before we self-isolated.
Who are the owners? Will it survive? How excellent that they didn’t spell it “Donut”. We have watched so many small businesses come and go since we’ve lived here. It’s heartbreaking to see proud owners standing in the street, hands on hips, surveying their brave new world, and even more heartbreaking to know they may not have sufficient backing to survive even a lean first couple of weeks – and that was during the good times. To my relief, Doughnut Time is there, closed but with a notice on the door saying their doughnuts can be reached via Deliveroo. Maybe they’ll make it.
We’ve lost count of the number of restaurants we have seen installing many thousands of pounds-worth of gleaming kitchen equipment, only to see it torn out and tossed into skips as the new owners decide on different ovens, fridges and sinks – more thousands of pounds, for who knows how long this time.
I see hardly anyone on the streets. Occasional knots of delivery men, leaning on their pushbikes and motor bikes, gather on corners chatting and paying no attention to social distancing. I am masked and most people smile at me benignly, except for one squat man who deliberately bends down to unleash his even squatter bulldog right in front of me, hoping, I feel, to scare me. I smile at them both behind my mask.
In the windows of padlocked sex shops, once the mainstay of Soho, are reflected the patisseries and chocolate shops that have taken their place. I was sad about that gentrification once but today I’m glad to be back on Soho’s streets, whatever their character, and long to see them thronging with life again.
Chocolate, chocolate is all I can think about. Well, not quite all. There’s also the Pret –A-Manger smoked salmon sandwich I used to eat for lunch at least twice a week before Lockdown and the Itsu sushi we had on the other two days and, on the weekends, when we were feeling over-stuffed, the Pret tuna salad.
I’m noticing how our eating habits have changed during Lockdown and wondering whether we city folk are having a different experience from those in the country. I know Trisha and Tod, for example, are still shopping at the local bakery and eating food without the added flavour of Sanitizer. Friends in Wales are doing the same. To be fair, so are some people in London, though many, like us, are depending completely on deliveries, friends or both.
“The Writer” is craving pizza but won’t have it delivered because of the cardboard box it comes in and I’m dying for linguini from Vapiano, our local Italian slow food chain and Sen Chen Pad Thai from Busaba, neither of which are doing Takeaway.
Before Lockdown, we were horrified by the outrageous sums of money we were spending to eat in smart restaurants, though that didn’t stop us doing it – but it’s the food from the more modest chains we long for now.
We’re trying to eat a balanced diet but every time we fancy a treat, like the shortbread biscuits in the painted tin we were given by the Scottish Hotel in which we spent Christmas, we think, “Why not?” and then, “We deserve it”. But we don’t “deserve” it. We have done absolutely nothing but stay happily indoors for a few weeks in our comfortable apartment. And, though my husband is losing weight through not eating baskets of restaurant bread and not drinking wine with every restaurant dinner, I’m putting it on because all I want to eat are sugar or fat, or, preferably, both at the same time.
Scottish shortbread tin
Porridge or fruit with yoghurt are what we always had for breakfast and still do, sometimes with the addition of honey from our beekeeper friend in the next door apartment. Lunches are harder because, pre-lockdown we used to drop in somewhere while out walking or bring something in. Nowadays, baked beans, sardines on toast, tuna or jacket potato are the staples of our lunch menu. And, on Sunday, we were so missing going out for breakfast with friends as we usually do, we had to re-create it at home. I have to say, it wasn’t the same.
Dinner can be a bit hit and miss, because, when I order the ingredients to make something and only half of them turn up, I’m not a creative enough cook to change course.
We have had roasts – a chicken with all the trimmings cooked by “The Writer” and I cooked a slow-roasted leg of lamb, seethed in middle-eastern spices, which looked so fabulous when it came out of the oven, I forgot to photograph it in my excitement!
(Strange how reluctant we are to have a roast on any day but Sunday. It’s as though our weeks retain some vague imprint of their pre-lockdown shape – like the muscle -memory of an exercise or a dance).
Our favourite salad has always been Greek, mainly because it’s an excuse for “The Writer” to turn a healthy salad into a fattening cheese dish. And, since Lockdown, we’ve added Italian Caprese salad, because so few people seem to eat Buffola Mozzerella, I can always get hold of it. Sadly, my basil, such a vital part of the look and taste of Caprese, has given up the ghost, as you can see below. The chives are doing OK though, and turn up almost all the time time in our favourite standby, the Omelette. A more daring friend who goes out for her shopping, reports that eggs are hard to come by, to the extent that her local supermarket hides them, bringing them out, surreptitiously, for regular customers only. So far, I’ve been lucky and had no problem getting them delivered.
In order to accommodate the umpteen tins of sardines we feel will give us at least a bit of Omega 3, we had to have a big cupboard clear out last week. These are just a couple of the tins we found. Look closely and you’ll see the date.
We do well for fruit, mainly because I’m doing the ordering and I love it. And, we were given a fabulous fruit box by “The Writer’s” family. Less well for vegetables because I don’t love them. In an effort to cram some veg down us, I’ve made so many batches of soup – butternut squash with creme fraiche, vegetables with barley, pea with yoghurt, spinach, leek and courgette – I’m now having to wear a wrist brace as a result of too much chopping.
Contents of a fabulous fruit box sent to us by “The Writer’s” mother and sister.
Since “The Writer” is actually writing, I undertook to be in charge of food, though he is dishwasher- loader and microwaver in chief. (I think he believes only men can do those things anyway). I confess we’re both getting tired of thinking about what to eat twice a day because we were so used to lazily eating bought sandwiches and salads. I’m now looking for Ready Meals wherever I can find them but their quality varies wildly. The one we like most of all is Marks and Spencer Cod Mornay. Trouble is, since they don’t include that range in their only recently-introduced deliveries, we’re dependant for these on kind people offering to make a special trip.
But, I digress. I have digressed from my favourite subject. Behold, I present the shrine to my beloved – our chocolate drawer. We both pretend this doesn’t exist, never go to it at the same time so we don’t have to discuss it, and never mention the fact that its contents mysteriously diminish day by day, or that they get equally mysteriously topped up when I bag the next delivery slot.
Ignore Bertie Bassett (Top Left). He belongs to Tod, who loves liquorice. Bertie will lie there until we, with Tod and Trisha, re-convene our Saturday nights together watching “Strictly Come Dancing”, while listening to “The Writer”complaining loudly throughout, “Do we REALLY have to watch this rubbish again?” Both his moaning and Bertie are part of the tradition.
Oh, and I missed out a bit of chocolate. Here is a traditional ‘Before” and ‘After”shot of my Easter egg. The only reason the milk chocolates inside it remain uneaten is that I only like plain chocolate. Trisha is the one who likes milk and she and Tod are still leading their normal-ish life in the highlands. No doubt within sight of a less colourful version of our bovine friend on the biscuit tin above.
It’s a shameful thing to admit but I have never cleaned. I don’t mean just wiping down kitchen surfaces or making sure the lavatory is up to scratch, I mean cleaning a whole place from top to bottom. My mother was too house-proud to allow me to botch jobs in the name of learning, not for her a rota where the child played her part. As far as she was concerned, children did children’s things – and that didn’t include housework. At University, I found myself sharing a house with three male students, not one of whom was known to have lifted a cloth. I joined in enthusiastically with the household regime of leaving the dirt to bed in. As soon as I had a job, I paid another woman to do the work I hated. Of course, like most middle-class women, I felt guilty about this and, of course, like most, I rationalised that I was at least giving someone work she needed.
When we waved a sad goodbye to the lovely Margerita, our cleaner, the last remnant of our civilised existence before Lockdown, “The writer” and I looked at each other in the horrified realisation that at our advanced age, and with stiffening limbs, we had to take on the apartment.
We’ve had various different cleaners during the time we’ve lived here and I’ve always suggested that, if there’s a cleaning product they prefer to use, they should ask and I would get it. Thereafter, I haven’t taken much notice so the sight that greeted us when we explored the cleaning cupboard came as something of a shock:
The next shock was realising that one should always use tools oneself before giving them to other people to work with. Lugging our massively heavy cylinder vacuum upstairs nearly wrenched my shoulder from its socket. I had thought it was the best implement I could buy for the job but didn’t consider that Margerita is the same height as me and about the same weight. How could I have done that to her? I invested in a shiny new Dyson, decided to throw out the old vacuum, then worried that Margerita may have a comfortable relationship with it, and be so horrified not to find it when she returns, she would leave. The solution was to put it in the spare room ,which has gradually filled with things we can no longer be bothered to cram into cupboards, on the grounds that we are bound to be needing them again “soon”.
During the first week of lockdown, in an effort to become the perfect hausfrau, I carefully wiped all picture frames, standing on chairs where necessary, removed every item from every surface before dusting and disinfecting, and sprayed every mirror with noxious substances before rubbing at it hard enough to dissolve my reflection. But then salvation came in the form of an ostrich-feather duster, bought from an ostrich farm in Argentina where I actually saw my duster, or at least a relative, galloping across the Pampas. They’re big buggers, Ostriches, and quite fierce, and I’m not sure how he would have felt about the depths to which he has fallen, with his finery hanging from a stick. Anyway, the feather duster is now my implement of choice – I swipe the picture frames, dust surfaces without moving ornaments and promise myself, I’ll do it properly next time. I’m pretty sure all feather dusters do is move the dust around but I’ve dealt with any guilt by moving on to the next room before it has chance to settle again.
I dropped Margerita an email yesterday, ostensibly to ask how she was but, Oh, how I wished she could drop by.
***********************************
More notes from readers about their symbols of lockdown:
Sharon writes:
‘This is my best moment of lockdown life. The seeds I dried from a couple of tomatoes have sprung into life. I’ll have to prick out a few and plant separately – when we have sunshine again. And I planted some slices which I think may be doing the same – I’m watching daily, could soon be overrun”.
“The writer” has decided to plant a cheese sandwich. As he says, you never know………
After yesterday’s post about my wanting to go out for a walk and reluctance to break the Marital Pact (Yes, I do see it with capital letters), “The Writer”decided he obviously wasn’t keeping me well enough entertained at home and yesterday evening announced that he was in the process of devising a quiz utilising one of his least-known and most impressive talents. He promised it would be ready by this morning.
After our morning walk – on the terrace – he calls me to look a a sequence of pictures featuring the titles of well-known novels. I am to guess which novel is represented by each picture.
I reproduce , here, what greeted me:
“Guess,Guess, he demands.
“Watership Down”?
“No”
“The Velveteen Rabbit”?
“No”
” Duck! Rabbit!?”
“No”.
“Raising Rabbits for Meat by Eric Rapp?”
“That’s silly”
“Wolf Nation?, the Company of Wolves?, Wolf Hall, Kavid the Wolf Dog?”
More notes from readers about their symbols of lockdown:
Sharon writes:
‘This is my best moment of lockdown life. The seeds I dried from a couple of tomatoes have sprung into life. I’ll have to prick out a few and plant separately – when we have sunshine again. And I planted some slices which I think may be doing the same – I’m watching daily, could soon be overrun”.
Today looks like the day for pricking out, Sharon. Lots of sun.
Seven weeks ago, while passing the pelican cabaret in St. James’s Park, “The Writer” and I were discussing Covid-19.
“Absolutely the only way to be a hundred percent safe”, I suggested , assuming it was a preposterous idea, ” is to lock oneself in and not come out until there is a vaccine”
“Right, said my husband, “Then that’s what we’ll do.” And that’s what we did. We have depended on food deliveries, seen two people on neighbouring terraces, talked to groups of friends and our trainer on Zoom and FaceTime, and exercised both in the house and by walking up and down the terrace. We have not been outside our front door since that day.
We agreed then, that if one of us feels strongly about something Covid-related, the other would go along with it, and my husband felt, and continues to feel, very strongly, that we should keep ourselves as safe as possible. Most of our friends take advantage of their daily exercise but they are not in London. And things are undoubtedly worse in London.
What we never did on that first day, was agree our criteria for going out into the world again. I’m not talking about the Government’s easing of Lockdown. That’s irrelevant. We, not the government, decided we would not take our hour’s exercise outside and we, not the Government, must decide when we are prepared to change our own rule.
When I first broached the idea, a few weeks ago, that we should discuss our exit strategy, my husband said that, for him, it would be when the hospitals were not so pressured as to be on the point of collapse, that there should be spare capacity in Critical Care units and that the death rate should be falling.
I felt this was reasonable and agreed.
It seems to me these criteria have now been more or less met and I would like to go out. My husband doesn’t feel they have, is perfectly happy exercising on the terrace and can’t understand my urgency. I realise that “I just want to go out now” is not a convincing argument but I am worried he may be nearing the foothills of agoraphobia.
I point out to him that there is no need for both of us to go out. I am perfectly happy to walk in the park or round the streets on my own – in fact would rather do so. He is a few years older than me, therefore slightly more at risk. He is male, therefore slightly more at risk and he is naturally a more anxious person – though I’m bad enough. I would far rather go alone than be responsible for making him feel uncomfortable or nervous. I’m pretty anxious myself but I can deal with that.
I’m sorry to put this pressure on him but now I worry that if we don’t take the plunge, there may never be a reason to go out again.
But there is our pact to consider. If I continue to cajole, leave optimistic statistical reports lying around the house, chat, casually, about our friends’ happy excursions into local shops, I’m breaking it by emotional blackmail. And suppose I persuade him to go out and the worst happens, and he catches it and is terribly ill or worse, it would be my fault and I couldn’t live with that. And, if he did suddenly agree, would I panic and be too scared to open the front door?
To sum up: I can’t break the Marital Pact. So welcome to another few weeks(?), months(?), years(?), of this Lockdown blog.
Meanwhile, I think I’m staying relatively sane, compared to some!
Today, my Mother’s rose tree bloomed for the first time. My Mother died on September 12 last year, at the age of 106, and her devoted friend, Izzi, gave me the rose tree in her memory. It stands outside my study window and I have watched the buds hourly for signs of colour. Towards the end of her long life, the only things that gave Mum real pleasure were visits from me and Izzi and the flowers she’d always loved. We’d bring her roses, tulips, daffodils. (I could never find her favourite violets, and I’m not sure she would have remembered they were her favourite in her last few years of life).
Mum had her own taxonomy of flowers. Carnations were “garage flowers”, lilies reminded her of death (I think she forgot she had them in her wedding bouquet – or maybe she remembered, since the marriage died), she disliked chrysanthemums because they were autumnal, she wouldn’t have anemones in the house (Death again) or red and white flowers in the same vase (blood and bandages). Trish would bring armfuls of glorious lilac from her garden and I would hear Mum muttering “Unlucky”as she threw them in the bin. In fact, though I’ve never thought about it ’til now, florists must have been places of extreme danger for my Mother.
There were pink roses on her dressing table as she lay dying, an echo of the vases that had filled the room at her 106th birthday party only two months before.
The memorial rose is called Emily Bronte and has been chosen with such care, it even boasts” a strong tea fragrance”. Nothing in the world could remind me more of my Mother than “a strong tea fragrance”. She drank at least six cups a day – milk in first – in her favourite bone china mug with a picture of herself drinking tea on the front. She loved that mug and showed it proudly to everyone who visited. I think the idea of a picture of herself drinking tea on something out of which she was drinking tea, delighted her.
I drink as many cups as she did and today, I stood in front of the tree drinking from her cup and convincing myself I could smell an answering scent of tea from the roses.
As Izzi said when he gave it to me, I don’t need anything to remind me of my Mother. She was with me so long, I fancied she would be with me for ever. But I amSO glad to have it. As I read the latest lockdown news or listen to the day’s horrific death toll, I look up from my computer screen and the roses give me pause to remember her beauty and her love.
We were in Jaipur, not many weeks before lockdown. As we sat, eating dinner in a marquee the size of Terminal Five, all sparkling in our various International versions of evening dress, an elegant, serious-looking Indian women glided towards us from across the lawn. Positioning herself beside”The Writer’s” gilt chair, she bent down, gracefully, to his ear and whispered, “I hope you don’t mind if I say something personal?”.
“The Writer” gazing up into her intense face, close enough to his for him to feel the warmth of her skin, clearly didn’t mind what she said, as long as she didn’t move from his side. She bent closer still, her voluptuous lips nearly touching his face, and breathed into his ear, “You know, if God were a lion, he’d look like you”. Then she straightened, fixed him with an intense stare and vanished into the night in a rustle of silken sari.
I mention this today because, “The Writer’s” hair is the topic of discussion at breakfast. (Surprisingly, most of the men I speak to and few of the women, seem concerned about the lack of hairdressers).
Me: “Would you like me to cut it?”
“The Writer”, rearing back in his chair, “What? Are you mad?”
Me: “Well, I could have a go or are you going to let it grow down to your shoulders?”
(I wonder, fleetingly, whether it’s only that he doesn’t trust my technique or is his virility at stake here. Has he developed a Samson complex during Lockdown?)
” She said I looked like God AND like a lion”.
“Who did?”
He gives me a half-piteous, half furious look that says, “If you loved me, you couldn’t possibly have forgotten”
So powerful is the look, I immediately remember. I remember the tent, the smell of a thousand Biryanis, Jalfrezis and Vindaloos on the already fragrant air, the men lounging with embroidered pashminas flung across their shoulders – and, of course, the woman.
“I think the longer it gets, the more leonine I look and, besides, I like looking feral”
“Disinfecting the shopping doesn’t seem very feral,” I remark.
He looks at me with scorn and shakes his head. His hair falls about his shoulders – almost.
It’s not as though I look upon the return of his hairdresser with any pleasure. He’s a beautiful young man who comes to the house and talks incessantly about cricket: World cricket, Test Cricket, One day cricket, Limited Overs, Twenty20, his own team, his batting averages, bowling averages, catches taken. Thinking about the ending of Lockdown and his return, I decide my husband does, indeed, look God-like and give up. I know when I’m beaten.
Besides, how can I compete with the prophet in the silken sari?
You’re still writing in about what symbolises Lockdown for you and I’m struck by the fact that no-one has yet listed anything bad. All the things you’ve mentioned so far, will be a pleasure to look back on.
Poppy writes:
1) Shifting all my work into Zoom. Those dratted headphones that are brilliant but hurt my ears after 8 hours. 2) My new puppy. An impulse purchase at the beginning of lock down that has been a godsend distraction for all of us. 3) Wild garlic. Foraging and making things from scratch. A return to my childhood where my father would produce a whole meal from a hedgerow. 4) My 3 children. We haven’t spent so much time together in 10 years and it has been amazing to have a stable rhythm with them
Billy
As we began our 6th week of total isolation, the first person to enter our apartment in all this time, is due today. There is both excitement and trepidation in the air. I have written about Mark, our terrace designer and gardener, before, and now we are so utterly dependent on our terrace for fresh air and beauty, we can’t risk anything on it coming to grief, or we will follow.. The arrangements for Mark to enter our Soho fortress are complex: He is to phone when on his way, phone on arrival downstairs and phone again when he reaches our floor of the block. I will put the front door on the latch in advance, open the terrace door so he doesn’t have to touch it, then close myself in my study. I admit to having misgivings about making Mark feel like a Pariah but, the way he enthusiastically joins in the planning of the mad rituals, reassures me.
Safety ensconced in my study, I shout to him to push open the front door and come in. Through my study door and the heavy steel front door, there is little prospect of his hearing me – and he doesn’t. I rush out of my study, shout the instruction once again from behind the front door, rush back into my study and close the door again, at which moment, Mark enters. It is the oddest feeling to have someone else in the apartment after so long on our own. I have to admit, we’ve both enjoyed not having to entertain the numbers of people who used to troop through and, mysteriously, always head for our lavatory before undertaking any actual work.. But that’s only because, so far, and only by chance, we haven’t needed the services of a plumber, washing machine engineer or electrician. Our solution to a recently bleeping smoke alarm was to rip it out of the ceiling.
“The writer” is so nonplussed, he has retired to his eerie under the roof and and will not emerge ’til the invasion is over. I enjoy a shouted conversation through the terrace door with Mark, as he plants tomatoes and looks approvingly at the gooseberries I’m looking after so assiduously. Until we had them, I never realised gooseberry bushes had such sharp spikes and I wonder whether that’s why they were “chosen” for babies to be found under, to deter the older children from looking for their impending brother or sister? Having concocted this sentimental explanation I discover, on looking it up, that “Gooseberry bush” was 19th-century slang for pubic hair- so much for sentiment.
Mark finishes his tasks, walks gingerly back through the apartment to the front door and leaves us a considerate list of what he’s touched: the hose, outdoor broom and hose tap. I rush out to sanitise them with disinfectant wipes.
“The writer” refuses to re-appear and join me for a celebratory cup of tea until the air has had time to clear.
The aim of this Blog has always been to record the effects of Lockdown on me and my life and hope it might find an echo or a contradiction in yours. It’s solipsistic but that’s in the nature of diaries, so forgive me if I talk about sleep – my sleep. I have always slept badly, unable to drift off at the beginning of the night, with mostly quite trivial anxieties – tasks unfinished, tasks to come, plans for the next day, even what to wear for an event, swarming in my head. I would wake at about 2am, beset by more free-floating anxiety, and snap instantly wide- awake at about 5am, relieved – thrilled – to begin the day, finally released from thought into action.
Beside me,”The Writer” slept solidly and deeply, waking me from my fragile sleep with snoring, visits to the loo and the occasional leap out of bed to walk up and down the bedroom moaning with cramp.
I needed blackout curtains under heavy velvet ones, the red light on the TV had to be blocked with a statuette (It didn’t have to be a statuette, of course, but it was a good excuse to invest in the glorious Art Deco figure I’d lusted after for years), the green light on the telephone cradle was hidden by a carefully -positioned hand-cream tube and in every hotel we visited, I would block out the various standby lights with a rolled towels or plumped cushion.
‘Durga’ by Demetre Chiparus
I knew all about “sleep hygiene”. I’d read every article warning “No TV before bed”, “Warm bath before bed”, “Hot drink before bed” (Goodness knows how you were ever supposed to get to bed if you had to do all that beforehand.) Then there were the proscriptions: “No mobiles in the bedroom “and, of course, “No checking emails or social media in the night”
“No radio” was one of the many strictures I would ignore, trying all manner of speakers before giving up specialised equipment in favour of sleeping with a small radio under my pillow. “The writer” wouldn’t have wakened if I’d played it at full volume on “Rock Radio” or clog-danced round the room but the under -the- pillow method suited me anyway. It would be on as I went to sleep and again immediately I woke up, always on a speech channel. Listening to voices seemed to drive out the voices in my head. (Not literal ones, you understand).
The odd thing was that I didn’t dream. I know everyone dreams and it’s just that I didn’t remember mine, but that feels like not dreaming. Every morning,”The Writer” would regale me with ever more fantastical stories of where he’s been and what he’d done in the night. I was so envious. Compared to my tedious sleeplessness, his nights were packed with excitement. The only other person I have even known like me is Tod. He regularly has barely five hours sleep and spends his mornings listening to Trisha’s dreamtime escapades. Maybe each couple needs one dreamer and one for an audience.
Maybe you’re wondering by now where all this self-confession is going – or maybe you’ve guessed.
Well, Lockdown is the cure!: I go to bed earlier, sleep as soon as I hit the pillow, never wake in the night – and dream– not about Covid -19. Our early mornings have turned into a battle as to which of us tells our dream tale first. The light from windows,TV and ‘phone are invisible to me now, I’m out cold for seven hours and the presenter of my favourite 4am chat-show is chatting to the empty air – or at least to his other thousands of listeners.
As someone interested in human psychology, of course I wonder why this odd thing has happened. Then I realise: I’m no longer worrying – about the minutiae of life, or anything else. I’m just doing the day’s few basic tasks, not thinking about tomorrow’s and enjoying the sunshine. Can it be that what there is to worry about – out there – is so enormous, that my mind can’t cope with it and shuts down in sleep?
That’s my diagnosis, anyway. How are you sleeping?
Quite a shock to see this yesterday after so much glorious weather.
I’m surprised how much difference it made to my mood but it’s good thing for the country. Few people would have been be tempted to visit beauty spots.
In my post of April 26, I mentioned my “To Do” list that I haven’t looked at for the whole of Lockdown. It inspired Amy to send this:
“I have always made lists. As a child, lists of favourite colours, girls names , boys names etc. My brother asked me if I had a list of my lists. Listing is with me to this day. I have notebooks full of them. I can find lists of what I took to Bruges,Tenerife, Florida etc. I have lists of Christmas and Birthday gifts I have sent for the last 10 years .I have unearthed lists from 1972 when we were doing up our house in Canterbury. I am now compiling a mental list of what I will do after Lockdown. I have a beautiful new notebook but am hesitant to put pen to paper lest my writing sullies those pristine pages.”
And here are a few of Amy’s store of lists:
I’m so impressed that Amy keeps actual notebooks of her lists. It’s just the sort of thing one longs to see in history books. A centuries-old list has about it romance and intrigue that a current one can’t hope to emulate.
I realised last night ,that, although I haven’t looked at my “To Do” list, I am still making shopping lists but I doubt they would find their way into any history book. For one thing, even I can’t read them. (There appears to be “prostate” on this one, though I can’t say I remember ordering that).
I also have a permanent travel list on my computer that I call up whenever we go away- one for hot climates, one for cold. The only thing that seems to change every year is the amount of tech. I take with me. It’s gone from a simple iPhone, to iPad, Laptop, portable charger, Kindle.
Any guesses as to when Amy, I, or anyone else will be needing our travel lists again?
Locked down in London 