It’s Funny the Things
You Feel Nostalgic About
It is strange, isn’t it, the things one tends to look back
on with fondness and longing? I used to say that the happiest time of my life
was when the kids were pre-school age. It may be true, but I have for the most
part stopped yearning for those times recently.
But there are particular periods in your life and they often
come to an abrupt end. When you were at school yourself, and towards the end of
that time, couldn’t wait for the confinement and repression (I may be
overdramatizing here) to end. When you were a young man or woman and were out
on the town every Saturday night. Various marital or occupational periods.
When the lockdown started in early 2020, I am sure I was not
alone in my first thoughts being to regret the times immediately past when we
could go where we wanted and when we wanted (assuming we could afford it). I mourned for the Yorkshire Three Peaks
Holiday in 2017, mentioned in a previous blog, for Linda’s and my US holiday in
2018, encompassing the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and New Orleans, and our 2019
challenge of climbing the four highest peaks in the UK administrations (but one
at a time, none of that mad nonsense of all in one day).
Then the atmosphere relaxed over the summer and we had a
sort of halfway house between lockdown and normal life. The dreadful second
spike came with Autumn and Winter. Around Christmas 2020 and new Year 2021,
when we were seeing more than a thousand deaths a day from the virus, I felt
the strangest nostalgia, not for pre-pandemic days but first for the early
lockdown period when we applauded every Thursday evening and we all felt we
were in the same boat (before the Cummings debacle demonstrated that we were
all in very different boats), and second for that in-between period when
restrictions were partially lifted.
I didn’t keep a formal diary during that summer period, but
I did occasionally record events and thoughts over a week. Here are a couple of
extracts from summer 2020.
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Monday
Monday evening we did the hash again, keeping a safe
distance from the rest of the gang, Strange to say, I have been doing the hash
house harriers stuff on a Monday night with Linda and her pals, something I
always swore off in the past, due to the ritualism which followed the run. It
used to be that they all stood round in a circle, and sang various off-colour
songs, with some of the members being forced to stand in the middle and down
glasses of beer as forfeits for lapses from some arcane aspect of protocol.
I found all that stuff deeply embarrassing, so I avoided it
like the pledge. It all reminded me too much of The Sons of The Desert, the
society that Laurel and Hardy belonged to, or the RAOB, Royal and Ancient Order
of Buffaloes. Actually, Linda’s late grandmother had a brother who belonged to
the RAOB, but grandma, with typical irreverence, referred to them as the
ragged-arsed old bastards. ANYWAY, because of the limitations on one’s
activities, they can’t have all that ritual, so I now do the hash run on a
Monday night, sweating away as I jog along and watch the pack disappear round a
corner three hundred yards away. Duffy bringing up the rear as per, big fat
bastard puffing and panting, miles behind the rest of them, big Clodhoppers
slapping the ground like an Indian laundryman walloping the wet clothes on a
stone. This keeps me at a safe distance, of course. Often I am running along
behind Linda and her pals, so I am chasing a pack of women like Benny Hill.
Tuesday
Meeting after bloody meeting on Zoom or MS teams all bloody
day. One side effect of the lockdown is that some of my colleagues (the
non-clinical ones) have f*** all to do except call Zoom meetings. I spend so
much time in meetings I never seem to have time to do any work. The other thing
that occurs to me is that I have become someone I don’t like much in my old age
in this respect. When I was younger, at meetings I would sit as close to the
biscuits as possible, pig out on them and say not a word. Now I sit about
complaining all the time.
Taekwondo on Zoom in the evening. My taekwondo instructor is
back from his holidays and classes have resumed. While he was away, I devised a
self-instructed class which I did for 90 minutes twice a week. If anything the
self-instructed stuff was more strenuous than the usual classes. One nice thing
was that instead of running on the spot and doing Knees Up Mother Brown and all
that for the warm up, I could just go outside and run a mile for a
warm-up.
***********************************
I think that gives you an idea of my mood then and I feel it
looks relatively optimistic. I am hopeful again, having just had my second
vaccination dose. Thinking back on the past year or so, it seems that there are
some unsung heroes. Of course, we are all tremendously grateful for the work of
health and social care staff, and I can’t imagine the pressures of working in
respiratory or critical care in the winter of 2020/21. But think about some
other heroes, in particular, the people responsible for production and
distribution of food and drink. They can’t work from home. They have had to turn
out every day including the very risky days of five months ago, planting,
harvesting, doing production line work, stacking shelves, manning tills,
cycling round town with the big cuboid Deliveroo packs on their backs. Three
cheers for the people who have fed us through the pandemic.
But back to nostalgia. In the year 2007, we had several
terrific holidays. An extended family holiday at Easter with brothers and
sisters, nephews and nieces, aunties and uncles, in the Hope Valley,
Derbyshire, one of the most beautiful places in the world. In summer, we had a
few days in Yorkshire with the beloved in-laws, a few days in Scotland
including my brother Tbone’s wedding, and a few days on the magnificent
Northumberland coast. I have a story about that- remind me to tell you it in a
future blog. In the Autumn half term week, we had five days in New York City,
staying in a 56th floor flat on 42nd street.
One period in my life which is definitely over and which I
think about a lot is that time in the early 2000’s when my great pal Kevin
Connelly and I worked within a mile of each other in London. We would meet for
lunch in the pub around once a month and take a whole afternoon off twice a
year for a major boozy do. Kevin retired a few years before the pandemic struck,
so that period was already over. But I value the memories of it. So many of
those meetings involved great hilarity, often from very personal jokes which
mean more to Kevin and myself than to anyone else. Kevin wrote a brilliant,
multi-layered play about it, called ‘The Felter Curn’. Look up an online
lowland Scots dictionary. However, let me tell you a more accessible anecdote
from those times.
In 2005, having two children aged 9 and 11, I had not been
paying much attention to the news, and in the Red Lion, near Moorgate, Kevin
mentioned the fact that President George W. Bush had had a cycling accident in
the grounds of Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, while attending the G8 summit.
‘Yes,’ said Kevin, ‘He crashed into a policeman. Put him in
hospital.’
‘What?’ I reacted, ‘He put a Scottish police officer in
hospital?’
‘Yes,’ said Kevin, ‘It was on the news.’
‘By God,’ I said, ‘He’s lucky he’s President of the United
States.’
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