November

20 Nov November

November is drifting by. Mostly damp. Sometimes the sun sends the early mist scuttling to wherever it hides on perfect autumn days – under a gently decaying log in the far reaches of the park perhaps or in a hollow by the river. Not so many of those early-mist-yielding-to-sparkling-sunny days this year. Or is that my imagination and my mood?

Dull days on a repeat cycle somehow resonate with the gruesome statistics of the pandemic that, once more, take up mind space. I’ve become fixated again with the numbers. They had receded a little over the summer as the toll of cases was quelled, life became fuller and freer for a while and the living was easier. I didn’t always look or stop to ponder the person behind the 8 or maybe 10 deaths on this or that day back in August. Who had they been? Who had loved them? What plans had they left unfinished, dreams unfulfilled, quarrels unresolved? Now we’re back indoors and the numbers are busy again doing their terrible adding up. How fickle they are; what games they play. Not so much in what they represent. I assume the numbers are truths even if people argue about whether it’s the right way to count or it’s better or worse than this country or that. No, it’s how they habituate the mind to the horror show. Graphs and charts, daily totals of this, projections of that, models of the next thing. We watch the news for the daily stats, feel relief if they have ‘flattened’ even though several hundred more are already in the queue for the crematorium. Perhaps it makes us feel in control of something, this seeing of trends. We can work out whether to be worried or not, seek ways to make them reassuring, much as we do when, praying for a sunny day, we trawl every weather website until we find the forecast we want. We can depersonalise. We have the information. But we lose its meaning. Somehow, the numbers abstract the humanity. Maybe that’s the only way to hang on.

I’m still limiting the news feed to once a day in an effort to reach 2021 and keep sane. Still washing the shopping. Still opening the post wearing rubber gloves. Still cleaning a lot. Still moisturising hands that have never seen so much soap and water. Still not been to a shop. Still zooming from time to time, though it seems everyone is a little jaded with zoom. Wondering how many of all these ‘still’-nesses I’ll carry over to the next life. No, I haven’t gone all religious. I don’t mean life after death. Just life after COVID. News of vaccines makes me hopeful. But I’m trying to ‘manage my expectations’, as they say.

The view from life conducted mostly indoors has its own pace. Time passes surprisingly quickly. At its best, on glinting mornings, it’s filled with the silver birch in the back garden in its majestic golden phase. Like a fairy-tale princess throwing off everyday green and cloaking herself in a shimmering cape. Two pictures, a week apart, follow her journey. Just look at her. Talk about flashy!

My little study in the attic gives the best view and it soothes me to see the tree going through its seasonal paces as if nothing much has changed in the world. This is also where I “go to Aberdeen” a couple of days a week, sometimes more. I’m romping my way through a millennium of Scottish history, loitering for a while in the seventeenth century crafting an end of term essay. I’m realising that taking on this course was a way of shutting out the world. But, also, a sign of hope.

My outdoor horizons have extended to a shared allotment that four of us, brave/bonkers (delete as appropriate) women have taken on. We’ll spend the winter rescuing it from neglect and nursing it back to health. Another sign of hope. And a metaphor for life.