I’ve managed to work out that today is Saturday. I’m usually quite good at working out what day of the week it is, but in these strange times, I can barely tell one day from another.
Yesterday, Friday, I thought it was Saturday and was surprised how thin my weekend Guardian was. Then it dawned on me it wasn’t Saturday. It was, as I discovered from the front of the newspaper, Friday.
Part of my confusion is being furloughed. Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of being furloughed and would probably have guessed it was a horse-racing term or perhaps something a carpenter might do. Now I know it’s the government paying me 80% of my normal salary to sit around doing nothing, something I spend probably 65% of the week doing anyway. I can live with that, probably for years if the truth be known. Whether the government can afford it is another matter all together.
I certainly know it’s a bank holiday weekend because the supermarkets are rammed, something you can tell by the mass queues outside as you drive by. In fact, I was once again on a mercy mission shopping expedition and the goods I needed were easily available in much smaller shops. Apart from that, it’s any day.
I’ve been doing today what I have been doing everyday, which is not very much. Writing a bit, reading a bit, drinking industrial quantities of coffee along with unhealthy comfort foods. I’m too worn out mentally to undertake any serious, or even minor, physical activity today. On that basis, it must be Sunday. It certainly feels like Sunday.
The weather is still improbably beautiful, with occasional creamy clouds dancing across the blue skies, whilst the world below, down here, is an unmitigated hell hole and misery. In a normal world, it would be chucking it down with rain today. But this is not normal.
It’s Saturday with none of my usual Saturday stuff. No sport, no pub crawl around the docks, no music buying in HMV or Rough Trade (although Thundercat’s new album did arrive by snail mail today – hooray!) and no chance of seeing friends or relatives.
The days are getting longer, yet I don’t really want them to get longer. Part of me wants them to disappear in the wind so we can reach a better place where people stop dying before their time, where we can all be together again, we all remember how awful life is at the moment and we can change the world when the dark days have passed.
For now, I am listening to Erland Cooper’s wonderful Sule Skerry album which is a hymn to the sea off the north of Scotland. I’ve never been there but they tell me it’s nice. If I get through this bastard virus and remember what day it is, I’ll be going there and to some of the other places I have always wanted to go to.
Once thing of which I have been reminded is my mortality which I can control even less than I believed. I need to bear that in mind with every decision I make from now on. If I make it. Not all of us will.
