Diaries

I don’t believe in angels, or fairies, or devils - save bad thoughts - but I like the idea of a holy spirit which see as kindness.  A dream/dram of Oban, or Apple Brandy, Calvados - hot and quick and intense, but only when drunk first as once - savoured - and then go on.

I can taste them now - one of them, Oban.  One mouthful - held and gone.  Never more, because the second becomes a habit, never tasted.

So holy spirit - a happy thought.

Yesterday was good, I walked a long way through Highbury and thought of Jinny and Villa Ada.  The sky was a very deep perfect circle of blue.  I remembered visiting Winsome Green Prison.  The circling vast outer wall, behind which could  be heard the number11 bus circling round, orbiting this inner world, separate, remote.  The sky above a round blue plate.  The cell

windows in the heavy brick of a secure block, barred.  A plane passed over with a vapour trail drifting.  The breeze lifted nothing, but from one window with a broken pane a hand reached out and fed the dirty pigeon on its sill.

What do we know of ‘Lock Down’?

We go on, fools govern while we let them.  The world burns

The planet will survive but humankind may have to be ‘has been’

Oban - only in memory.

Just read Coleridge - Frost at Midnight.  He and his child beside the fluttering fire, and all his hope and love for this child’s freedom to wander in beauty, is here.  And I can see somewhere just behind him, The I industrial Revolution has begun.  The city he has gone from increases in size, the railways are about to develop and Malthus in the nearing future will look at population and Engels will be in Manchester.  But this Coleridge could not forsee.

Yesterday the news showed crowds at the seaside and beauty spots - all ’taking the sun’ - walking, meeting, picnicking.  All 'desperate to get out’ as the cliche goes.  And all the warnings of scientists that  ‘it is too soon to go out and about’  fall unheard by many not wanting to be heard.

Will a second wave come?  Will something worse develop?

America burns with protest - people turn on callous government and dug-in deep racism.  And many are hurt as one has died.

'We don’t do death’ in this Western Modern Society.  Meaning we don’t

recognise Death don’t wish to meet it.  We think we can shoot stars and live for ever.

Bocaccio: The Wheel of Fortune, Fate and The Dance Macabre.

Just read Keats ’Nightingale’.

This morning the sky is white, the weather has changed, it is cooler, the air still.

Outside continuous background surf of traffic.  Work gradually beginning again.

There is a hiatus as, all around, people go back - yet wait and watch - tentative.

Some simply do not believe in this strange virus circling around us.  They feel untouched, free, and so go about raucous and impatient for the pubs to open again, for coffee bars and food.  They make for open space to live as always - wanting shops and spending and good times, because that is life and livelihoods.

Theatres are silent, cinemas look old.  Small outlets will remain shut up.

Underneath and all around uncertainty is there.

You haven’t died yet but the tax bill will land one day or the next.

I can’t really remember what I did yesterday, save that I got through it in a mundane way.  Gentle exercise, lunch, nap, walk, shop for cat food - came

home to water garden, cook supper, watch television.  I avoided all things creative.

A diary piece?  I can’t be doing this, the dreary ordinary thoughts of a not very interesting mind.  Not funny.

And I realise how I am daunted, incapable of an objective/subjective commentary on the happenings in the world.  The riots and protests in America.  The injustice.  The horror of a dangerous racist, bigot at the helm.  His idiotic stance - Bible in hand. This horrific troubled man threatening with guns and soldiers the people - people denied, despised, held down .

How apt the image of a white policeman kneeling on a black mans neck.

How Long?

And I live in a garden- of such beauty - and outside a woman crouches in the bushes beside the Vets’ where I go for my cats’s medication, she is furtively shooting into her veins, hidden by the bins.  Thin body, busted shoes.

We live side by side and I ?  As trump would condone - 'I’m alright Jack!’

I go on just mithering and mooching and watering my garden, bored and sad.

Barren and culpable.

I turn and read John Clare, he knew lockdown.

Maggy Markworthy