The year 2022 is not a year for dry January. Nor for general purgatory of any kind. As I now practice bar tending on a Sunday, it seems right that Friday nights have become the new Sunday afternoons. I have vauge, but fond memories, of long lazy afternoons, starting with shared boards of cheese and pickled onions, accompanied by some amazing unknown musician, performing unplugged, sweating by the fire. That was what Sundays were made for. That was before covid, when you could all eat cheese from the same breadboard…
Now, my favourite few hours are on a Friday night, early doors, because everyone has waited all week, just incase covid had struck, and then by 4pm, lateral flows are clear, and they pile in, sitting within heckling distance of the bar, nursing bowls of hot spuds. I turn up late after finishing chores, and instantly am heckled, then squashed in alongside dogs and loveable locals alike, gleaning snatches of banter across the table, picking up on conversations and putting them down when the level of balderdash becomes too far fetched… If you could bottle it, it would be the Channel of the perfume world, and well, its comforting. Especially when some of them make positive noises about actually reading this blog, which has needled me into sitting down and writing.
This year, so far as its eight days have taken me, has not been a productive year for writing. Nothing seems inspiring, and this endless grey and warm, or grey and wet, or grey and cold, which constitutes our Cornish winter, just seems relentless. Consequently, this won’t be one of those blogs, the ones where I can talk about some hilarious activity Mr Jones has managed to get himself embroiled with, because even if we dismiss the weather, and his normal grumpy efforts to be cheery, we are still, after all this time, stuck in an endless, bottomless pit, of boring bollox, which seems to prohibit the word fun and promote thought before action, a situation otherwise known as C-O-V-I-D 19. Except that now, it’s Covid22, and it has another variant no-one can pronounce, and we like many other pubs are holding on by our fingertips. It’s a consolatory thought to realise that within this quagmire of a new year, dear old Boris, is as consistent as the virus. You can’t have a party, but I will if thats quite alright, oh and don’t go to the pub, but yes still go to the pub, and when your out and about give people a wide birth, at least a meter, but, all go now, together at the same time and stand in a close line for your booster. While I’m at it I’ll have another look at masks, now yes, don’t wear a mask, but then wait, do wear a mask… I don’t need to continue, but he will always remain in my memory as man of contradictions, who has seemingly been taking lessons from Vicky Pollard…
The other thing about writing is that it needs to be a joy and not a chore. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I was hoping that the next time I wrote, I could think fondly of covid as one of those things that happened. A thing that changed the world for a year or so, albeit in a way I haven’t seen in my lifetime. Yet here we are, a new year – and its STILL here – dominating everything. (Including my use of shouty capitals). So, I can’t not write about it, and as I sit and turn the events over, I find with hindsight, that it slowly dawns on me just how much the virus has changed our lives. I don’t think I am the only one to who things that everything feels fragile, like we are sitting on the lip of a precipice, seesawing precariously between moving forward and dropping down to a depth from which normality is unrecoverable. Which is why I find it almost traumatic, when I look back to the lockdowns, the closures, the empty pub, the endless blue sky’s and unseasonal summer sunshine, that my memory tells me, I enjoyed it. All of it. The green hair dye and the very bad DIY hair cuts. The odd socks song and the zoom meetings. The hundreds of hours spent leisurely cooking and eating, all our copious efforts to drink the cellar dry and all the ensuing hangovers. The empty beaches and contented dogs, the lack of petrol station visits, the takeaway and our lovely customers – what a wonderful time it really was!
Of course it wasn’t. There were days when things felt endless, and I know it would be guileless to think everything that romanticised. Even the rosey tinted notion that I can never spend too much time with Mr Jones, is not exactly accurate. Once you put the silver lining aside, and come down to the brass tacks of it, 2021 was a diabolically disappointing, dire, dirge, of a year. I am glad it is over.
One of the other reasons for radio silence and the crowning of the diabolical year of 2021, was in part due to the great, general public. Who would have fathomed before this pandemic, that wallless time does unbelievable damage to us human beings. We are generally a gregarious and sociable race, but the pandemic shortened tempers and over engineered expectations. Holiday in the UK Boris said, and so Cornwall was full to the brim of people wanting to get away, most of them from each other. I really did have a conversation with a customer who was not happy with her room, because its geographical location was ‘to far away’ from St Ives. I had another with a lady who wanted me to provide a porch so that she didn’t have to share her room with her dog. If I had a pound for the bucket of requests I had for chicken nuggets, I could have retired by mid august, and don’t even get me started on lobster. I am not complaining about trade, or the ability to be able to trade because it was brilliant. May was one long day that lasted until October, when Boris said something else without thinking and everyone started to stay in again. If I could define this one, incredibly long day, it would be as a melting pot of emotion, where one group of despondent, exasperated humans, met another group of thwarted go getters, who had been, and still were, going nowhere. This combined with a lack of young people or indeed any people that wanted to work, made for an interesting few months. If I’m blunt, hospitality is a young persons game, and young people were busy. They were understandably and desperately trying to recoup time and celebrate lost landmarks. They hadn’t been able to start living, so why did they need to start working? There had been no one night stands, no nightclubs, no backpacking around Australia, no proper pubs, no messy music festivals, no cinema. No one could get staff and if you could, you couldn’t get enough. In the words of one customer, “they are just overdone” – and we all were.
One day, Some budding anthropologist will write a paper on the effects of covid on the human condition, but they won’t capture that feeling of raw exasperation because you had to experience it and it’s juxtaposition. You were either one of those who just had to get up in the morning and work, because someone had to carry on, or for whatever reason, you were someone who couldn’t wait to take out their post lockdown trauma on the first people they encountered. We might all be complaining we have no staff now, but wait until normality beckons. They will all be running as fast as they can towards the sun and it won’t just be a problem for the hospitality sector. Even Boris in whatever Boris world he inhabits, understands that.
As I’ve ruminated on this entry, I’ve been sat watching the endless rain, and it dawns on me that there is another thing about covid that I had underestimated. While we aren’t locked up Covid has forced us to remain local. We stay at home more, and do not under any circumstances tramp about the world indulging in innate nomadic tendencies. Which is of course is not a remotely profound point, but what is, is that this localness, once a badge of honour, a rooting to an environment that shapes who we are as individuals and provides us an identity, has suddenly become the very thing we are all trying to run away from. We have been displaced by staying still. I want to go and ‘be local’ somewhere else. I feel like going to Scarborough or Yorkshire and taste their prawns and drink their beer. I want to be a Hairy Biker or take Mr Fog and travel the UK in 80 days. I want to say “not as good as Lushingtons”, or “not as pretty as the Tamar”, and not much is, if you catch the river in those rare moments when it runs like a pool in the first light of a golden sunrise. I can’t remember the last time I saw the water like that, and I feel like I need to remind myself that Cornwall is as beautiful and brilliant as I remember it being. I’m not talking about a holiday, I’m talking about an excursion into the wilds of Great Britain, an emersion in our diverse culture, which may just be enough to remind me who I am and where I come from.
And on that note, it’s time for a pint…