Necessary Journeys . A Haircut. Naked people.

                                                                     Necessity.

Last week I set out out on a Necessary Journey, to Amsterdam. Yes, I was needed, but I will not  lie to you dear readers, I was glad glad glad of the necessity.  The sense of being herded, detained in my own home for weeks on end ( home's your castle) by other parties was doing something to my mind's peace...my maybe soul.  Grinning guards at check points when I had to travel, queues cattle-like at supermarkets, I accepted, with its  consequential cortisol spikes, helplessness...(the curve the curve).  The news, the newsfeeds arguing the toss, disputing fatalities.  The helpless old in nursing homes.  Collective Guilt. Mea culpa mea culpa.

I accepted it, all.

And now the oh so reluctant opening up (dance of the seven veils) complete with doom laden warnings to the restless, squeals of refusal from the people thoroughly spooked and BLOODY WELL NEVER COMING OUT AGAIN, PERIOD!

And science as news, as newsfeed, as irrefutable, with its contradicting, blaming, framing messages:

There will there won't be: second waves, antibodies, cures.
There is there isn't: alleviation in hydroxychloroquine, remdesiver, masks.
Locking down, or kind of not, has it hasn't  saved the people, flattened the curve.
But facial Masks are useful, useless, helpful, pointless to prevent your spreading, but not breathing in, a virus...
droplets, droplets travel many metres, wait to ambush, hoover, hang, athough they don't... they may... they are...dissolved... they are too fine for masks to stop them... not, they're not!
Just wear the masks? Yes, wear them anyway. Ok?

Me, I took positions on this virus, like you do. I got behind the immune system coping, the right to prudent autonomy,  that kind of thing.  Behind questioning everything  spinning from the panicked government, irrefutable scientists, news, the newsfeed.  I wasn't scared, or any more than I am always scared of life's incalculable shifts and endings.

But then, days were weeks and weeks were months of lockdown.  Fear comes to you anyway.  Hysteria, a kind of madness flying out from all the shifting narratives, sticks.  Even as you try to hold your ground, sustain your people. The point comes where you can't sustain this flight from normal, or say the words ( flattening curves, in it together, stay safe stay safe) ( you never said the words). You must resume your everyday, or spiral into some basically unhinged.

                                                              A Haircut.

And so I walked from  Centraal Station into the enlightened city of Amsterdam,  blinking at bodily proximities of 1.5 mts, fumbling for masks for trams, and breathing, breathing mouthfuls of lung expanding air. Walking, walking as you do in cities always, taking in the city vistas,  its canals and buildings visible anew in the absence of the tourists.  Only the locals out and shopping, walking, talking in their native tongue, the strong stretched vowels prevailing in the soft warm air.
I listen, soothed, on my way to have my hair cut on my second day.  I had a sense that I would be renewed, made good again in the sanctum of the salon,  the snip snip of the stylist's  scissiors. Accumulations, dead ends from the lockdown falling from me as the stylist layered and washed and combed my Irish hair.

And so it was. I walked back up from Prinsengracht,  crossing the Kalverstraat to Dam Square so  free and fine and easy, light as air.  I felt my head sit lighter on my shoulders,  cleaner, sane.


                                            You pay your money and you take your chances...

Days pass, and we grow accustomed to the freedoms here, the restrictions too that have become the price of freedoms. Coffee in a cafe, dinners out, apologetic waiters limiting numbers, murmured reminders of social distance as we the Grateful Customers smile assent. The people walk together in the public spaces easily, reminded of the virus by shop assistants, waiters wanting so to have you in.  Observe the rules...oh yes, oh yes, but nonetheless entice you...in.   Come in, come in, oh careful does it; this way, do come in.


                                                                  Nudists,

The angel child and I take the train to Zanvoort aan  Zee, on Friday. The Zee the Zee, I say, it's been forever dearest (corralled in midland locked-down Ireland)  since we've been and seen the sea!
It is divine, is all. The sun shines kindly, warms our pallid Irish skin, the breeze blows back our new cut hair, the sand gives gently to bare feet, we walk the shoreline, talk, the two of us, content. We turn at midday, cross the sand for coffee, walking through the people sun bathing. I pay them little mind.
"So um, why are they all, I mean, ah, naked?"
Huh?
The dear girl's face is creased with distaste at a solitary naked man stretched careless on a towel. Full frontal, to be clear. There are a few of these guys, as well as little groups of men and women comfortably naked, unbothered in their skin. We agree we must be on the nudist stretch, and to get our coffee back the way.  And she, the dear girl, asks me as we hasten ( she more disturbed than I) if I would, I mean myself,  be into that, because she most definitely would not.  I say I think I would (among congenial people). I say I think, after the initial awkwardness I'd be ok with it. She definitely wouldn’t be.  I cannot say I blame her really, observing the ever so slightly predatory solitary man. The fleeting facial smirk, the calculating eye. But ah, the little laughing groups!

I talk about about my naked dreams over coffee. (We’ve done her dreaming on the walk) Dreams of the recurring kind where you are shoeless, barefoot, sometimes naked, in the public space. Where you are OUT, too late to dress, go back, or find your shoes... your clothes.   Self conscious, feeling foolish, solitary, shamed and naked in a public place. We ponder on it, poke at it,  consider exhibitionism, shame, or boundaries, appropriateness, grounded ness. Thefeartheshame. Recurrence, and what it is that I'm (just) not getting here, why doomed to dream the dream over and over.

We shift to Normal People which she is re-reading after the TV show. It turns out to be, basically, related, we decide.  Connell and Marianne and intimacy in bodies, minds, the heart. Baring body baring heart. The desire for it... fear of it. (And still the public discomfort  about...naked need?)

I wonder later if in fact the dream discomfort’s with vulnerability, openness.  Not leaky boundaries, sagging gates, between public and private, as I had loosely guessed.  Not a dream of jeopardy, abandonment of lock downed, closed off, safety ( we hysterically require)   The feartheshame neurosis.  Not that at all.  I wonder if in fact being naked, honest/open with all others is the last frontier?  Connection, laying bare the body/heart. The feartheshame neurosis.   Being able for it, being willing, to try. 

Where do you go to (my Lovely).

                                                                   Unmoored

 "So, we'll all break for coffee...ah... will we,"  the hostess says self consciously  "...and we'll all I mean go down to our kitchens now, from wherever you are, in your (chuckle) socks, and, you know, make yourself a cup of coffee, or tea even, make tea, and come back...from wherever you are in the house in your...your PJs"  She chortles at her own insouciance, trials off...
And I'm pushing up from the desk in the box room, the play room that was, shelves still holding children's books, splashy children's paintings. I am disorientated in place and time, yanked from aural connection via tele conference, and in need of strong coffee.
'Wherever you are in the house' 'our kitchens??'  Oh.  The words erase my inner visual of colleagues  in a room around a table, besuited, a secretarial station humming just down the hall.  Like I know I'm in my socks in my boxroom, but they were at work where my mind had placed them. Picture perfect, arranged,  never disturbing me with visual cues or body language. My captive audience. Not.  And I'm shocked into body, pins and needles, real.
I need an infusion of coffee. (not tea).

                                                                    Stunned

I offer that palliative to my younger daughter, passing her room, her open door, where she is a pale silent presence hunched over a desk. She looks up and through me, failing to connect.  She's online at a lecture, the lecturer's voice grown familiar to me over weeks, catching stray words, dutch accents, intoning on physics, micro-macro duality, vectors and whatnot.
She beats a path every day of this lockdown from kitchen to garden to bedroom, listening, writing, staring at a screen.  Connecting for lectures sometimes in the early morning, sometimes in late evening. The Dutch are always ahead of us. Or behind us... They're down with an early start, anyhoo.
"But, so,  I mean... what about dinner... the hoovering... your washing? (spilling untended from the washing machine) I variously ask, forgetting that she is not really here, in my house. She's in a lecture. She's not really there either.

Days she has a stunned look, like a bird smacking hard on a windowpane.  Times she grows wild and rowdy on zoom calls, only wanting to connect, hysterical in the emptiness of virtual presence.
The Garden is taking shape under her restless fingers, strawberries forming, tomatoes, lettuce tips peeping from the raised bed. She grows the vegetables, leaves the flowers, the grass cutting to me.
She is a lover, a hugger, a dancer with dancers, given pacifiers of virtual meets, netflix, lectures online. Tossed back and forth from virtual interior to empty exterior, each and every day.  Sometimes suspended in the transition. Lost.

All night she dreamzs,  creates... astonishing astonished scenarios to locate herself, somehow, in this bizarre and total up -turning of her everyday life.
Dreamzs. She dreamzs, and in her dreaming leaves her lockdown, travels far and wide and seeking.

                                                                   Barbarian

I stand and stare at the kettle thinking this, and remember the other one, the sister.  In virtual college too, bedroom door closed, desk neat, pencils lined, computer placed, content I think you might say.  Her papers submitted in a timely fashion, her grades looking good, at ease with this slowing down of every day tumult, worldly invasions.  At ease at the wheel that lockdown has placed in her appreciative hands. I wonder if Beauty in her tower, Rapunzel and Sleeping were just as OK with it, were humming and upbeat in the cool quiet space created by bricked walls, lockdowns.
She comes down, steps out, slips away periodically to meet her BF, her lovely boyfriend, quarantined
in similar rooms, waiting.

Evenings she comes down from the mountain, sits with us. Knitting, headbands, scarves, a shoulder bag, her needles weaving blues and greens and reds, her eyes fixed on the TV screen as she dissects narrative arcs on box sets, Game of Thrones rehashes, Normal People.  Scherezade distracting us.... 

I wonder how the hell she'll ever go back to clamour, non verbal communications, the great unwashed humanity.  If she ever has to.  I expect she can do it, she's done it before, (if she ever has to...)
I roar, invasive, from the kitchen  "Hey, d'u want a cup of Coffee! Hey?  Hello?... Answer me when I'm talking (shouting) to you!"
I am the Barbarian (at the gates)

                                                                Dreaming

I'm spooning Lavazza into a jug when a phone call comes in, from the boy, in the moment as you might say.
I ask him how he's going, how he's spending his days. He has refused to come home, preferring the pandemic payment, rent assist, long days fishing, long nights talking with mates on his xbox, his snapchat, his facebook page.  Unwilling to give all that up. DOH! Unable to see any down side,  I suppose ...
"yeah, good, yeah, I mean weathers good? I'm, like, fishing, on the river all day... in the evening I yeah, talk to the lads on the xbox?" he offers me.  "Right".
A silence... "So, the days are like melding? one into the next? in a dream, like, a daze?..." he says
slowly.  Hmm.

He is a poet, a baulker, a bird you toss strategically, tenderly, from the nest. As I had done a while back, watching keenly from back here on the nest's rim as he got on top of routine, got into having to  work every single solitary day even summer, got his head around paying for things. Which he managed, pretty well.
Until now. When he doesn't have to manage anything at all. Uncongenial, I mean.
We talk some about his (maybe) Masters, his (kinda of) notion to do an MA in the Autumn. About getting going at it, taking steps, that sort of thing.

I mean I talk, and he (half) listens...



                                                             I Will be your Virus.

He tells me how he won't come home, start yet, infect me maybe...maybe? baby!, I think, truly, you've got nothing I've not given you? and maybe I won't call you out on that (just yet) ( I'll wait) (timing's everything) Yeah. 


In the kitchen the Caged Bird has taken over making the coffee, and Beauty has the cups.
I catch them eye rolling as I say goodbye to the Boy, remind him to switch off the Xbox occasionally, eat Good Stuff, wear Sun Block, come Home (occasionally)


                                                                 Enmeshed.




Somehow we've slipped back in time, in years. I have put on the halter of Mammy and they the mantle of adolescence, as though leaving home, growing up, flying solo had never happened at all... has to happen all over again.

Sometimes I slip into my car on my own and drive. For foodstuffs, or medical supplies or, I mean
essential business. The car is my Oyster, my Chariot to Nowhere, my own crazy headspace. My own.

And just when you're thinking you're getting away with it a txt flashes in on your screen which you decide not to read and you read...
"where u? in town? u nvr sed!!!
You stare at the screen.
And another
"We'd hve likd 2 go 2? get out of here 2!!!"
And another
"U nvr sed?"
I am barbarous...keepy...viral... I am.

Sometimes I wish I didn't know so much about them. I wish that they didn't know so much about me either...


(Do feel free to share my post dear readers, if you have enjoyed it!)



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And something else for you


My recently published ebook 


The Chemical Angels Came for Us

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It’s a Catholic Thing. Holy Week.

                                                        ENDING, DYING, KNOWING.

When I was twelve year old I spent a year in a place of terror and anxiety,  preoccupied, haunted by the prospect of dying. Of death.  Ending. You would die, no matter what.  You could die, at any time. I struggle now to remember what it was exactly that took me to the edge of that abyss, what thought, what feeling got you there.   Where you could not look away to manage the all consuming fear.  It was the not knowing when, maybe.  It was letting the knowing in, perhaps.  Yeah. The facing of the fact. It was the horror of not being, of annihilation.

                                                   CATHOLICS AND ALL THAT JAZZ

I stumbled on for another year, and for another after that. Looking back now, it seems a bit like depression, a touch like panic, obsession, all the labels.  But. Things, perspectives, were adjusting in me. Ground slowly gained.  Some spirit of survival whispered.  Something.  Oh not Catholicism, all that jazz.  That turned out to irrelevant to what ailed me, the spectre dogging my waking footsteps, tormenting dreamtime, nights.


                                                 

                                                    IF YOU WOULD ONLY LET ME IN 

I can recall my thirteen year old self, can see her clearly walking, back and forth and back again before the gates of our local Monastery, hesitant about going in there and asking them.  On one muggy Sunday when I really couldn't stand it anymore. I did not go in.  I did not know how. I figured they'd have nothing.  None of them,  monks or parents, family or priests.  Adults, being being only a source of pressure and reproach at my irritability, my preoccupation, distraction.  Judging my increasing withdrawal, anomie amplifying my fears of madness now, in the dark terrors of nighttime, beset by the sense of being stalked by something  inevitable, incalculable.

But things were shifting somehow... anyhow.  The more I could hold the idea of ending in my mind, could look at it full on, the better I became at imagining a life, and getting on with things and having things, of doing things, even if and even though the truth was always ending, dying, death... the part of me that could look at that, bear that, becoming a ledge to crawl back onto.


                                                   SO, HOLY WEEK REDEEMED THEM

And so for a few years, I was buzzed and frantic with doing, racing against time, getting things for myself,  having life.  But learned, you learn in time, to slow down, to visit the quiet place where death is, and I am, and life waits.  And being Catholic was not entirely useless as it turned out.  They do Holy Week.

I mean Christmas for a child was all sweaty excitement, anticipation, a giddy high, but Easter, Holy Week, was hiatus, timeout, a quiet space.  Scary, yeah but safe enough, familiar enough, contained in ceremony and in time.  You'd get your Easter holidays, run free and happyish on the farm all the lightening lengthening day ( except when your Mother caught you, put you to work at something needed) and in the evenings you'd go to church.

Memories were filed and stored, places to visit.  Ah there you are, your Sunday Coat, your polished shoes, squashed happy in the family car, a sibling on your knee your mother fussing.  You'd go, all go, all had to for,  Palm Sunday,  Confession Tuesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.  Confession, praying, kneeling, penitent,  copying adults who knew.  Snickering, yawning,  poking a sister, saying the words of the prayers, tickling the baby, maybe.  Sacred and boring, thrilling and mystery, all in  one. It was all consuming and everything slowing and stopping, for Christ dying nailed to his cross.  Crucifiction.  Stations. The Stations of the Cross.


                                                                     FORSAKEN 

Ah, Stations of the Cross. Our shuffling procession past shadowy pictures of Christ's flayed and splattered agony. See there he staggers under the cross, there falls, he falls, first, second and third time,  he falls, he is pierced in his side.  'My God my God' he cries, 'why? hast thou forsaken me..."  When I was eleven years old I related.

Easter Sunday, after the chocolate eggs, the chicken dinner, was anticlimax. Resurrection, Christ strolling from his tomb was just another thing they all believed, it didn't resonate. I always hated Sundays anyway. The slow winding down of hours, gateway into Monday and the workaday week.


                                               LOOKING THOUGH YOUR FINGERS FIRST

Every year has Christmas, Easter, Summer, School, and here in Ireland, Holy Week. Still hanging on, a relic of the past, and this year roaring back to meaning in Lockdown.  We are given,  whether we wanted it or not, space, where all things stop. We are obliged to look.  See here the beast is caged or over there becalmed, at the heart of darkness.  Obliged to feel the tenderest, darkest,  terrors lurking at the hearts deepest core.  We have to look. To hold.


                                               IF GOD CANT HAVE YOU DEVIL  MUST 

If Covid 19 keeps you up at night, impels your run like blazes to your holiday home, or fuels your rage at random cheaters,  consider this.  It's ending, death, that stalks you,  really.  Death, and this your opportunity to face, embrace and take it in.  Don't blame, don't run, or close your inner borders tight.  Embrace the darkness.  In this thoroughly modern Holy Week.

"And I will show you something  

different from either  

Your shadow at morning striding 

behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to  

meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(T.S. Elliot. The Waste Land)

Do share my post from your social media page or by any other means, dear readers. And comment if the spirit moves you!  Anna. 

All the Good Boys Bend Over. Degrading Democracy.

Permitted exercise

Pulling the door behind me and stepping out on to the path, I take a breath of the good clean air.  I  check to see who's in my path, who's breathing my air as they pass, and who might object to the space I'm intending to claim for a walk.  Permitted Exercise.

                               cocooning

Navigating the brave new world ordained by our (good boy) Government is not for the fainthearted, people.  It's a trip down the rabbit hole where the public space is forbidden the Over 70s. Period. Regardless. Well or ill or robust, doesn't matter.  Makes no difference. They can stay in their houses can't they? They can be left in there alone, can't they? Just a few months we can steal from what's left of their good living days, can't we?  Sure, it won't be the same for them, Limbo.  Not as though life moves with any felt tumult through their ageing veins. Not as if the sweet song of sound and vision, birdsong and burgeoning nature sings to them or for them.   Nor connection, fined tuned over a lifetime, with God in the ground you walk, the long line of trees on the river road, the first pale pink hint of the apple blossom, needs preserving.  Cocooning.

                                                     within two kilometres              

I am developing an etiquette out there on the open ground. Sometimes its like Easter. Open-ended Easter. The light, the calm quiet spaces you find on that holiday, that gift of days when work stops, schools close, traffic thins, a holiday without Christmas frenzy,  summer crowds.  It's Easter, there are only chocolate eggs and Christ dying and rising again in the gentle melancholy of Holy week. On those days, my brain says it's Easter! I'll take it!

Sometimes it's End of Days, Mordor.  You are a wraith meeting wraiths and Winter is Coming.  Grey sky only slightly less ominous than the silent spreading gloom in your house, the stale air in your living room, redolent of sanitiser, bleach. Your hands in your pockets close-fisted,  skinned red. Within two Kilometres.

                                                                             with (un)social distancing

Days where the people cross the road 20 metres back when they see you, when you see them, or else shuffle out to the edge of the pavement as you segue unto the grass margin, to pass.  When you catch the eye of the other out of stubbornness, need,  exact a wavering smile, a blank nothing, depending.
                           
Days you reach Main Street, hear your shoes slap the pavement as you pass shops shuttered, doors closed, an emptied out world.  But wait, just up there on the corner, a gang of men calling loudly, talking loose, claiming space. You will not cross the road, you do not walk around them but though them to throw them off course as you have learned to do.  Scattered,  they separate, the sense of tension that is not quite menace, easing. For that day, for that time, at least. Social Distancing.

                                                                                                              and tell on your neighbours (do)

A speeding jogger,  a flying cyclist, two girls softly chatting, a woman pulls out her phone...to report them? Well maybe.  I listen to one such on the radio yesterday,  enraged by joggers,  indicting flying cyclists, pleading for policing, arrests!  You are invited, no, encouraged! to unleash your inner paranoiac, your instinct to judge, your will to control.  All the glad haters come in from the cold!  The Swedes says their people have judgement, discretion, control. Go, Prime Minister Loften! They hold the line, the public space, as the rest of Europe watches and waits for them to fail. Anticipates failure. And tell on your neighbours.

                                                                               
                                                                                                 necessary journeys

I remember the scattered men later, alone in my car on my solitary shopping trip for groceries, medicines.  Alerted, the hair standing stiff on the back of my neck, as a lorry drives tight to my bumper, trailer rocking perilous behind,  never once falling back on a ten km journey.  I speed up, he speeds up,  he does not pass.  I slow below the speed limit, grit my teeth and watch him through my side mirror as he watches me, slowing, revving, slowing, bumper to bumper until I turn off the road for the shop.

A few days later I get out of the path of a carload of howling boys, slipping unto the hard shoulder sharpish from necessity. Necessary Journeys.
 
                                                                       so why as I doing this again?

I'm going with this lockdown, this shutting down, for now.  This slowing down of a lung eating virus, dispatching those of us already in the departure lounge,  threatening those beloved others living by grace of Vaccine, Transplant, Chemotherapy, but tell me this good boy Varadkar, all of you good boys voting in your emergency laws on Friday last,  giving way everyway to a virus, (as you gave way to Bankers, a decade ago) to whom do you imagine we're ceding our public space. Who and what will colonise, gain ground, in the spaces we have so obediently vacated. Every idle bad actor, every dispossessed, untethered soul, rocking up from the highways and byways vacated, that's who.


Even as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, gain ground in the world.  While we carry on carrying on, turning back a Virus that keeps on coming regardless.  About which the science is not clear. You think you can easily turn back this tide boys? can whistle back an abandoned economy, throw in a shifting Sunset Clause to a Charter for a Police State, an Autocracy.  And afterwards, Pandora goes obligingly back in her box?  Do you know you don't know what you do? And why am I doing this, again.

                                                       degrading oppression.                                                                            

I talked with a man last year,  a refugee to whom asylum was granted after long years in Direct Provision, after endless Requests, Appeals, and Court applications.  He told me every counted hour of trying, waiting, disappointment, was worth it to be here and not there under the dictatorship he escaped. He told me how the very air in that country was poisoned from top down, how the stealing of personal space, of any say, of human rights, degraded all.  All.  Those who assumed the power and those who allowed it to be taken from them, whether they could stop it or not.  You did what they said until you could not,  he told me, and then you ran for your life from your own hopelessness, depression, despair.  Degrading Oppression.

  ... only for a little while...

Back home, my daughter's days are entirely virtual. She sits for her virtual lectures, has virtual chats with her struggling, jittering friends, consigned all to virtual reality.  She sings like an angel alone in her room,  Billie Eilish today.  She uploads on Instagram, for her friends, for her virtual audience,  for me.  For us, who have failed to hold the space for her and for all the jittering girls and boys.  Failed... as the good boys fail us.

"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".

....only for a little while?

OH CORONA

Having a sustaining glass of wine,  post shopping for (essential) supplies.  Just a quick in and out I figured, just  a few necessaries, bread, wine.  I stand in a snaking queue for the check out, pushed and rushed and shaken by a panicked crowd, wondering whether, maybe, the universe had sent a plague to test us, shake us, hold a mirror to us, people.  I have a notion that the Virus, all the Viruses, have a function, shifting, nudging body rhythms in effect,  altering perceptions ( of survivors ).  The Virus as an instrument that refines, retunes, reboots, releases, human bodies.

Holding up a mirror, showing us what we are, or have become:

1.  Supplies.

We are not short of foodstuffs people. We have more stuff stashed.  Foodstuff, medications, sanitisers,  tissues, loo roll, paper towels.  We have warehouses,  supermarkets, trucks a  trucking across continents with stuff, more stuff,  And yet, and still, and anyway here we are.  Pushing, shoving, grabbing, emptying shelves so that we will have it before the next woman takes it.  I WILL have my sliced bread and my loo roll in my bunker.  I WILL ALWAYS eat (and wipe my bottom) whatever!  Whenever! things run out...on you.

2.  Loving Care.

Don't touch, don't hold, don't speak too closely, whisper kiss, go skin on skin.  Don't accidentally brush, doors handles, people, petrol nozzles.   I think of orphanages, in Eastern Europe before Glasnost,  all the love lorn places, where infants, tiny humans, were driven mad,  irreparably stunted by lack of touch.  Forget the loo roll, people, grab a loved one, snatch a partner, take an infant, a random relative, into the lock-down coming down the tracks.

3.  Go Virtual (at your peril)

And here we'll be corralled in our houses, busy bees  remotely working, living, eating, safe removed from human contact, in the kind of isolated bubble Child Psychologists, Talking Heads, tell us leads to (has led to) to over-weigh, disabled, anxious teens. Teens are us.

4.   Avoidance.

Is this lockdown for a week, a month, a year? Are we shadow boxing with a mystery Virus
which may or (may not) have been here for  a week, a month, a....since November 2019?  Eh?
Who can say? People have been dying, getting better, since November last (or forever).  Of... well ...something! Influenza?  No one panicked? No one knew back then to blame, to name, Corona.

So now we know. What do we know? We know The Virus will be defeated by the young folk who are not, if they are not, immune compromised. There will be an uneven battle with the old, the sick, and all those people whose immune function has been messed up, broken down, un-underused. All the people insulated by vaccine from the common cold, the influenza, everyday infections, whose immune systems sag flaccid and unused. How many are there of those people? Do we know?

5.   Fear:  

The hardest thing to hold steady in the mind, for us poor humans, is that fact that we will die. So we do not ( hold it in the mind)  We cosset children, prolong adolescence, hobble resilience, suck the marrow from the buzz of living,  rather than let life flow to dying when it comes. We vaccine, insure, corral, distance ourselves to the point where children suffer anxious states, self harm to feel,  grow into helpless half baked adults, narcisstic, lost, irresolute. We would not let them face the perils of the world and leave them reaching after chemical highs. We will not face the abyss, or accept the defining, life enhancing clarity, that we will die.

6.  Denial:

I listen to the pundits, politicians on the radio, on the TV,  Social Media, getting off,  enlivened, as they talk talk talk.  Oh, not about the Virus, no,  but about the things we'll do to stop this happening, backs turned oblivious to the Elephant in the Room. We cannot stop this, people? We can delay it, yes, give the always patchy Health Service, our heroic Health Care Staff, a break,  but can't, we can't  close down normal service indefinitely,  or turn the Virus back.  And so we lock-down for a month, six months, a  year, await a vaccine.  And then the next Corona, and the next, and the next one after that.  Each one oncoming sooner than the one before.  Until we learn. We can only live, eat, mind ourselves cannily,  live, until we die.

7.  Consolation.

There is a strange strange turnabout just now between the minders and those who must be minded, that is truly rich.  How often have I listened lately to the young ones blaming, claiming, wailing how I, and you, have stolen their future, wrecked their planet, used up all the good stuff leaving none for them.  How often tried to soothe their youthful terrors, anxieties, about climate change, the carbon footprint, a planet dying while they're on it,  quite before their time.  Apologies, soothing, good attention, silence offered as they speak, accuse, indict.  Rage, against this, that I have not and you have not prevented dying, ending, death. That we will not.

And now it's us, the minders, first, who face this grim and grinning Reaper.  And I'm waiting for the Darlings to step up, get the picture, read the writing on the wall.   See true and clear, unblinkered,  for whom this great bell tolls.

My daughter, my cell mate in isolation, drops a Newspaper article from 2017 in my lap concerning long dormant Viruses awakening.... from frozen places melting,  from buried places unearthed, from forests burned for profit,  headless hardcore fracking.   Elephants in the Room. 

Valentine's Day.

Another year, another Valentines.  You think the day will come, has come, when all that jazz will pass you by by unnoticed!  Irrelevant to you! A Marketing Nonsense!    Remembering forever Valentine days when you were 16, 17, hoping for Valentines, just one,  thinking one would do, as you watched Helen Moran counting hers at lunch time, waving red-edged cards with captured pink-gold hearts about for all to envy.

You decide there might be maybe one small plain one later, slipping through the letter box at home on the wind of your want. You figure maybe next year, some year anyway, your's will come?

Ah yes, the fevered expectation of school girls ready for the magic, for the love and the passion, all the dark mysteries, to start. The hunger for it!  Life's essence in you and you might never get out from the traps to have it, to love, be loved, adored, have babies, kisses, tongue! Or ever get a single solitary Valentine...

Decades later you find out, at the only school reunion you’ll ever do, that Helen Moran? she sent those Valentines to herself.   That neither she nor we humble on-lookers, actually got any a single solitary Valentine between us.  Someone get Helen another double whiskey! Not a pink heart, a black-gold question mark, a fat red cherub between us! Oh, we got 'em later on from boyfriends, husbands maybe...Duty Valentines! But hey, that never counted? And the mad wild longing on us every Valentine’s Day for something Other.  A Secret card, Unknown Admirer, Arrow Shot Possibilities from the Virtual Universe.

I totally get Bathsheba Everdene’s naughty giggling act in sending that Valentine to William Baldwin in Far From the Madding Crowd.  And thereby pulling loose the thread of reason in his love lorn mind,  unraveling painful until he murdered Captain Troy. I sent a few myself on that very principle?

I used to think that it was all in The Waiting, for The One to find you, but now I'd see it’s the Found  Fusion with the Mystic Other? Hah!  Valentines means coming home at last.  It's the falling into the abyss of the real true.... Chemical  High.  Valentines will come to you,  I might have told my sixteen year old self, or even my sixteen year old daughter,  yes!  And you will ride the whirlwind, yes you will.  Emerging bedraggled on love's withdrawal, grim and sober and swearing on a rational life.

And also, I would tell her, age won't save you!  Or Maturity.  Valentine’s Day comes round each year for all of us and if you are not pierced to the heart, a little, with memory and longing I would not credit it.

Or maybe even, looking at a small white card, a rose, a question mark... even, as you swear you won’t succumb, fall into the Irresistible Madness one more time. Oh yes, yes. yes.

This Butterfly Has No Wings.

                                                 who knows where time goes, 

A year has passed since the Boss, my sweetest girl, left me to live among the Dutch people, spicing up the international melting pot at AOC Amsterdam University with a pinch of eccentric Irish.  I sit and brood this September on all those things I didn't do, never got round to... actually abandoned... over this past year without her.   All my projects half begun, my notions of things I would start at last,  things dreamed up, half-visioned.  New Dawns, siren calls to strange horizons,  sit (going off) on the back burner.  Unrealised, basically.

I read a million online reviews on the eBike,  chasing visions of myself flying past the hedgerows, peddling deep into the countryside,  taking on the Waterford Greenway.  My inner cynic boring on about expense, picturing the eBike cobwebbed in the hall.  I read some more reviews, I never buy.  All my Dreamzs! receding, fraying around the edges now.  Where (oh where) has the year gone?


                                                               Calling Paris

Where???  On Distance Parenting, that's where!  Online Mammy,  messaging,  texting, skypeing, video phoning; firing out into the ether prescriptions, instructions,  enquiries... care.  "How are you now darling... really? truly how are things?" "So how are things now?"
Long hours listening into your iPhone to the Beautiful Girl in Paris, to the Boss in Amsterdam. Troubleshooting.  Containing crises; of confidence, of disasters pending.  Hearing; urgent requests for advice, to discard later maybe, but to have now.  Receiving; homesickness and sorrow and terror,  happiness only real when it's told.  The tug on the umbilicus across seas, a visceral need that you, neither of you, imagined on setting out, on kicking off giddy with Prospects.

Time...looping backwards, sideways to circle my children, and never on the linear path I imagined.

The Beautiful Girl, teaching in the Sorbonne in Paris, in deep in her beautiful life, done and dusted I'd thought.  Actually launched to go anywhere, I'd figured?  Not foreseeing, oh not foreseeing,  landlords who failed to drop by with your keys, leaving you sitting on your massive suitcase weeping with exhaustion.  Not allowing for tormenting employers, shouty contrary students, calculated  to overwhelm your beautiful soul.  She is the kind of girl who cries in sympathy with your (rare) crying, struggling to mediate her fine tuned sensibilities, her vulnerability, to live in this messed up, incalculable,  crazy dumbed down world.  And it's a burden, bascially, your Beautiful Soul.

I have now stretched the boundaries of mothering to France.  I have sternly lectured a French Landlord on the phone? I have menaced a strange and unsettling housemate at her house, on a visit?  I have advised, on a loop, on how to dance your way around Snappy Parisians, oh yes.  And I have sat quietly, on the cyber level, with the beautiful girl in her room on the fifth floor of an ancient Boarding House for Girls in central Paris while les Gilets Jaunes stormed, each and every Saturday past her window, past the streets where she liked to walk.  'So why not go out and have a look, maybe mount the barricades' I suggest one day as we, on a video call,  watch from her window. 'Why don't you come over here and try' she answers, watching the massing howling crowd, the cops, le Flic, running with raised batons, automatic guns, on her screen.  No princess imprisoned in her Ivory Tower spoke with such tragic dignity.  My bad.

I have visited,  wandering enthralled in Paris with the dear girl many times.  Often enough for the streets to feel familiar, the Seine a silver snaking glory I can find on foot. I went inside the warm dark beating heart of Notre Dam Cathedral with my daughter before it burned.


                                                         And Amsterdam.

And her sister, striding away from me in Station Central in September, rebounding rubber band like all through the year.   Her disasters, her super marvellous experiences in equal part requiring a listening post,  a talking head,  a willing ear.
 "I mean,  just tell me what you think... like, what I actually ought to do here?" And I tell her, carefully, thoughtfully. (I think!) And she is satisfied. (Although she never actually does it) Ah yes,

She was a signal dish buzzing with incoming calls to join, partake, go out and meet,  to go; to Berlin, for the Student Shadow UN Conference, to climate change marching (XR to you), to Paris to see the Beauty in her tower.  And then to mix it up with Super Nice People at Parties, where she dances, sings, and takes in everything there is on offer (oh I know. )  She buys; a bicycle second hand, her winter clothes in the market.  She scolds; on sustainability, on the sin of buying New Things, sustainable sins.  She struggles; with the learning curves on her courses,  with money. She refuses: to be less that the best, to live mindlessly.

She crashes, burns, oh sometimes she burns.  She falls from her speeding bicycle, saved by canny Dutch cyclists flying past who do not crush her.  She slips, at Christmas, on impacted snow, coming down hard on her ankle,  hobbled for weeks.   And poisoned, yes she's poisoned, on a trip to the Netherlands countryside where she and her Hungarian friend Anna fill their eco bottles from a tap in a ditch, over which hangs a sign saying Don't! Drink the Water. So they do! drink the water.  And that becomes a phone call at midnight from a weeping girl racked with pain, spasmodic vomiting.  A horror show running for days,  demanding random medical advice,  careful emotional soothing, judicious bracing, from Mammy and a kindly dutch nurse.   (It occuring to me later that she had never suffered in that way before, or in any consistent way at all?)  (Though she would certainly not agree.)

After Christmas she was, for a few weeks, giving up and coming home.  And not just her I learn, but  other girls,  particular friends, all going home.  All wanting a break from Education, they say.  All yearning after time out, gap years, wanderings, romantically and experientially, in the Great Wide World.  (Well, Thailand anyway, or Iceland possibly)  'But,' I offer, 'but... education!... is a...it's a privilege?  Not a sentence?  And The World is cold and bare and dangerous, essentially? Experience it where you are! Where you're warm and occupied and lucky.  She doesn't think I'm, kind of, getting this?  My cold dark world is not the world that was promised to her.

So anyhoo, she doesn't leave.  That passed. The year completed.  She never was the kind of girl to permit herself slip lightly from the hook she's chosen.

There were video chats between us on people's mental health,  on minding it.  (Which has become another thing you have to mind as it turns out. In this permanently switched on, wired up, relentlessly connected online world)  The young, I think darkly,  are led by the nose. Soon they will exist and have their being only in the mental (cyber) realm.  Addled.  Logged-in, stranded, and helpless in still forming minds.  The heart becomes a mystery to them, the senses a little visited wasteland.


                                                       Meanwhile back in Ireland

At home, the boy was tipping along, smoothly, in the midst of all this overseas turmoil,  dramas across the wires,  distractions in myself, preoccupied with Distance Troubles. He stays with me for this, his final college, year, spending his days discussing his Thesis on the second world war, playing on his Xbox, watching his box sets. He introduces me to Peaky Blinders,  The Lost Kingdom, Vikings,  for some evening viewing together. And how he is content! How long has he waited for this, to be an only child? To have his way on Boxsets, Music, Food, at last.  His sisters and their vegetarian ways, their female TV viewing, are just not here!  Last year I watched The Affair, Victoria, The Crown, and only eat red meat with him when the sisters were absent.  Now he and I, cheerfully carnivorous, spend our evenings having the chats about the Third Reich, rooting for Ragner Lothbrok in Vikings, binging on Peaky Blinders.  It turned out to be unexpectedly delightful?  I wanted to give him his year when I see that he wants that, and find myself drawn in too,  richly rewarded.


                                                                    Choosing                              

And where does the time go, when does it end, in a frantic, improvised, crisis strewn, busy busy year?   When does your own stuff start?  How can you locate and stay in the interior space where you can think, where you can breathe?

Can you, a Mother, choose?  Can you decide to hand back the dilemnas, terrors, devouring needs to the owners thereof.  Can you ask them to mange these things for themselves, as you once had to?  And is it true that young lives are so bleak now, so taxing,  that they need, deserve, can't manage, without the constant support that you yourself were never given?  I can't decide, a kind of paralysis grips me here. I  find that to make my adult children care for themselves, to insist they try,  is quite as challenging for me as it is for them. In truth. I seem to be unable to let that other woman, hovering in me now, in.  She is bad Mammy, non Mammy. And if I am not Mammy always, who am I now? Who used I be before the children?  How can I be the unMammy? And yet, I need to try,  it must be tried.

I wonder if it's guilt in fact,  forced on women by the culture,  swallowed whole,  that holds me here.  Expiation, because we, the adults, have personally and wilfully despoiled the planet.  Mea Culpa. We have destroyed the future.  Mea Maxima Culpa. And now we owe the children we have nurtured with lifesblood ... everything we can salvage in ourselves to help them through.

I think of being young, that young.  The adults overheard discussing Iodine Tablets and did we have enough to offset radium damage?  Explanatory leaflets in the post on how to survive the fall-out from the Nuclear Bomb, as the world awaited a nuclear strike and devastation.

And all the hobbling, pitch black Catholic Guilt, the leash of the Priests distorting every natural instinct,  jerking on on your neck as you fought to have your hopeful life? We are all dying anyway. We were always, all, dying anyway and there was no quarter then or now for anyone except in the fragile succour of loving, the truth in creating.

The pupae, incubated at last, must have its struggle to claw its way from your careful woven cocoon, and claim its place on the planet.   Or see the Mammies everywhere disable the butterfly.  Aborting Metamorphosis.

So yes, my task is not to Mother,  Mother, till death do part us.  My task is to stop!  To stop, and return to the notions, visions,  dreaming.   To be an example to my children in this,  of what a woman is and who she is and what she may become.  I decide that.

And yesterday I wave the children off.  I buy the fleetest Ebike on review,  and start my word press blog.  I begin              

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