YOU take your comforts where you can these days. Like the robin in our garden swooping down from the skeletal black branch of the rowan tree, to whip up the crumbs. Some crumbs are luxury in these thin times.
Our friends fire up the chiminea and offer this guest the best distanced seat in the garden … with a fleece blanket for added comfort. There is whipped hot chocolate with cream and a drop of brandy. There is fresh baked coffee cake with a walnut on top.
What more could you wish for?
We sit and we chat as their old dog curls up at my feet and we toast the young people we once were in the long ago Holyland when she, being responsible, took the tea towels home to wash at the weekend, and I, being irresponsible, hoarded dirty coffee mugs under the bed to the point that the rest of them had to stage raids on my room when supplies ran dry.
“I did nothing,” I had to confess.
At home, my mother had me well trained – I was the teenage queen of the ironing board – it was ironing for eight in our house but with Abba on the record player, you were the dancing queen.
Still once freedom beckoned, I waved goodbye to domesticity and I was the laziest sloven of a flatmate ever. I hang my head in shame.
“But you were great craic,” said my friend.
The hot chocolate warmed me through, maybe it was the brandy.
It seems like the early days of this pandemic are light years ago. Now we are weary to our bones. But we move on.
My sister puts a chair out on her porch and we talk at a social distance, braving the cold, eating chocolate as my wet washing tumbles about in her dryer.
There are police officers up in the shopping centre to see that everyone is obeying the rules and the clothes and homeware goods have been cordoned off so you can only buy food, she tells me. It’s an alien world.
People are talking about a second lockdown when we have never really crawled on our bellies out over the trenches of the first one.
Our joys are simple… a circle of the park as the last light of the afternoon hits the black bones of the trees; watching a toddler toss piles of golden leaves in the air; a lonely call echoing across the playing field, a dog chasing its shadow at breakneck speed.
A friend has become a passionate wild swimmer. She shares the joy of a quick dip in the wild down at Helen’s Bay. I’m not entirely convinced. “Hypothermia,” I tell her.
I’m a swimmer to my bones. I learned in the wild Atlantic Ocean. I was eight years old and my aunt was a no-nonsense maths teacher who strode out in a sensible navy costume and a rubber cap with floppy flowers.
I trotted behind her down to the sea and ingested her rules. Observe the slope of a beach – too steep and there may be a shelf. Swim parallel to the beach, never out to sea.
Then I’d hold on to her waist as the sun shone down in a long ago summer. That Connemara beach edged with wild grasses was empty and sandy golden and beautiful.
It was a precious gift that my aunt gave me. But I’m too much of a coward to brave icy waters in winter.
In the famous swimming book Haunts of the Black Masseur you can dip into the tale of Lord Byron swimming the four-mile strait at the Hellespont. But that sea is soft and warm and sparkling turquoise.
Watching the latest in a series of Scandi noirs, it’s not the story that draws me but the sight of the main character slicing through the water at speed wearing a pair of swimming scooper gloves. They are on the Santa list.
Some day, in the not so far away future, I shall perform a ceremonial shattering of my old plastic coffee mug and the tin flask that have been my trusty companions in the park through this pandemic.
I shall torch the socially distanced deck chairs out our front. I may even have to jump up and down on my Fitbit.
It’s endgame. So are we the only people who feel more anxious? As if, with the finishing line in sight, it would be foolish to tempt fate.
