Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On May 30, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

May 30^th

Flies buzz around the flat, their wings the sound of determined futility; welcome to the sound of the summer. The year we realised we meant nothing.

There are people on the streets but it still feels quiet, quieter than London at Christmas despite the people on the pavement. There’s something missing. But what’s strange is: what’s missing is something, like anti-matter that “something missing” is in the makeup of reality, and you can feel it looming heavy over each and every one of us. It follows all of us out on the streets and in the parks and in the shops. It is a dark and vague uncertainty.

Is it safe? we say as we catch one another’s eyes.

Is it safe?

But then we blink. Fuck it, I guess is what most people think. Because there’s the smell of barbecues and hot coals and roasting meat. Midday is thick with it. There’s music coming from boom boxes out on the heath.

All the summers ever fill my head. I wonder what London Fields is like right now?

The same as it ever was, I guess.

Thank god I’m not (the same as I ever was).

It is the season of the rose, as you may have deduced from their use as a backdrop. I stop and breathe them in at every opportunity; yellow roses hit the spot every time. Big daisies called moon pennies are blooming. And for the first time in a couple of years I see foxgloves in someone’s garden. I’ll take my omens where I can find them.

Foxgloves in the Victorian Language of Flowers symbolised “riddles, conundrums, and secrets”.

Someone hacks into my old email, which now functions as a repository for junk, but also serves as a safe, a time capsule, for correspondences with people I love who are now dead. I pretend it hasn’t happened for almost 24hrs.

If you are not deeply concerned by what is happening both sides of the sea, not only have you not been paying attention, you’ve been brainwashed.

Go out and feel the wind, it will remind you what’s important.

I’ve written a note at the top of this dairy entry — “sense of humour failure” — and I have deleted most of what I had written angrily. People have said it already and put it better. But I haven’t found this week amusing. What I will say is, I’m in full support of whatever changes this shit immediately. The peaceful protests have been done already. And if you’re British, and you look at America and think it’s a disgrace, know that we are tumbling towards that.

Wood cracks in the heat.

My friend sends me a recipe for elderflower cordial and to my surprise, I find myself out one hot evening picking elderflowers, enough left for the bees and enough for me to make cordial and champagne – I am literally making booze in a bucket, that’s where we’re at now. It’s currently festering in the broom cupboard because I can’t be bothered to sterilise bottles, so it should have some decent fizz to it when it does comes out.

We sit on a wooden fence that circles the men’s pond on Hampstead Heath. It’s empty of men but surrounded by cow parsley and yellow irises, the water looks clean for the first time ever. I wonder if the ponds were ever empty before?

“Before all this shit started,” drifts up through our bedroom window one morning.

Before and…It doesn’t seem like there’s an after yet, only a before.

But if you go outside you would be forgiven for thinking nothing ever happened; even the two meter distance signs painted on park entrances have faded. But it’s there. All that’s ever happened is just behind us on the wind, and the trees are creaking with the weight.

Hampstead heath Jade April 2020 pandemic

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On May 22, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

May 22^nd

I sit outside and hear the world shutting up and closing windows after a hot day. It sounds like nightfall in a small Italian town. We had the first hot day this week, no chill in the air or in the shadows. As I sit listening to the world going to bed I think of all the talk about how we never had time for all this thought, focus, presence before. Having previously agreed, in this moment I realise I don’t think that’s true. We’ve always had the time; we just chose not to use it.

The reality is, if you’re not going out there’s only so much TV you can watch, only so much scrolling you can do before you put your phone down, turn off the TV and start to pay attention. I understand why we might want to distract ourselves from life, but distract ourselves from the planet, that I don’t get. Why are we not in a constant state of wonder? I suppose bodily functions have a tendency to bring you back to earth.

On the road where children have been drawing NHS rainbows in chalk, I notice someone has taken a discarded nub and drawn a penis.

I look through a photo album I made last summer, and as I flick through the images I start to cry. What I find upsetting is the innocence of our faces. Smiling, we have no idea what is coming.

Acid lime Brimstone butterflies flash across the deep green vista I run through, like a splash of vinegar.

My mum, in Devon, goes to pick up eggs and veg from the honesty box at one of the farms up near the coast. She gets stuck in hours of tailbacks from day-trippers. Then I see a picture circulating Twitter of the blocked roads all around Woolacombe (just around the bay) and it’s even worse than I imagined. This kind of tourism isn’t contributing to the economy, it’s just making the lives of those who live at these “beauty spots” (typically relatively poor areas) impossible. While potentially putting them at risk.

Mum also questioned where these people were going to the toilet – seems as there are no pubs public toilets open at the moment, it’s a good question.

Earlier, I’d seen pictures of Hampstead Heath the morning after a hot day, covered in bottles, shopping bags, crisp packets and dog shit bags. And, though the hope had been that the virus would result in an evolution of collective consciousness, I can’t help but think we have learned nothing. Parks were elevated to near-sacred spaces during this and yet we still treat them like a tip. Which makes you wonder, what will it take for us—I mean a vast majority of us— to learn to respect the land we live on?

More than a pandemic directly linked to the destruction of the environment, it seems.

We sit in a park, our local beauty spot, after work under a big cedar tree and drink beer. I take off my shoes and feel the sun warm my bare soles. Watch pollen and insects swirling up on a thermal towards the sun.

Up, up, up. Until you can no longer make out the particles from the light.

Watching old documentaries about astronauts I start to question what I’m doing. I’d be there writing about the beauty of the moon rather than going to it. Like that Buddhist aphorism: looking at the finger pointing to the moon, rather than the moon itself.

Surely it’s better to be out doing something, rather than writing about doing something. Is writing even a worthy pursuit anymore? I think it might have been once. It may be again. But I do wonder if it is now. And if it’s not, how can you make so?

But I suppose it’s in our nature to question everything. In Tom Wolfe’s essay, Post Orbital Remorse, the astronauts came to loathe their celebrity – they weren’t individuals, apart from a couple, no one even knew their names, they were just “astronauts”, and then forgotten.

It is regretful that we even managed to politicise outer space. Will no nook of the universe be free from our small-mindedness?

I must be in a funk. I need to get outside more. I look into fruit picking jobs. There’s been a lot of talk about it, most of it I’ve missed, but the general vibe being that it should be the Brexiteers doing the fruit picking now … to me, that just seems like the other side of the same coin: the problem is hardly any UK nationals want to pick fruit. I do, but there’s no farms even remotely near travelling distance to London. And suddenly I remember I looked into this last year as well.

What’s that thing that guy said about doing the same thing and expecting different results?

One day I will work with my hands again. If we all did a bit, it wouldn’t be loaded in unmanageable amounts on other people.

It reminds me of when I had a realisation that for society to function we all have to play our bit in different roles, on different strata of society. If we were all only to stay at the bottom it wouldn’t work, same if we were all only to stay at the top. What works is the flux between the two.

That’s why you shouldn’t ever let the fuckers keep you down.

Table plums highgate London April 2020 Pandemic lcokdown

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On May 15, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

May 15^th

After a cold, grey week of watching the wind bully the trees, we’re back to beautiful mornings. Cool in the shadows but warm in the sun. Disaster is coming. Or it isn’t. Like a fox on a country road, frozen under the full-beam of an on-coming car in an otherwise black night, I don’t know which way to turn.

Forwards or backwards?

The decision is made for me. I have to go for a (routine) blood test— this is the furthest I’ve ventured in 6 weeks. I wear brightly coloured trousers to ward off evil spirits. And in case that doesn’t work, I’ve got the Dr. Death leather jacket back on so the virus will know to back the fuck up.

I listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s Manhattan while walking through dirty London streets still creaking with the weight of a pandemic, and it feels rather smug. Billy Holiday’s more the vibe. Civilisation as we know it has been put into question, as have our individual identities, which means men in white vans demonstrate their virility by using anyone attempting to cross the road as target practice. Paying them no mind, a man with a mask cycles with no hands up the empty street. I much prefer these kind of cyclists to the mid-life Lycra set who bellow “watch out” as they scream round a blind corner twice as fast as the speed limit.

The ice cream van’s been out for about a month, and the local cemeteries have been open for a couple of weeks, presumably for anyone who wants to save themselves the trouble and just launch themselves into an early grave now.

Apparently, you can get that bored.

The ravens and rooks hobble around like boys in baggy trousers. Flame licked iris are out and pink, purple, and white rhododendrons have burst onto the scene; beyond their haze of colour twisted roots and branches loop each other like a mangrove swap. Magpies skim along the ground like stones across the water.

When I go for a run the air by the lake is filled with glowing pollen blowing off the reeds that rustle reassurances on the wind. The haze makes the scene look like the summers when everything was golden. Already the earth is dry and cracked in places like my hands.

Continuing my cottage industry, I’ve sold some black stilettos on eBay now. Maybe whoever bought them’s going to the cemetery.

I dig at a kiwi with a spoon and its seeded flesh oozes out like frog spawn. It’s not ripe yet and makes my mouth water. I ripen hard plums in a chipped white bowl in the sun. The tomato plant I grew from seed has been indoors and survived the winter; it now thrives in the sitting room and droops like a willow under its green fruit.

Nothing is ripe yet.

Nothing is ready.

It’s all too soon.

But the sun is shining and there’s weed on the wind. As the evacuated stay in their second homes, gardens run wild and buttercups stand tall, begging for chins to glow up. The dust-covered cars are on the move again. Walking home laden with shopping, I listen to Bob Dylan and make a decision to serve no one but the ones I love.

We put on Rambo for some easy watching and are surprised to discover that it’s a masterpiece. It starts with a small incident and explodes into this epic psychological breakdown. Stallone is practically silent throughout the film, and only in the last five minutes does he really talk, and when he does, it floors me. The trauma. It floors me.

“Nobody would help! No one helped! He said, I want to go home, Johnny, I wanna drive my Chevy…”

An opera shrieks from the radio while I’m in the bath. It’s von Suppé’s The Devil on Earth, and what I gather is that in von Suppe’s future everyone is eccentric, but at a party two brothers are unable to elicit either any mischief or any romance. They conclude that in the future the devil has distributed himself evenly among everyone, so is everywhere but impossible to find.

It’s been a long time coming: face masks are fashionable, and they aren’t called face masks, they’re face coverings. I see a female politician wearing a coordinated mauve outfit and mauve face “covering” and find it infinitely more terrifying than the clinical alternative. I’m all about reusing masks and making them out of whatever fabric you want but… it’s the coordination. The consideration. This is our new reality and it’s unsettling how quickly something so sinister is assimilated into fashion.

May joy be unconfined, our downstairs neighbour’s taken up the bongos. Occasionally, the bongos are accompanied by some vigorous throat singing, which when it catches you off guard can be quite alarming, but I appreciate it’s certainly more musical than just screaming into a pillow.

I’m reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle this week. As well as being a surprisingly enjoyable read about a poisoning, it is a book about a type of isolation that makes what many of us are experiencing seem almost communal. I suppose all stories are stories of isolation if you look at them right.

Got Time To Watch Plums Ripen In A White Chipped Bowl