2020-07-12
Yesterday I watched a whole season of Kingdom on Netflix. It’s a big budget zombie show set in 16th century Korea. It being a Korean language show, there are English subtitles. However the subtitles not only translate dialogue but describe other sounds. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those subtitles.
2020-07-06
We’re coming back to the world in floods of normalcy at the moment. One of my best friends was back in town on Thursday, and he came over for dinner and a drink. He was able to see our new home, I was able to cook for him, we were able to sit in our living room together and chat. We kept up chatting until just before midnight. We were all just so thankful to be able to have the kind of conversations you have with your friends in person when you’re relaxed. Then on Saturday morning I walked down our new high street as it opened up for the first time since we’ve lived here. Saturday was the day the majority of the businesses in the country were given to open up again. It’s been so long that bustling commerce, restaurants, markets — they all feel like a new idea. It’s like they’re inventing something new: the sit-in café, the come-in-and-look-around gardening supplier. I was practically bouncing down the road by the time I’d picked up all my supplies. I took pictures of the fronts of shops with their wares spilling out on the pavements, flowering all at once.
2020-07-01
I’ve been meeting my manager in the park every week during lockdown. He lived in a neighbourhood nearby and we both missed seeing people from work face-to-face, so it made sense. Plus the weather’s been good for the most part so it’s been nice to sit and have our catch up in the sun with either a coffee or a beer. Today I cycled there from the new house; it’s about fifteen minutes away.
2020-06-25
It’s thirty degrees outside and we’re all, including the cat, feeling languid. The internet is down for much of South London, which adds to the general sense of stolid malaise.
The past few days have been much more active. I’ve been buzzing around the house trying to make it a home bit by bit. It’s a tightrope doing the practicalities while basking in the glow of our fresh, new space. Try to sit in the airy new lounge without a care like you never could before, but also get that shoe rack and cutlery drawer insert ordered. When is the sofa arriving?
2020-06-22
This morning I woke up in my own house to sunlight. I got up and took a shower, the water pressure was great. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the news, and then practiced my Spanish for a while. I hung out some washing to dry. Nobody came along. I had forgotten how it feels to start your day quietly and at your own pace.
The weekend was an endless blur of stress and back strain, but we’re in here now, a home of our own. It is the greatest thing. We’ll have lunch in the garden today.
2020-06-10
The Black Lives Matter protests have become the story of the day. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world have been demonstrating for over a week. We joined the end of a march in Brixton first, hearing about it from a friend who saw it pass through Kennington and cycling out to join the fray. It was the first crowd I’d been in in months. It made the fact that people were shouting in one voice even more striking. A man stood over the crowd with a megaphone and thanked them for assembling, spoke about the need for justice for those killed by police in the UK, and asked us to go home peacefully. The core of the group marched up Brixton Road and demonstrated in Windrush Square. We went to another march this Sunday, beginning as a protest at the American Embassy in Vauxhall and eventually marching over Vauxhall Bridge and to Parliament Square. Unlikely figures hung out of the windows of expensive apartment buildings in Pimlico to show support for the passing demonstrators, banging pots and pans. Many more windows were notably absent of support, given then everybody is probably home. In Parliament Square, I looked at the protestors with a colossal statue of Winston Churchill rising above them and wondered how long its presence would be tolerated; later the news reported his plinth had been annotated to include his status as a murderer.
2020-06-02
We’ve picked a new house. It’s going to be a house! It’ll have a garden and stairs and space for the cat, space for us to work and relax. We’re leaving in three weeks unless some recalcitrant property manager or landlord gets in the way.
Outside, COVID-19 measures had begun to relax and things had begun drifting slowly toward normal. Then a few days ago the US exploded with protests against police violence in response to the murder of a man named George Floyd by a policeman in Minnesota. All over the country the authorities have responded with a police riot. Peaceful protestors, the press, and bystanders are being brutalised and arrested all over the country. Black Lives Matter marches are starting up here too; my employer has notified us we don’t need to use up holiday allocation to march. I’ve made some donations to bail funds and encouraged others to do the same.
2020-05-25
We’re getting ready to leave the house. The idea of moving out of this place and into one of our own, already a firm intention before lockdown began, has become a serious one again. Subtly depersonalised pictures of the room we’ve spent so much time in have been taken, and posted online. We are responsible for reviewing applications for our replacements. Young professional, woman, 27, media. Smiley headshot, second photo featuring Aperol Spritz. In the meantime I’m sitting in the armchair. I’m watching the kitten bound around with a mouse toy in her mouth, jumping over Emma who’s dozing in bed. I’m looking at the bookshelves, two of them double-stacked on every shelf. All of it says that the life we have is getting too big for the place we’re in.
2020-05-16
The restrictions on movement were lifted a bit. We’re allowed to sit down in the parks rather than hurry through them on the purpose of exercise. Almost immediately, tiny groups in sunglasses and with beers in hand have appeared. We are also allowed to drive a little way for our recreation.
Emma drove us down to the cliffs in Sussex. We packed food and water into a rucksack, and rued that we couldn’t stop in for a preparation pint in the last town before the walk. We passed a dozen idyllic pubs in the glorious countryside. On the walker’s trail everything seemed normal again, huffing through meadows of wildflowers and up through tracks in copses — until another group was encountered and we all duly traced the circumference of a two metre circle between one another.
2020-05-11
In some other countries they’ve been re-opening society, slowly. Here things are fraying; many are talking about making decisions for their own mental wellbeing all government advice besides. On Sunday we said, “We’ll see what the Prime Minister says tomorrow.”
“…If we don’t do it by those dates, and if the alert level won’t allow it, we will simply wait and go on until we have got it right.”
“We will come back from this devilish illness.”