Blog 19 Mar 2020 on
Daily life in Lunel
We are just acclimatising to Life under Lockdown. A dramatic phrase - Mary says rightly that nothing much has changed for us. We are mostly at home together quietly, reading, watching telly, in M’s case knitting or practising cello. We shopped last weekend and have enough to eat for the next week. Of course we miss our occasional outings - French conversation, music rehearsals, wine tasting - and see friends at a distance if at all. But spring is around the corner, and we are lucky for the moment to have our health.
20 March
Tried the new regime of restricted movement for defined purposes, carrying a self-declaration form or attestation today. Supermarket quite quiet, reasonably stocked, encouraging comments of ‘Bon courage’ from customers to checkout staff. I was cycling, a good way of getting around these very quiet streets, and food shops in town all open and not busy. God knows how businesses will survive reduced sales let alone the many enforced closures. On the way home I stopped to exchange some greetings (at a suitable distance) with neighbour Michel. Later, next-door neighbour Bruno, temporarily living by his work in Sommières since his wife Chris is in quarantine next door following return from Italy, said hi from his car as he paid a brief, isolated, masked visit. What a muddle...
A poem from Alexander McCall Smith
In a time of distance
The unexpected always happens in the way
The unexpected has always occurred:
While we are doing something else,
While we are thinking of altogether
Different things – matters that events
Then show to be every bit as unimportant
As our human concerns so often are;
And then, with the unexpected upon us,
We look at one another with a sort of surprise;
How could things possibly turn out this way
When we are so competent, so pleased
With the elaborate systems we’ve created –
Networks and satellites, intelligent machines,
Pills for every eventuality – except this one?
And so we turn again to face one another
And discover those things
We had almost forgotten,
But that, mercifully, are still there:
Love and friendship, not just for those
To whom we are closest, but also for those
Whom we do not know and of whom
Perhaps we have in the past been frightened;
The words brother and sister, powerful still,
Are brought out, dusted down,
Found to be still capable of expressing
What we feel for others, that precise concern;
Joined together in adversity
We discover things we had put aside:
Old board games with obscure rules,
Books we had been meaning to read,
Letters we had intended to write,
Things we had thought we might say
But for which we never found the time;
And from these discoveries of self, of time,
There comes a new realisation
That we have been in too much of hurry,
That we have misused our fragile world,
That we have forgotten the claims of others
Who have been left behind;
We find that out in our seclusion,
In our silence; we commit ourselves afresh,
We look for a few bars of song
That we used to sing together,
A long time ago; we give what we can,
We wait, knowing that when this is over
A lot of us – not all perhaps – but most,
Will be slightly different people,
And our world, though diminished,
Will be much bigger, its beauty revealed afresh.
Weekend 21-22 March
I like Facebook because it makes connections, for example:
John and Annie, both artists, both life drawers or painters
Married to (equally) interesting people
And also have complex, interesting families
.
We are reminded of their links daily
Because we see their work on the walls of our house
John and Annie, two very different, equally interesting people
Linked by art
Sunday M back from town.
The Halles covered market is open, metre markings in front of the stalls to keep people apart (contrast to the unregulated pictures I’ve just seen of Beaune market, and the excellent cheese stall functioning as usual. The little fruit & veg shop is also back in business following the owners’ annual Feb holiday, only two people at a time in the tiny space which is normally rammed with people. Local and sourced produce. Both suppliers a delight ever since we’ve lived in Lunel.
Monday - Thursday
The first half of the week is usually our busiest - Mary off to various musical encounters, both of us at French conversation. So this week has been more than usually quiet. I was at the supermarket, M in town again. No sign of the gendarmes but we always have our attestations at hand in case. Our limit of recreational outing is set at 1 km radius
We are occupying our evenings in watching box sets of police dramas. Having pretty well exhausted Endevaour before the virus struck, we are now well into Vera, much of which we'd not seen before. For this end of week we'll teak a brief break and excursion into Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, with a recently received but very old recording of Fischer Dieskau, Mirella Freni et al.
No comments:
Post a Comment