Day 79
This isn’t going to go away. In fact it never has gone away. It’s it familiarity or is it fear that breads contempt? Chaucer said it was familiarity, as for the other saying I think it’s written in a song somewhere. Whatever it is, it seems to reappear like a bad penny, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, just the closed parameters that it encompasses. I won’t be the first to say that all lives matter, but at the moment the focus is on Black Lives, and if that brings about a wider understanding that everyone’s life matters perhaps it is a good movement, rather than just a potential populist band wagon. At least it gives us all something else to talk about. Husband who is a little slower to the mark on such things, has just come into the office to ask me why people on the news are holding banners. George Floyd I say quietly. I know he’s wanting more of an explanation, but I look at him and shrug. I’m writing, I say, go away. He does, after giving me a long look, and he turns away with a flounce that suggests he was not satisfied with my remarks. I’m always uneasy about trying to discuss politics with him, he is back and white and no grey, so I let him go, he can figure out the facts himself. This morning a speeding fine managed to find its way into our letter box so he’s not in my good books anyway, only he could get a speeding ticket when there is no reason at all for him to be speeding.
The weather today is grey and it makes everything feel a little sad. The garden is out of bounds due to the fact that some very nice builders have come to fill in my hole and lay some very heavy patio slabs that I couldn’t even move let alone lay down myself. It had become somewhat of an emergency, as my hole was letting water into the sacred kitchen, so they have been instructed to put in a drain while they are at it… at least some of my digging was not in vein. My toe however, still tells me otherwise on a daily basis. The hole debacle aside, the book is shaping up in that type of shaping up way a new story can not help but do. There isn’t a lot of flesh to it and I seem to be partaking in more procrastination than actual physical writing, but I am hoping that will come, otherwise I’ll spend the rest of the lockdown just pretending to write, because it gives me something to talk about with my friends over zoom in the evenings.
I put down my pen again and switch over to iTunes, where the remnants of blackout Tuesday still litter the ‘for you’ category. I read the #TheShowMustBePaused hashtag, yes please I think, I’d like to get off now.