I have been patient. I have been compliant. I have scrupulously observed the Covid code of hygiene at home and abroad. (Abroad? Hah! Chance would be a fine thing!)
I have even been cheerful in a ‘what can’t be cured must be endured’ sort of way. My world has shrunk to a daily trip to the paper shop 500 yards away and once weekly half-blind scurry round the supermarket, my glasses misted over above a mask, impulse-buying tasty things to boost my morale – to which my creaking waistband can attest. I am fed up, literally and metaphorically. My telephone bill is astronomical keeping in tenuous touch with friends and relations, though we have little to say to each other.
In the initial days of lockdown I embarked upon ambitious schemes – deep cleaning, de-cluttering and throwing out. They’re abandoned long ago. The Good Spare Room hosts a Kilimanjaro of black bin bags full to bursting with stuff, before remembering that all the charity shops are shut and now they smell of abandonment. Early on, I sensibly closed the doors of rooms not in use. My sole pot plant, an ornamental ivy, has died of neglect in the Good Bathroom.
Though I’m very fond of my own company, you can get too much of a good thing. As the Loving Spouse used to say, “Sometimes you’re very hard to stick.” How right he was. I’m currently suffering murderous envy of Scots, Welsh and English women getting haircuts, highlights and their eyebrows tinted, while I turn into a dandelion clock. I feel like a frustrated toddler, skulking about, kicking chairs and muttering “S’not fair, so it isn’t!” I thought I was managing so well – revelling in doing as I please (viz. as little as possible) luxuriating in idleness and long lie-ins; reading a lot and cooking favourite dinners.
Now I can’t concentrate long enough to finish a novel and find myself eating coul oul’ salad on a freezing day sooner than have the lettuce walk out the front door of its own accord. Also, my chocolate consumption has seriously increased while watching repeats of programmes already seen and there’s a radio burbling in every room to mask the sound of silence. “How are you spending your time?” friends ask. I’ve gained an honours degree in footering and mooning about.
With ample leisure for reflection, I’ve worked out the difference between solitude and loneliness. ‘Solitude’ – the very word has an easeful serenity about it, a contemplative and relieving positivity after the hurly-burly of work or the exit of visitors, however welcome. Time to relax, to think and plan, do your nails, pluck your eyebrows or forget to dust. Solitude is walking in the garden under my six white cherry trees in full bloom on a fine evening with a glass of wine.
Loneliness is when the corkscrew lodges immovably in the wine-bottle and there’s nobody there to get it out; or finding oneself marooned at midnight in a dress with a stuck back zipper, (an intimate service one can hardly ask of a neighbour.) Or there’s a power-cut and you can’t remember in the pitch dark where you put the torch or candles and anyway, you haven’t any matches. These are lived experiences I assure you.
Seeking solitude is a conscious choice succinctly summed up by that well-worn phrase, “Give my head peace”. Loneliness is circumstantial, a precarious state of apprehensive ‘what-iffery?’’ One of the bleakest words in the English language is ‘alone’. We’re gregarious by nature – pack animals but with souls. The necessary pandemic penance of isolation has done untold damage to the human psyche. Look how relaxation of Covid rules elsewhere has engendered a Gadarene rush of dangerous gladness to beaches, beauty spots and shopping malls. We crave company and connection. As somebody famous once said, “Loneliness wouldn’t be so hard to fight if I didn’t have to do it all by myself.”
And now, the final straw. The living room television has snuffed it. “It’s died of old age,” is the verdict of Richard OvertheRoad, who knows about these things.
What fresh hell is this?
