“Hell is other people”. So wrote Sartre in his play of 1943. Philosophy is not my forte, but If I were writing an update in 2020 I would write, “Hell is other people and their blasted noise”. Here we are in enforced lockdown in a beautifully warm and sunny Easter weekend, trying to enjoy the peace of an English garden, and all we get is THUMP, THUMP, THUMP of some hideous music from two doors away. Of course, this is not a phenomenon unique to lockdown; it often happens whenever there is a nice sunny day. The problem is living on an estate. I don’t mean an estate like Chatsworth or Woburn. I mean a modern housing estate with the nearest house just ten metres away. If we could afford to move, then we would, but I understand that neither Chatsworth nor Woburn are up for sale at the moment, and even the lesser estates cost more than the £300,000 that our lovely house might raise if we sold it. I have often wondered about buying one of those Victorian forts in the middle of the English Channel: it would suit me perfectly. Our palliative solution to the noise, in previous years, has been simply to load up the car and decamp to our boat in Devonshire. There we have the options of sailing off into wild blue yonder, cruising up river to a quiet spot and anchoring, or simply remaining alongside in the marina. Even the last has its drawbacks, because a high proportion of boat owners seem to take their dogs with them, and the dogs yap continually; but at least we can escape them. The boat option is, of course, not available to us at the moment, so it is on with the sound-deadening headphones and Beethoven, and hope they deaden it all out.
I think the dogs are more irritating than the music, because the barking where we live is incessant. All our neighbours, bar one, have dogs. One neighbour has five. When one starts to bark, the rest join in and it goes on forever. But by far the worst neighbours are next but one from us and we label them The Dog People. Their three dogs bark continually throughout the day (and here I am not exaggerating): if I empty stuff in our bins, then they bark; if I go into my garage, then they bark; if I walk down my drive, then they bark; and if the owners go out, then the dogs howl continuously. Their dogs bark more than the rest of the dogs in the area put together. It can be hell on earth. The dogs are kept in the back garden or conservatory all day, and mess on the artificial lawn, leaving little clumps of faeces for the three children to play with. Lovely.
If there is one profession that has not come out well from this pandemic, then it must surely be journalism. With a few notable exceptions, our journalists have been appalling. Their questions of politicians have been rambling, self-seeking, repetitive, negative, vacuous, carping or naïve. And that is just the adjectives I can think of in a few seconds. The reporters seem to take delight in finding a weakness in the government strategy, in the plans to fight the infection, in failures of logistics, or in statements made. They find a topic or perceived weakness and worry at it like a dog with a bone: it used to be Instigating Lockdown; then it was Testing; currently it is Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) or Masks. There is nothing positive or supportive in their approach. Questions that should or could be asked, that is questions that occur to ordinary folk, are not raised. In my newspaper today there was one opinion stating that the government delayed lockdown too long, causing unnecessary loss of lives, and another opinion stating that we really should cancel this lockdown before the economy totally collapses, causing loss of lives as collateral damage. I have cancelled my newspaper subscription. Just as in the years following the Brexit referendum, I have stopped listening to or reading the news now; the daily brief by the government is quite sufficient and depressing enough, and I do trust it. Journalists. They will be the first up against the wall when my revolution comes.
Now the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has come out and told nurses not to work if they haven’t got the correct PPE. Oh, brilliant! How helpful! Let us all just lie down then, and do nothing shall we: don’t treat anyone, don’t move or cremate the bodies, don’t dish out pills, don’t enforce the law, don’t fight any fires, don’t generate electricity, don’t deliver food, don’t collect the rubbish and don’t rescue anyone….the list is endless. The RCN does not seem to realise that we are all in a crisis together and that all the stops are being pulled out to get PPE to everyone who needs it. There may still be shortages. I do not underestimate the genuinely brave work our front line medical staff are doing and I recognise that we are asking them to put their lives on the line; indeed, they have already suffered casualties in this battle. But these are exceptional circumstances and they will just have to improvise and make do, just as medical staff have to do in field hospitals. The medics are not the only people who have to risk there lives in the course of their jobs. The RCN is becoming less of a Royal College and more of a Bolshie trade union, it seems to me. As a first step we should take a way the prefix ‘Royal’ from the title.
Well, that seems to wrap it up for noisy neighbours, dogs, journalists and the RCN. Any more for the firing squad? Oh, is that your dog? What a nice little chap.
Well, Jane is attending a coffee morning as I write this. Such an assembly is difficult in the present circumstances, of course, but she and the other girls (I use the term loosely) among our Good Neighbours have overcome the problem by sitting on garden chairs and conversing across the ten metre gap that is our street. They started this coven last week and I was amazed then that they could find something to talk about for nearly two hours. Women have this astonishing ability to converse for long periods; men just say what is necessary, and stop. On this occasion, Jane has baked cupcakes to accompany the coffee, though I am curious as to how they will be shared across the distance: fired by catapult or trebuchet perhaps. I suppose, as they are hot from the oven, the cupcakes must be virus-free. Come to think of it, I have not been offered any. Men, naturally, are excluded from this loose and loquacious gathering. I wonder if some busybody, who was not invited, will report the coven to the police. There is, at the moment, a law against Enjoying Oneself.
Does anyone else finds that it is the little things in life that generate the challenges to sanity? I was downstairs this morning preparing the tea for the memsahib and, while it was mashing, I thought I would just check the coffee machine to make sure it didn’t need emptying. We are real coffee addicts (we won’t touch Instant) and have one of those Nespresso pod machines that makes excellent coffee. The discarded pods are collected in a hopper and emptied periodically into a recycling bag, which is later collected by Nespresso whenever new pods are delivered. Sure enough, the hopper was full so I carried it and the drip tray through to the utility room to obtain a new recycling bag, and clean the hopper. I rummaged in the cupboard for the proper bag, discarding various superfluous items that Jane had hidden in there (old jam jars, used polythene bags, vases, elastic bands, unidentifiable seeds…), but could not find the recycling bag. However, my enthusiastic search dislodged a spare kitchen roll on top of the cupboard, and this fell on my head. Calmly (because God has spoken to me before about losing my temper), I picked it up and gently put it back on top of the cupboard. I closed the cupboard door. This brought forth an avalanche of spare kitchen rolls, dusters, an old shoe box, a small picnic basket and an aerosol can of Pledge. These landed on me, dropped in the sink, bounced on the work surface and rolled around the floor. God, give me strength, but I smiled benignly (“You won’t get through to me!”) as I gathered it all up. I spoke sternly to them all (if I can talk to a shed then I can certainly give a bunch of kitchen rolls a severe dressing down). I advised them all that they were coming to within an inch of being kicked around the garden. Every single one of them. Well, that told them and, while they were suitably cowed, I stuffed them all back firmly, decisively and with some force back onto the top of the cupboard. This time they didn’t fall down. Mind you, I did notice that the kitchen rolls had become a little flattened and bent in the restoring process, but I can always blame that on Jane’s packing at the supermarket. I returned to the task in hand, that is to say, the absence of a recycling bag. Nothing else for it but to dump the old coffee pods in the general waste – something I don’t like doing, but needs must. So I picked up the hopper and drip tray, dumped the pods and, by some means or other, spilt the entire contents of the drip tray all over the utility room floor. Cold coffee went everywhere: down the kitchen unit doors, up the walls, over the main door, up to the ceiling, and over me. It is astonishing how far it went. That Noel Coward dressing gown will never be the same, and the silk pyjamas will need special cleaning, though I did manage to save the cravat. It took me quite some time to mop up the mess and clean the floor, the doors and the walls, but I was immensely proud of how calm I had remained throughout – those prayers for tolerance and patience, clearly, had not been wasted. I returned the spotlessly clean and empty hopper to the Nespresso machine and there – lying on the floor next to the machine in the kitchen – was the empty recycling bag that I had been seeking.
“You took a long time”, said the memsahib after we had gone through the usual temperature and curtain ritual. “What have you been doing? This tea tastes a bit stewed”
Just wait until she opens that cupboard door.
As I have mentioned before, the memsahib does not do sewing. Her talents (including the uncanny ability to know what I am thinking or when I am stepping on plants) are manifold, but – alas – sewing is not among them. I do my own sewing as necessary: a series of half hitches with button thread works for most things and a purse-string suture works well on holed socks (I have been out with a fair number of nurses). But the onset of this present enforced isolation has driven Jane to take out her sewing box (huge box, nothing in it except three bobbins of thread and two needles) and make an effort at shortening an evening dress and restitching the broken strap of her silk nightdress. This last repair was particularly necessary because the damaged nightdress gave her a sort of lop-sided Amazonian, Boudicca-like look, if you follow me, and I had already cast an amused eye at the result. Well, that evening dress has been hanging on a hook in the dressing room for three weeks now. Today it progressed to the drawing room, where is was draped over the sofa with the Iceni nightdress, Jane siting in the middle of it all with a needle and thread like a medieval maiden whiling away her time waiting for her knight to return from the Wars of the Roses. Curses and un-maidenlike words sprang forth from the room from time to time, and I tiptoed away to do the accounts and other manly tasks until all was done. After about two hours I popped downstairs to get a cup of coffee and glanced through the glass door of the drawing room. She was still sitting there, in the same pose, but playing Word with Friends on her iPhone; the needlework was untouched. I stood in the doorway and cleared my throat tentatively, raising my eyebrows.
“Finished?”
“No. I hate sewing”, was all she said.
It looks like those dresses are going to be there for some time. And now she says she doesn’t feel too good. No cough, no fever. Let’s hope that it is just general malaise.
As I surfed the channels on the television this morning, desperately looking for something worth watching while we sipped our tea (never yet been known to happen, but you never know), I sensed that Jane was a bit embarrassed about saying something. Finally, she burst out,
“Would you mind awfully if we didn’t do anything today?”
I said nothing and looked uncomfortable.
“Is that all right?”, she asked, looking slightly concerned at my expression.
“Well”, I said, “that’s rather what I was planning to do anyway…”
And here we are.
12 April 2020
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 