Social distancing

23 Apr Social distancing

The heron was almost motionless – an occasional slow turn of the head as it cast a dismissive eye around. I had the sense it was weary of us all stopping to gaze. Disdainful even. There is something ancient about herons with their solitary habits, pterodactyl wings and long legs – yes, I did have to look up the spelling! This one would have been at home in the Natural History Museum or in a gallery, a piece of installation art entitled ‘Time’ or ‘Solitude’ – or maybe, and frustratingly, ‘Untitled IV’. It does annoy me when artists boast about being able to use Roman numerals but can’t be bothered to title their work.

The other bird in the distance, the one on the chunky plinth, is smaller – and not just because of perspective. A gull or a pigeon I couldn’t quite see. One with quite a size advantage in the bird world but looking awed by the scale and tranquillity of the heron. Doubtless envying its fancy perch. Social distancing in the bird world – almost too far for their voices to carry. I wonder, do the different species talk to one another except in anger or fear?

It put me in mind of the distance that’s opened up because of social distancing in my little corner of the human world. I’m thinking of the friends and relatives that bit further away, beyond the ‘local travel’ limits. For me, many of these are in Scotland, the ‘let’s meet up when I’m passing through’ people whom I don’t normally see more than once or twice a year. But that’s always been enough to keep us going steady, to maintain the connections that started back in our childhood or teenage years. Now it’s more than a year, by summer it will be two years, two whole years since we saw one another. It feels long enough to worry about it a little. I wonder how they have fared this last year, how much their worlds have changed.

There’s been the odd Whatsapp message, birthday and Christmas greetings. There could have been calls or zooms, but mostly there haven’t. It’s not that I’ve rationed zooming, though I like it less now than I did at the start of lockdown. It’s not that I’ve consciously applied limits or categorised friends for levels of contact. But it dawned on me, watching the heron and looking across that voiceless distance between it and the other bird, that those occasional contacts of mine with their long histories and deeply-rooted attachments have been the ones most neglected this last year. Not that I haven’t thought about them and, quite possibly, they have thought about me. But they haven’t transferred from real time to screen time; somehow, they exist on location and in the moment rather than in a virtual world.

And yet, I’ve zoomed with people much further away, so far away that we’re having breakfast while they’re tucking into dinner. And the local ones, the close ones where our everyday lives are enmeshed have continued with sometimes daily messages interspersed with frequent walks. It’s the in-between relationships that seem to have suffered – if suffering is what it is. I don’t have the answers but would love to understand it. Perhaps it’s something about those old friendships, the ones that are picked up and put down again, the ones that happen when I’m back in the old world I used to inhabit and with which they help keep me connected. Maybe they have some kind of inbuilt resilience. We are not enmeshed in each other’s lives day in day out. But our connection runs deep down into a shared past, a solid fixture that won’t be lost. They are reliable, touchstones to my past selves. We will pick up where we left off when I’m passing that way again. What a joyful thought!