Annus Lockdownus. I began my blog with a poem a day after my mother died three years ago, which I then deleted to make way for the new one. When lockdown started, I moved in to prose.
My first entries were paranoid as I read 1984 (which I think my father hid and I have now refound) and felt real terror at the thought of never leaving the house and garden and only seeing friends behind screens and losing our democratic free will.
But the reality is worse than I had imagined. A year on we are still in lockdown, we purchase with plastic without thinking about it and the greed and blatant lies of our leaders are beyond anything I had imagined possible. I thought the Conservatives stood for a patriarchal benevolence, which meant that the rich created employment and gave to charity. Not that the wealthy would be allowed to make vast sums of money out of death, spend vast sums of taxpayer money inefficiently and be unaccountable.
This is why my father didn’t want to live. We were not allowed to discuss politics on our daily work through the snowdrops, the bluebells, the wheat fields and the onions but economics was permitted. Quantitative easing a bad idea.
My father would have been 90 on Monday, with a household of the 27 Raisons who attended his funeral last September, with the acting game, Adnams fizz and a witty speech full of JPR aphorisms. I hear his soft slipper shuffle round the house, feel his gentle benevolence and when the headstone was planted in Valentine’s Week its concreteness and finality took my breath away; Dad no longer peering down at Mum with me but crossed to the other side.
ness365 