Hampstead Heath June 2020 pandemic lockdown

The Last Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On June 12, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

June 12^th

Little girls chase the pigeons while they ride their bikes on the concrete in the park.

“Try not to kill them,” one girl says.

Life feels uncertain.

Learn to ride it like a mustang.

Yesterday, I went for a socially distanced walk with two friends and their respective son and dog. It was strange and it wasn’t. Previously, it’s been quite common for me not to see friends for weeks at a time, but the difference now is I haven’t seen anyone for months. As one friend points out, “It’s all been two dimensional.” The other friend says, how driving through London she almost burst into tears. The city’s been in this great slumber for so long “and how will it ever wake up again?”

I’m quiet in the company of friends. And I know I’m quiet. Which makes me quieter. I’m wearing Doctor Death leather jacket and a baseball cap and look and feel decidedly dodgy.

I’m given a loaf of bread and lose my footing. I fall into the 12^th century.

There was a break in the overcast sky for an hour earlier in the week. It was then I heard my first cricket of the summer hiding in the reeds. Noticed thistles have been left to grow in wide patches. The crickets have been quiet ever since.

I watch a fly on a railing for longer than is strictly normal.

The back pain is back in a big way. Question this time is: what am I not anxious about?

There are more protests this weekend. Unless you’re going to cause aggro, I encourage anyone and everyone to go (wear facemasks). But there’s something from the last week’s protest that has been bugging me. As we stood in Parliament Square I watched two young white women, they had cardboard signs they were holding but seemed uncomfortable with them. They held their ‘BLM’ tightly to their sides. Then one whispered to the other and gave her her phone. She stood in front of the crowd and held up her sign high above her head. She proceeded to do several poses, including one from behind. She then asked her friend quietly if she’d “got it”, which she nodded she had. Then they swapped positions and the other friend did exactly the same thing. They stood around looking uncomfortable for a few minutes, with their signs down by their sides again. And then they walked off.

There was too much happening last week for it to be at the front of my mind but it bugged me. And it’s been bugging me ever since. I don’t doubt that those girls had good intentions, but somehow they let themselves get in the way of those intentions.

Me, I don’t have the answers to anything.

Four Dead In Ohio runs round my head. Crosby, Stills and Nash. I used to sing it thinking it was sad, but not knowing what it was about.

People are still dying of the virus, in this country and all over the world (except New Zealand). It’s still very real despite the growing feeling its happening behind closed doors. A conservative estimate is well over 400,000 people have now died. The rise in deaths from domestic violence since lockdown makes it hard to swallow. And I mean makes it physically hard to swallow.

The tomatoes that drooped green like a willow are ripe enough to eat.

Tens of thousands of turtles drift to nest on an island in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s so calm. So peaceful. The turtles so sure of their destination. There is no doubt. Their purpose and reason for being is absolute.

We long to return to the water. I live in the bath.

I went to the Great Barrier Reef about fifteen years ago. I’ve never liked instructions so I ate melon and didn’t listen to the boat’s captain explain where to go and where not to. I swam away from the group and over a sort of reef precipice. It was blue. God it was blue. Blue like swimming pool blue. And covered in beautiful tropical fish and I couldn’t understand why no one else was over there. Just to the right of the reef was a deep deep dark crevasse. And when I looked down, meters below me were four reef sharks, circling.

Some words from the captain had made their way into my brain. “They won’t kill ya, but they’ll rip yer arm off.”

The elderflower champagne is adding an unexpected element of danger to our lives. My godfather has made it in Ireland before and gets advice sent from over there. He calls me with it. It’s not good news. Firstly, to prevent explosions, we’re supposed to be storing it in demijohns (expensive, enormous glass containers with diffusers to let pressure not air out) not wine bottles, and also, you’re supposed to wait a year before drinking, because there is a magic to it. This time next year, when the elderflower blooms again, that blossoming is also in the champagne’s DNA, and this is when you get the “petelance”, the fizz.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of things.

I need get back into the world, if only in the limited capacity of staring out the window, and get off the internet. There are some issues where there shouldn’t even be a side to take, there are some issues we should all be in agreement on. But that’s never going to happen and there comes a point when the internet stops being educational and it’s just people shouting at each other from either side of the valley. The internet makes all things binary, and what do we expect? It’s the nature of its code. In there, in here, it is a binary reality.

It’s warm this week and there’s a big wind. A big gentle wind blowing through deep layers of our psyche. It feels like an encouraging friend nudging us forward when it’s our turn to speak. History repeating itself is not necessarily a bad thing: there’s some unfinished business and it’s back to get finished. That’s the thing with the past, it’s always catching up with us.

Maybe tomorrow it will be sunny.

When all this started I read something Hunter S Thompson wrote: “When the going gets Weird, the Weird turn pro.”

It’s stayed with me throughout this. It’s our time, weird ones. Let’s go!

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On June 7, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

June 7^th

The weather turned again this week. Now we’re riding the gloom train until the tracks run out. Our last warm evening was Tuesday. The birds here have been agitated since then. That evening about a hundred ravens and magpies flew from the trees in front of the flat, squawking and cawing and barking. Something spooked them and they did everything to get that something out of their tree. It’s the numbers. They rally together. Every bird in the tree goes at whatever it is that is threatening them.

I thought you had to be in a position of power to wield any power. We can do things on the micro but on the macro, we feel helpless. “Impotent rage,” my mother calls it. But I think we’re starting to realise we’re all in positions of power and it’s time we started using it, because as many have already said: the UK is not innocent when it comes to racism, not in the past, and not now.

The world is turning faster than ever before, and it’s only natural that some of us will lose our footing every now and again. What’s important is that we find it again as quickly as possible. We could have done all of this, realised all this, a lot sooner.

And if you haven’t yet, it’s not too late to change your mind.

Protests change things. Riots change them faster. Small actions every day also change things. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. Don’t let that pressure drop.

Like running cancer races, you go on protests because you don’t want anyone else to have to go through it ever again, because you want things to change, and you do it for the people you love, you loved. At the moment there’s the whole virus issue, which I respect and take very seriously. But when I heard today’s protest was starting in Battersea, a fixture of my childhood, the home of my late Trinidadian godmother, I knew I had to go. I had to show respect and solidarity to the people in my life. And I had to show it to strangers. They didn’t need me there, but I wanted to make up the numbers, because in numbers we change things.

It’s a fifteen-mile walk down to Battersea and back, but how hard can that be? I ran a marathon, remember. It’ll be like Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting, I tell myself, a lot of looking in windows and watching lives go by. And to begin with, it is.

We walk past firemen practicing rolling up their hoses. We watch the multitudinous bike-riding families roll past. Down past closed and run-down frame emporiums, antique shops with brass candlesticks and old dolls, where ivy has been pulled off its sign recently, exposing leaf and vine-shaped green paint beneath the black.

There’s a dilapidated house, at its dark and empty window hangs large mustard yellow velvet curtains, one artfully drawn back.

The honeysuckle’s coming out and the sky is moody over the gothic St Pancras hotel in Kings Cross, but nothing like yesterday’s storms. We go past a plaque for Percy and Mary Shelley and I think of what I read this week, that his son took Percy’s heart from the funeral pyre and kept it. I think it’s kind of beautiful. Certainly more beautiful than it is gross.

Passing all these closed places, some of these closed places are places I used to work. In Holborn I remember the hideous period as a cocktail waitress in a “boutique bowling” alley – I get a kick out of seeing it shut now. I only lasted 3 or 4 months at that place, but somehow I made two lifelong friends there.

We head down a tree-lined street in Holborn that looks like an avenue in Paris, except someone in a moment of wishful extravagance has graffitied on an office “Abolish Work”.

We walk through Bloomsbury, where I met a friend at a bookshop and had coffee and pastel de nata—that was the last time I met with anyone before lockdown. At the time she said about her preparations: “I’ve bought an extra can of tuna, it’s going to be fine.”

Suddenly we’re by the river, I can’t remember when I last saw the river. By the time we get to the bridge you can hear the helicopters, chopping the stormish clouds above, and from there on out that sound doesn’t go away.

To my surprise, there are tourists on the South Bank for their post-apocalyptic holidays, dragging suitcases and looking lost as they go past a deserted and caged-off merry-go-round.

Big Ben’s covered in scaffolding and by the time my feet start to ache we’re in Battersea. The protest moves over Vauxhall Bridge and towards Parliament Square. Cars honk and wave signs from out their windows– the louder the honk the louder the applause from the crowd. People lean out from their flats waving their self-made ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs, someone waves a Sudanese flag. One woman shakes a Tambourine from her flat window.

We stay until I can hardly stand anymore, and then head back on the 7mile journey home. I can tell you, walking 15 miles in leather trousers is much harder than running a marathon.

Covent Garden is silent, and feels confused by that silence.

The rest of the walk home is horrendous. We didn’t get back long ago, and the last hour of the walk I started to feel drunk. Then I hallucinated (we hadn’t eaten since a crumpet at breakfast). There was a bunch of electric wiring tied to the wall of the newsagent that I thought was a man; I politely stood aside for the bunch of wiring to walk past. Fucker didn’t move, didn’t even say thank you.

We got home, and I broke in half.

Today, the protest, the whole thing was entirely peaceful – except for some fascists who felt the need to turn up and stand behind a line of police. People just ignored them. Yesterday however, whoever shoved a bike into the side of a horse—not ok. The poor horse doesn’t know what’s going on. Whether we like it or not (and as much as I like horses, I don’t in these situations) the police horses are there: don’t fucking hurt the animals. Don’t hurt anyone. But today there was none of that, and I think 98-99% of people were wearing face masks. And no, I agree, the timing’s not perfect, what with the pandemic and everything, but the time is now. No doubt about it.

And I’m not going anywhere for a couple of weeks, so…

As I write, the birdfeeder swings. A parakeet has, in the last week or so, got the hang of nibbling the peanuts. He’s quite a spectacle but I like the little chickadees. A few of which are fledglings now and incredibly scruffy. They bop about with their little mohawks in the drizzle.

Everyone seems to have a pet now except me and I fear I am turning into one for lack of one. I’ve started biting. I yowl like a cat just for something to do.

A group of men in suits congregate loudly in the communal gardens. It’s an odd sight. I haven’t seen the short-sleeved shirts and black trouser a combination since Barnstaple —the men all dressed up for a night on the lash outside Golden Lion Tavern in their short-sleeved shirts, hair slicked wet with Dax Wax, Jack Daniels belt buckles on. It seems to be a funeral gathering, and if it is, they’re all in remarkably good spirits. I’d be pissed off if I were the person who died!

Planes fly over late at night.

I forgot what normal was like.

There’s a break in the clouds for a while.

We watch a brilliant series called Rock and Roll America about the evolution of rock and roll, from blues in New Orleans and Memphis to the influence of the waves on Californian surf music. I watch girls screaming at the men on stage in total bewilderment.

I can’t imagine getting that excited about anything.

My loss, I suppose.

The other night I couldn’t sleep. The soles of my feet were hot. The wind was blowing the trees so hard if I closed by eyes I could have been by the sea. I needed to be outside. I got up, lit a candle and placed the hot soles of my feet on the cold tiles.

I found that I miss the world.

I’m reading Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (tr. William Rees). He was the dude who wrote The Little Prince, but he was also a pioneering airmail pilot who was shot down somewhere at sea. This is a book astronauts often reference; they call him a “mystic”. I can see why. After being lost with no fuel somewhere over the Sahara he and his astrologer, Néri, land in Casablanca.

“Neri and I would go down into town where there are little cafés already open at dawn…Neri and I would find a table and sit down safely, laughing off the night, with warm croissants and milky coffee set before us. Life would give to Neri and to me that morning gift. An old peasant woman finds her God only through a painted image, or a primitive medallion, or her rosary; we too must hear a simple language if we are to hear it truly. And so the joy of being alive was gathered in that aromatic and burning first taste, in that blend of milk, coffee and wheat which brings communion with peaceful pastures, with exotic plantations and with harvests, communion with all the earth. Among so many stars there was only one accessible to us, only one that could compose that fragrant breakfast bowl.”

In hedges everywhere brambles are flowering. What will have happened on the only star available to us in the months that form the blackberries?

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

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On April 23, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

April 24th

When the wind catches the Cyprus tree its leaves turn silver.

I walk past a woman whose perfume takes me back to an untraceable image from my childhood. Maybe it’s not even from a childhood this time around. It’s a rich person’s perfume. A person from another age, another time and place, who has somehow washed up in the strange experience two thousand and twenty is proving to be.

On Monday night I find I have been wearing my trousers back to front for the whole evening, this sums up the whole day, the whole week, the whole decade. I have had the worst week of my professional writing life this week. And previously, I have had some bad weeks.

I played the game and found the game to be rigged. The world is falling apart and all I asked for was some organisation from an editorial department that was set to be a quite big break for me. But that’s too much to ask. And I’m sick of putting my life in the hands of people who are not worthy of it.

So, I am done doing what I am supposed to do. I’m done working hard every day god gives me. I’m done. I’m on strike. I have been in bed for most of the week.

It feels as if I have been physically injured.

A broken wing.

Grief has brought out latent eccentricities in my character. A heartbreak is all it takes to turn someone from a (just about) functioning member of society to a batshit mad woman. And I have felt that break. This morning I find myself eating breakfast in the sun, wearing a baby’s sun hat, sunglasses, cycling shorts and a Chinese dressing gown.

The baby hat and Chinese dressing gown are only the start of this. I’ve never fitted in and I realise that it’s time I stopped trying. I hate the lot, so why did I convince myself I needed to be a part of it in order to succeed?

The magnolia tree blooms, like a thousand cupped hands waiting for something good to fall into them.

A side effect of going running that I had not anticipated is that I seem to be getting fitter. My lazy jog twice a week to rid myself of some anxiety seems to be having a noticeable effect on my stamina. Just outside our flat we have a near vertical hill. Running up it was a madness reserved solely for psychopaths, and possibly criminals evading the law. Now I am among their ranks. I pant like a dog when I get to the top, but still, I feel good in a very primal way (could be being at the top of a very high hill). And yet, I am wary. This is how you start getting ideas like, “A marathon might be interesting…”

I am slow to do an online shop for mother. She threatens to “mask-up” and go to the shops herself. I completely lose it, go apoplectic even at the suggestion. It is thus that I come to understand all the frazzled parents I have seen over the years, screaming at their bastard children as they attempt to launch their little bodies gleefully into on-coming traffic.

The Thursday night clapping and banging of pans for the NHS scares the pigeons and the spirits from the trees. It’s become the closest thing to a ritual we’ve had in this country for a long time.

My friend recommends putting banana skins in water for the plants. I do this on a particularly warm day, and add a bit of bruised banana flesh for good measure. Turns out it’s not just plants who like rotting banana water, within minutes we are invaded by plague-like clouds of fruit flies. Then the taps start dripping blood. Or was it frogs? I forget.

On this hot day, a man in his late 60s runs up the hill I am running down wearing a black face mask, he’s obviously struggling to breathe and is sweating heavily. I fear that at this moment the facial accoutrement is a greater risk to his life than the virus.

Seconds before witnessing this man’s potentially mortal miscalculation, I have an important realisation that has probably been evident to everyone but me for a very long time: although I often write because I need money, I don’t write for money, I write for people to read it. That’s partly why this week has been heartbreaking.

Given the context of the time we are living in, I feel we can agree that heartbreak has various degrees. This degree, a nasty, sharp forty-five degree break, is not the full three sixty. And so, though unable to fly, I can still crawl in a rather jaunty manner, and I am still aware I have so much to be thankful for.

From afar, I am witnessing an old friend right their course. Like they went off track a long time ago and this is giving them the time and space to rediscover who they really are. It’s a heart-warming thing to witness in the midst of all of this sadness.

Magnolia Fingers

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On April 12, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

April 12th

It’s black outside. As black as it gets in London. Orange-black. When the clouds pass through the sky like factory smoke. Nightly, there is the noise of torture below. It’s mating season. The foxes are at it, and we are party to this abysmal orgy. This means I am reminded on a nightly basis that foxes have barbed penises. Like there weren’t enough fucking horrors in this world.

Day and night, there is the background noise of sirens; Verdi’s Requiem plays and feels wholly befitting.

We did an unpleasant shop for a neighbour last week (rammed supermarkets, queues round the block, dirtiness, people sidling up next to me in the aisles – stinking, drunk men, they seem particularly liable to forget social distancing is a thing). This week, in return for that shop, we were given some rhubarb from our neighbour’s allotment. I’ve never bought or cooked rhubarb. But that night I stewed it and have been eating it on porridge all week.

This is the thing: only give what we can. You cannot be all things to all people all of the time. Sometimes you won’t be there for someone. Of course, we are each the centre of our own universe, so it seems unjust that someone should choose to look at the moon instead of tending to the sun. But I’ve been looking at the moon all week.

I don’t know many people who haven’t lost work because of the pandemic, but I envy the people who complain of boredom, who have no one to shop for, no one to look after but themselves. Too much navel gazing is never a good thing, so if you are that bored, maybe you could be doing more to help? This is that much discussed hour of need. It was not before and it is not after, it is now.

What are you safely (physically and mentally) able to contribute? It does not need to be the world, which is what key workers are currently giving us all. It might be your skills. It might be understanding. It might just be a bunch of rhubarb. That’s enough for now.

I am afraid to say, the translation of my copy of Beowulf is infuriating. The dude cannot stop hyphenating. And, although I enjoyed the overall story, reading it was mostly boring. It largely consists of very long speeches in mead halls about fifty glorious people whose names all begin with ‘H’. However, there were a total of three (!) monsters, to my delight. There was also this quote, which stuck out:

“Both bad and good, and much of both, must be borne in a lifetime spent on this earth in these anxious days.”

Now, all this talk of barbed penises reminds me that, many years ago, I read a piece about how early humans had barbed penises, or I thought I did. I happened to mention it in a blog post – these were the early days of my writing career, when I posted with whimsy and without stringent (or any) regulation of the facts. About a year or so later, I attended I gathering of hip, young intellectuals. How it came up I do not know, but a discussion about barbed penises in animals ensued. I thought, this is my moment. And, having been unsure of my intellect among such esteemed (loud) people, I decided to break my silence.

“Ancient humans had barbed penises,” I announce.

Suddenly, the whole party’s attention is on me. Everyone is laughing.

“No, really. I read about it, in the paper…”

There is much dispute over my anatomical knowledge of our early ancestors.

“Ok, I’ll look it up!”

I search frantically on my phone for proof. The internet, in its infinite curve of fact and bullshit, only pulled up one reference to this.

“Oh, that’s weird. It seems the only reference to it is on my blog…”

I dare not Google it again.

On Friday morning I got up at 5am. It was before the sun had risen and there was only light coming from an invisible source in the left-hand corner of the sky. To my right, the luminous yellowish moon loomed over the buildings in a light blue sky, slowly sinking behind the trees that have blossomed white. As I stood in the middle of these two orbs, exhausted, it felt like something fundamental was coming into balance. If not in the world at large, then at least something in my world. And I am pestered by a near-constant desire for champagne.

The White Blossom. (This weekend I have returned to my most time-consuming hobby: taking pictures of things through binoculars.)

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On April 3, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

April 3rd

It smells like smouldering embers. Someone nearby has had a fire going overnight. Strange thing to be doing in London but we’ll all be lighting fires in bins soon. The smell is of wood smoke and it is comforting, anything elemental is comforting. Give us further reminders of our place. Render me small again.

The mornings are frequently beautiful. Then, as if mirroring our collective intake of news throughout the day, the weather turns. Usually by lunch. This morning, however, is different. It’s milder than it has been but there is thick cloud cover, reminding me of mornings in Spain before the sun heats up and melts the white blanket below it.

Our dystopian laundry sways on the line; face masks twitch in the gentle breeze.

I’m reading Beowulf now. Turns out he’s not a wolf, which was a little disappointing, but there is at least a monster in it. So that’s good.

The woman next door has a bath. I don’t know how one person can make so much noise in there. It is as if a whale has squeezed through the plughole and beached in the bath, and having realised the mistake it has made, is frantically trying to escape. Squeaking and creaking and splashing for its release. I would forgive it every now and again, but she does this every morning. A very sad thing to take the grace out of bathing.

I go for my bi-weekly jog. As a walker most of the time I have become aware of manic joggers getting very sweaty and out of breath, and then being very sweaty and breathing heavily very close to me, very close to everyone. I hold my breath a lot when I walk.

So as not to be one of these super spreaders when I do jog (which apparently is now something I do–jogging, not super spreading), I make sure I keep my distance and keep breathing at a minimum. I am also fortunate that, like Prince Andrew, I have had military training and therefore do not sweat.

The fact I walk for around three quarters of my jog probably helps with the sweating thing. But the training is also important.

However, I do have to breath a little, but I do not want to be frowned upon, so keeping my distance is paramount. This has its hazards. Today, I jog daintily around the lake, admiring the light on the water and smiling to myself in a moment of wild, endorphin-induced positivity. Suddenly, a very, incredibly old man appears out of nowhere. Why is he lurking by the reeds? Why is he even out of the house?! I don’t have time to question this ancient health-risk’s motives. Instead, I launch myself away from him and almost into the water so as not to contaminate him with my breath particles.

He laughs. I do too, but not because I think it’s funny.

Old superstitions passed down by my mother resurface. Whatever happens, however weird this all gets, regardless of my military training, I will only ever salute birds. Magpies are my master now.

I see a dead magpie lying on some ivy on one of my walks and raise my hand to the fallen. Three other magpies are bouncing around the trees above it, cackling as they do, but they seem distressed.

I don’t know about all this “great equaliser” talk surrounding the virus. I had thought it might be true, but now I’m not so sure. I appreciate all of us could die (no change there then), in the mean time it seems to me like everyone who was poor before is still poor now. Anyone more likely to die before is still more likely to die now.

Anyone rich before is rich now. Anyone doing ok before is still doing ok.

Everyone picking up the pieces before is still picking up the pieces.

Everyone at the bottom of the pile is still at the bottom of the pile.

Everyone who fell through the cracks is still falling.

I speak to a friend about her time in Cuba, because I want to go there one day, and ask her to remind me why she didn’t like it. She reminds me. I wonder if those calling for communism here will let us share their second homes and healthy salaries? I’m all for it, baby. I got nothing to loose. See you in the bread queues.

I take refuge in the past. Even bad memories seem attractive now.

While out shopping for an old gentleman, I catch my reflection in the shop window: face mask, latex gloves, leather trench coat. The look is very ‘Dr. Death will see you now’. And I think, If I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t buy more leather coats.

The Leather Coat In Simpler Times

Yellow flowers Highgate London March 2020

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On March 27, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out, Uncategorized /

March 27th

There’s the familiar, mechanical Predator cackle of a magpie in a tree. It is another beautiful day. A distant hum of traffic, or is it just my ears buzzing from the silence?

I wake early, every day. Today, my back hurts so I watch the birds on the feeder from bed. Little brings me such uncomplicated joy as this.

One blue tit is on the feeder and two are hopping about on this gigantic yellow flowering thing that has grown in one of our pots over the last few months. I let it grow out of curiosity. At first I thought it might be kale from seeds in the compost, then as it grew, I became sure it was tender stem broccoli and we were going to eat it when it got back from Devon. But in that time it started flowering bright yellow flowers. Now I’m pretty sure it’s poisonous.

(If anyone knows what it is…?)

The daisies I planted last summer along with the all the other now-dead wild flowers kept flowering all winter, and are still going strong, bobbing obediently in the breeze. Some of the seeds planted last month finally have tiny shoots coming up from the dark earth.

Nature is slow. That’s how it keeps its magic.

I’m reading Wide Sargasso Sea. It’s brilliant but it’s sinister. A lot of heavy overtones to deal with. A lot heavy undertones to deal with also.

I swing from feeling everything far too much to not feeling anything at all. Not sure which is more healthy at this point in time. The combination certainly isn’t. Last night we watched Aussie Gold Hunters and I cried at anything even remotely emotional—happy or sad, which meant I cried through most of the programme.

Someone got shot in The Wire and we had to turn it off.

Apparently you carry anxiety in your lower back. It would explain why mine’s been playing up again the last couple of weeks. I thought I was pretty calm compared to some people, but then denial is a river and it flows to my heart.

I painted my nails red and it made me feel better. I listen exclusively to reggae and soul. And ok, I admit, some madrigals and cantatas. I’ve lost all my paid work in the last couple of weeks. Instead, I work hard on my own writing. Yesterday I worked hard, got up too early, and was asleep by 8.30pm. I now consider that a very good day.

This virus has brought some enlightening things with it, especially via Twitter and Facebook. Lesley, who you were sure had a life-long career as an estate agent, is actually an immunologist, it turns out. She has been reading The Guardian’s Coronavirus Live Feed for two weeks now, so she knows exactly what she’s talking about. Terrence— who you’ve never been entirely sure what he does— announces he is not only a qualified immunologist, having read the many NYT pieces Belinda sent him, but he’s also been on a Preppers4Life forum and now he’s a professional chef – he can make a sourdough starter out of the skin of an onion and a sprinkle potash. When you next log on: everyone has become an expert on everything. You however, are a failure. You have not become an expert on anything in the last two weeks. Or, so you think. In fact, you have become an expert at watching other people miraculously become experts on things they previously knew nothing about. Congratulations!

Why not make something just for you, Terrence?

But, you know, whatever gets you through the day, Terrence. You too, Lesley. Keep on keeping on. I’m with you.

Last night we leant over the balcony railings and listened as the whole city clapped in darkness for the NHS workers. It meant something. What would mean more is if those who voted Conservative hereby make the decision never to do anything so destructive again.

It hits when you least expect it. Walking back one night from doing a shop for someone, it was dark and the streets were silent, except for a group of boys on bikes circling the area. “This is what it’s like to be in a pandemic then,” I thought.

But there are things to be grateful for: I have – after phone calls, emails and innumerable failed attempts – finally got my mum’s food delivery sorted and, without a shadow of a doubt, I have certainly become an expert on that.

Mystery Plant

(And thank you, Sainsbury’s, for prioritising the elderly and vulnerable!)

Locked-down And Out In London

Posted On March 24, 2020 By jadeangelesfitton In Locked down and out /

March 24th 2020

London

I would say it was a beautiful day, but I wake up with such a heaviness over me. The bright, bright sun has a blackness in its light. The outside world, its greenness, its grand display of new life as we face so much death feels a little hostile.

I think of the Triffids. A man coughs violently in the communal garden.

All my life I have feared this, or something like this; I suppose now it’s here I can relax. No more waiting. The horror has arrived. All that is left is to face it. How I wish I could punch it in the face. Kick it. Kill it. My limited krav maga is useless now. (But may still come in handy if we revert to martial law…)

The deaths in Italy and Spain are horrifying. The mortality is so much greater than China, with their populations so much smaller. It makes it all rather hard to believe. It is all so much worse than we feared.

Yesterday I bought myself an orange rose to cheer me up. I wore latex gloves to the shops.

Last night we watched The Wire and for a few minutes I forgot what was going on in the world until I went to bed, setting my alarm for midnight to try and get mum a delivery slot for food. I failed. The site crashed and just showed me an image broken eggs.

Children scream. At lunch I wash a celery stick with soap. I’ve lost it already.

So what do we do now? Do I keep writing? Who for? Will there be books on the other side of all of this? I suppose I, like everyone else, just keep going blindly and hope I find my way in to the light. And that when I get there, everyone else is there too.

Quotes from Withnail and I have been circling my head for days.

“Throw yourself into the road, darling! You haven’t got a chance!”

“Reduced to the state of a bum!”

“You’ve got soup? Why haven’t I got soup?”

Visions of me in a week’s time rubbing myself with deep heat to stay warm and drinking methylated spirits because we’ve run out of red wine. It’s a small step. It’s a thin line, as thin as a stick of celery.

Pent up stress is making me twitchy and weird(er than usual). I go for a run. I have not been for a run since I had a breakdown and ran an ultra marathon 7 years ago — it must have been a breakdown, why else would anyone run an ultra marathon? I now remember why I haven’t run since, running is hard and boring.

But out here nature no longer seems so looming, so vivid. I stand a few feet away from a grey heron and we look into each other’s eyes for a minute or two, until he tires of me and walks back into the dry reeds. The first butterfly of the season flies onto the warm earth by my feet — a peacock butterfly. A new money North London couple call loudly after their dog, they have called it “Camden”. May the Lord preserve us. A carp half a meter long is visible in the lake, then disappears beneath a cloud of mud. Middle-aged men who don’t feel a pandemic is flying close enough to the sun free-wheel down the 90 degree hill, just a small stone and a wheel-spin away from on-coming traffic.

That’s why I love mankind.