Disconnected || The Creative Pandemic

I wrote another blog post for The Creative Pandemic called Disconnected, about moving house and not having the internet. You can read it in full here or further down below. 

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DISCONNECTED

The feeling of being disconnected.

I have not had this in a while, maybe when lying in a hospital bed and thinking about all the fun that my friends were having out there, in the summery sun-kissed world. 

(I have moved into a house with the love of my life – I feel like I should precursor this mope with my own context, by the way, I am happy.)

At the moment we have no internet and are busy moving-in; painting, decorating, searching, planning, eating, etc. My mind is taken up by all manner of things like, ‘Where the hell is the dustpan and brush?’ and, ‘Why is this microwave so complicated?’

And yet, when it comes to the witching hour, a term I heard from a friend who has recently given birth, which is when daylight warps into dusk and babies find it disturbing and cry, I get the heebie-jeebies wash over me too.

It’s a certain sinking feeling you get, as if you were in a cavernous auditorium and the lights are being switched off one by one from the back. It’s the encroaching darkness that dampens my mood. It’s why the Danes have hygge, right?

I feel even more out of joint from my normal routine. I have no internet, so can’t check my inbox for unread mail. Usually this means nothing to me, but this is not the deep truth because they do mean something to me, they are my normality. 

I usually unlock my phone out of habit like sighing deeply after climbing a hill, and when I see those red notifications my pulse rate lowers, then I carry on. Even if I return the device to the crevices of my pocket without checking them, it does the trick.

I was never aware of this sort of dependency. I watch my drinking, I watch my sugar intake, but do I watch the number of times I light up my phone for no reason? Pretending to check the time and date although I can’t seem to hold it in my head for more than the split second it took for the light to flash on and off. But the colours of my friends on my wallpaper brighten up my boredom to give me a hit of happiness in these gloomy times.

 

FEAR || The Creative Pandemic

I had a piece of writing feature in The Creative Pandemic titled FEAR, you can also read an earlier draft of it below. It's not very cheery; about the morose state of mind I found myself in when second lockdown was announced. 

FEAR 

I am afraid that this will last too long. 

Too long to be able to call what we once had normal. 

What if I refuse to adapt and live in denial; go in for hugs and be palmed off on to the pavement; what will they think? 

What on earth do they think? I think sadly to myself at home alone in my kitchen: nobody wants this so – what does that mean?

Eventually, we will become reckless and touch hands to face, to cough and splutter and inadvertently kill off the sick and elderly. How un-caring would that be, and could we live with ourselves after that kind of revolution?

I’m disgusted to even think of it and slam my glass down on the Ikea tabletop. I am not worse off, I’ve not been directly hit by this pandemic, so why am I sitting here being morose when there are people far worse off, dealing with poverty and a lack of space and being displaced. 

It puts me in an angry state, I feel caged in and helpless, I feel stupid and lethargic and incapable of doing anything good in the world. This whole thing makes me lose hope. 

I want to talk about the fear of not knowing. 

Not knowing whether what you are doing is right or wrong, or how you even feel about it in the grand scheme of things. People hope the government is doing the right thing, but of course they can’t be because no one knows what the hell to do, no one understands, there’s too much opposing data, too many questions that bring rise to more questions. 

Unlike a maths problem where there’s a cribsheet and fun to solve, the situation is forty thousand dead in eight months and the numbers are mounting. 

EXT. TREE LINED STREET - DAY

The diagnosis of covid is not black and white.

It’s much more complicated than what the public think.

Why aren’t we listening to the doctors who say that lockdown is going to cause more damage to public health than no lockdown?

Fatigue. That’s the big issue.

You mean post-viral fatigue syndrome?

No, the public’s feeling of fatigue.

 

INT. BASEMENT FLOOR KITCHEN - NIGHT

When was the last time you felt alive?

This very morning when I woke up alive and breathing, awake.

Is that what living is – being stuck in your locale, not communicating with society out of fear of infection? Is that really living?

When you put it like that, then no.

That’s what I’m talking about, man.

 

What if we learn to live small-y. Buy kittens, knead sourdough, prune plants and learn to forage mushrooms.

Get into home-schooling and cycle to work, get to know your neighbours and not rely on quick fixes to solve our mundane problems because we’re too poor to be click-baited all year round, out of season.

But what about the daters? 

I heard us couples became smug in our lockdown bubble o’ bliss. What about those of us who have to find a soul-mate, or someone to cuddle up to when the outside world seeps into your core. 

Penetrated by those desperate quiet stares of strangers sat across from you in train carriages, lips and softness smothered by a stretched piece of cloth. All you can do is swallow and hope that this will soon be over.

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Rice

In my kitchen while pottering around I put the leftover rice from the curry last night into a bowl and pour hot water over it (I don’t know where I learnt this). I think it’s an interpretation of Japanese ocha-zuké, where you pour green tea over cold rice, adding some condiments to make it into a palatable refreshing gruel. It’s to decrease waste – my Obaachan absolutely hated wasting anything – a child of The War. If there’s rice stuck to the bottom of the pan then simply add water, put it on the heat and stir. Throw in chopped cabbage, ginger, maybe a dash of soy sauce, spring onions. Why not crack an egg? Don’t you worry, I know what to do with leftover rice.

I use both hands to lift my bowl and carry it surreptitiously into our garden, tiptoeing across the patio slabs so as not to get my feet dirty. I manoeuvre onto the wicker chair and listen to the birdsong trilling. Energetic weeds push up between the slabs – they must’ve gone through a growth spurt during this hot spell – peach coloured roses droop from their stems and the lavender is buzzing. I pull my spoon around the bowl and up to my mouth to get the intense salty taste of chicken stock, the spicy tang of curry cubes and the wholesomeness of white rice.

This is the first time I’ve stayed in London over summer. My world has shrunk enormously, just like everyone else’s and eating food has become an event. Slowly my mind feels like it’s being re-wired to approach situations differently, with more time and flex, simply, the world seems more bendy.

I’ve lived here all my life and still the habits of Obaachan bubble up inside me. For an eighty-six-year-old she moves pretty fast. She might be talking to you from the kitchen, but when you reply she’s already out in the back-garden sweeping the paving stones. I can never keep track of her movements in her own home because that is her domain. Her hair is tightly permed framing her robust face like a cropped lion’s mane; she usually wears an indigo smock with a fetching owl motif over her clothes when she executes her cleaning rituals. Every morning Obaachan gets down on her hands and knees and wipes the floorboards; vacuum-cleans the carpets, both upstairs and downstairs. I caught her once, astride the bath-tub in oversized wellingtons (to stop her feet from getting wet), reaching up to the corners of the ceiling with a mop. I told her to get down carefully and never do it again. What if she were to slip and crack her head on the side of the solid stone bath? She bared her teeth and laughed at me, saying she would never do it again. As if I believed her.

I speak to my grandma every Sunday, although since lockdown it’s been more frequent – it was the best thing we did getting her a smartphone. When I see her pixelated world on my screen it reaffirms for me that another reality can exist. I see the rice-grass spun rope hanging from the kami dana (shrine) in her living room. This small wooden shrine is a house for the many gods, or kami and is positioned just below the ceiling, so when Obaachan holds up her camera phone, the kami dana floats above her head in the background. On the altar stands two vases of freshly cut leaves, a cup of water, and salt on a white porcelain dish. It’s something special that over the many earthquakes her house has endured the kami dana has never come crashing to the ground. I examine the background while talking to her and occasionally I’ll convince myself that her world and my world are not contradictory. Even though our cultures are different, I perfectly understand us.

This physical distance that’s been imposed on us is not too dissimilar from how we used to live. I only get to see her once a year – meeting only once a year isn’t enough when you’re over eighty – we both know realistically there’s not many years left. But this virus has made plans uncertain, a mental breach of something we both held so dearly, the promise of seeing each other again. Missing someone like that isn’t something you can do every day, otherwise the pull gets too strong and becomes a strain. It wears you down and you start to lose hope. So, as long as Obaachan keeps cleaning and I stick to my work… holding the bigger picture in my head, we will share a meal together again. It will be alright.

We have a rice-cooker in Japan, which Obaachan uses every day. Usually she cooks 1 gō of rice for herself (approximately 1 cup) because rice doesn’t keep, but when I’m visiting, she cooks up to 5 gō a piece. ‘Rice tastes better when you are here’, she says to me because the grains become fluffier with a greater volume of water and cooking time. A pang of pity swells inside me because I am reminded, every day she eats alone. Obaachan who is such a good storyteller, captivating us with her funny asides and character voices. Why does she have to eat alone? Because her eldest daughter emigrated to England, her younger daughter married-out to another man’s family as is the way, and her husband died.

I think about her now as I eat my rice. The two of us separated by thousands of miles – it’s not impossible – we could be eating rice at the same time. Not in the same place but in the same present performing the same actions, as in a ritual, finishing off a half-drawn circle; stirring my spoon around the bowl’s edge, tasting the sacred white rice.

Thames River Time

When we started walking the sun was up. I got us toasted sandwiches from the main coffee shop in the town centre. There’s something provincial about Woolwich and I want to be part of it. I’m gazing across the central square – while I wait for my coffee – that got done up for the Olympics, a forum with a huge television screen overlooking the concrete steps, where people are sitting. A child is creeping up behind pigeons, afraid he might actually catch one, so changes tact mid-way and runs at them screaming. Two women are chatting over a bag of corn snacks. Tracksuit bottom boy strides by flaunting a Gucci strap-bag on his hip.

You can glimpse all the movement of Woolwich, in one swoop of the eyes because of this central square. I’ve never really noticed it before because London doesn’t have town squares – apart from Trafalgar – the levelling of everyone on the same plain, people passing from side to side, like a game of tennis.

We walk towards the Thames. There is a farmer’s market in the new Woolwich Arsenal development, lined with stalls with striped tarpaulin roofs. People milling about with their dogs on leashes and holding coffee in cardboard cups; it’s not too crowded and could easily be pleasant. I notice more dogs away from the town centre, where all the city commuters live. The price of coffee steadily rises with each step you take towards the river.

There are so many un-built, part-filled flats on the riverside. There is a water-feature that’s worthy of any contemporary housing development - invisible spouts spurt water up and down in time to silent music. At night they light up in fuchsia glows, to give it an East Asian shopping mall feel. Kitsch and modern, also a deterrent for crime and rough sleepers, to cover a whole area with colourful water. Two big Alsatians play-fight amongst the spritz and look like they’re enjoying it.

If you keep walking the Thames footpath stops and you have to skirt around a warehouse complex. We made the wrong turning and found a climbing wall at a dead end. A woman in skin-tight leggings re-directs us and on the way out, we step into a gallery being set up for two artists. I'm won over by their mixed-media art – acrylic paint sandwiched between two sheets of Perspex then hung from a wooden frame by thick chains. Black ink applied with a palette knife over powdery Instagram filter backgrounds. The artists were setting up their Dark Silo exhibition, wearing pandemic face shields. One of them looked like David Hockney crossed with Garth from Wayne’s World.

The sky is filled with drizzle. We press on through streets flanked by enormous boarded-up warehouses and dilapidated civic buildings, and on to the Thames Barriers. The barriers were built in the 1970’s with an intended life-span of up to 2030. That’s only ten years from now. I wonder what the people who constructed the Thames Barriers thought life would be like today. It was a time of retro-futurism and Star Wars and that sci-fi ideal is definitely reflected in the giant curved stainless-steel structures, rising up from the riverbed like the optimistic past, which I have little connection to except through the nostalgia effect.

It’s properly raining now and we’re almost at Greenwich. There's a well-situated pub in between called the Anchor & Hope, where we stop off to have a half-pint and shandy. Music plays from a jukebox. Next to the pub is a seafood van with W-I-N-K-L-E-S painted on the side in royal blue, in old-style signage lettering. The catchy pop-beat of Maria by Blondie pulsates through the pub. Outside on the grey horizon, I can see the strange shape of the Millennium Dome with its toothpick yellow stilts, piercing up through the ground. 

The Thames is a good place to walk, it's like moving through vignettes of bygone eras, and it’s nice to forget sometimes what the day is like.

Packing and Moving

I am starting to pack up my room. A lovely, homely room I have lived in for about five years – on and off – I went to Japan for 6 months in between, but the room didn’t mind and welcomed me back. There are books on the shelves I never read on philosophy, sociology and political theory. They’re like standing heroes who oversaw my move in and now my move out.

Top tips for movers

·       Test your appliances, wires and devices. When you’ve been in a place for a while, you accumulate a lot of stuff, namely things that supply power to other things. It’s likely some of this tech has given up the ghost. I don’t need to take this mini-USB charger with me when the world i.e. port-sockets have moved on.

·       Close the lid. Find the lid and close all open containers and bottles you have in your possession.

·       Bags in bags. I’m a huge fan of putting small bags within slightly larger bags, and that within even larger bags. Like a Russian doll of your own stuff. I want to compartmentalise my life, to give it an ordered effect, so that I know things can’t escape and get mixed-up with the wrong things. It’s all nonsense but I want it to make sense. Sometimes it’s just about fittings things together. The end result is that it takes up less space, like this small brown leather pouch with an ipod and a wine-aerator in.

·       Get rid of old cards and vouchers.

·       There will be a lot of dust. Be prepared to sneeze.

·       If you have a massive vine – like my overgrown ivy – then unfurl it from the stand it has become attached to. Wrap itself around itself, so that it looks like a sleeping fox in a nest, then gently place it into a plastic bag for transportation.

·       No pain, no gain. Be prepared to stub your toe, scrape your arm, get splinters, etc.

·       Make sure you understand the importance of some things, in other words, “You don’t miss something until it gets smashed.” If you have a framed print you care about then wrap it in scarves.

·       Coats and bags take up the most room. Literally, they’re padding and baggage.

·       Get everything out of your drawers and pile them high on your bed, or the floor. A space where you may survey it, like a lord over his hobbits. This will allow you take stock of all you have, and give rise to discoveries like, oh I had a wad of facemasks my hygiene conscious aunt gave me in Japan – these are actually really useful in a pandemic. Thanks auntie!

·       Use bags for clothes and cases for books. It works with their shapes and consistencies.

During the move, it honestly helps to have friends cook meals for you, so that you can eat at regular intervals and not fall down with exhaustion.

Once you have arrived, hug your friends even if there are social distancing rules in place, because they are now part of your household.

Carefully unwrap the paintings, dust the floors, put the vine back on a pedestal, take a nap and then unpack.