In the lockdown school holidays, one child 'camped' around the house. Making tents under tables or behind the lounge, she slept on beanbags or blow up matresses or a myriad of other make shift bed materials. Each night before bed there was an industrious building of a cubby before settling down for sleep.
I decorated the surrounds with the vine fairy lights, so she was 'in the wild'.
It was silly.
It was funny.
It made the 'holidays' different to the last 2 weeks of lock down school in the exact same place.
In these strange days, small things are becoming everything.
Make that exotic cocktail.
Read in the sunshine.
Dress up for zoom.
Do whatever you need to in order to make it a little less dull, Find things to differentiate the days.
This weeks song is the lovely cover of the Beatles classic, and as we ease slowly out of restrictions, it seems fitting as the tentative interactions with the outside world become more regular.
Take care everyone - remember you still need to Social Distance and sanitise, app or no app.
Please note you need to take extra care if you have the app on iPhone as it's not registering contact properly. Pay attention to where the outbreaks are and make sure you get tested if you may have come into contact with them.
As an aside, YUNA is doing a live stream this week on the 7th (I'm a little confused about the Australian time, so can't help, sorry).
I'm going to say at the start I'm not a counsellor, so this is just my opinion. Get proper help if you are having problems. Don't stick with or discard a relationship because of anything you read here. And definitely don't stay with anyone abusive and don't let someone chip away at your self-esteem.
A week or so ago, someone posted on Facebook that they'd never had the kind of love that the character has in After Life (the Ricky Gervais series), and that they really wanted that kind of consuming love. It was a really heartbreaking post to read, but as I hadn't watched the second series yet, I said nothing. I have since watched it, and went back to respond but it's vanished, so I'm writing my thoughts here.
Firstly, in After Life, the wife has died. The husband is grieving. So the husband is focused on all the good things about her that he loved and missed. In the second season, there are hints that he wasn't the most attentive husband. He tells how he wouldn't say I love you back at the end of a phone call if other people were around, and how she'd be busy in the kitchen and he would get annoyed if he had to help and wouldn't dance with her at parties and so on. These are all fairly normal things, and are part of a long life together where we take opportunity for granted (we think our lives together will last forever, so that opportunity to say I love you on the phone won't be our last opportunity to say it). The show does give us glimpses that the husband is idolising his wife, but that perhaps it wasn't the most perfect relationship in real life, in no small part because of him and how casually he loved her at the time. All of which I would say is actually pretty normal. (Maybe not right, but normal).
Secondly, there is this brilliant talk by Alain De Botton on what shapes our idea of romantic love and marriage, and what it actually should be. It is part of the Opera House's Digital Season (which if you haven't checked out, it's worth doing - I've been making up for my lack of weekly visits by 'catching up' online). You can run it in the background while you're doing something else, so while it's an hour, it doesn't need to take up any time.
The bottom line is, with a romanticised idea of love, there's no room for arguing about towels. However, life is all those things, and so is love. It's utilitarian as well as being swept off your feet and a driving desire. It has to be.
While talking about lockdown, we were talking how lonely some people were, and my husband said "I've never felt that. I've always had you." He meant it in the sense that there was always someone to off load stress to, and someone to play Banangrams with when bored, and someone whose presence shone approval, rather than someone actually being there. There are plenty of people lonely in their marriage. The pragmatism of the statement was an acknowledgement of 20 plus years of marriage and friendship, rather than an indication of a romanticised 'great love'. Love is the little day to day things added up, not just the grand romantic gestures.
Lastly, just remember you forget. When you first got together you probably had that all-consuming love and desire that floods through many new relationships. But time dilutes its power and other glue emerges.
I think De Botton gives some very good advice at the end of the talk to a lady who asks about bringing some more romance back into her long marriage. 'Act as if tonight is your last'. Say that I love you in the phone call, plan something special for no reason. Do that thing you used to do but stopped because of kids, school, work or the million other aspects of life that got in the way.
This is a long post for a person who I hope reads it. I don't know if she will or how to find her. My advice, is don't throw away a good thing for an ideal that is impractical and just shaped by the Romantic Poets (this is discussed at length by De Botton in the talk). We are influenced in our ideas on love by movies and shows that do not show arguments over towels because it's too boring to watch. But those arguments about towels* happen all the same.
*De Botton uses the towels example. I don't have a nutty obsession with towels or a passive agressive issue with towels - at least not with my husband. The kids on the other hand....but that's another post.
I imagine this will be short as I feel I've really stagnated. Drinking : Cocktails. Trying to make the weekends interesting and different to the weekdays. Reading: Still The Half Brother by Saabye Christensen and listened to Jasper Jones and just started Mrs Dalloway. Wanting: This to be over. I've hit the wall. Laughing: As lockdown began I decided to run a Eurovision contest. This has provided much hilarity for 30 of us. Highlight of my week...
Playing: Ping pong - finally! Took a month to turn up!
Wasting: Time. Getting so little done. Really directionless.
Liking: After dinner boardgames. Hope I can keep that going after the restrictions ease.
Loving: The DJs in Europe live streaming in the mornings our time so I have a daybreaker session every second day. Really lifts my mood at the start of the day. (UK Peeps, you have HotDub at Home - a time travelling dance party from the 50's to now streaming live at 9pm. You don't want to miss it! Another daybreaker for us!) Hoping: This gets sorted and we get to revell in the wonderful world again.
Following: Lots of musicians who have been pretty generous with what they share.
The red is the LED shuttlecock in motion
Noticing: An unhealthy trend of people not letting you express negative emotions. Definitely don't dwell there but you can express them to process them and then they go. Pretending everything is great and you're grateful won't really help you adjust your emotional balance. (That said, if you are struggling with negative feelings, get help. Now is not the time to battle with difficult feelings unnecessarily. If you are feeling down more often than not, take action and get help. Don't let the negative focus take over). Enjoying: Night badminton. It's a predinner highlight.
This cover isn't new but it still makes me smile and lifts my mood - now with the added bonus of reminding me of my fabulous trip to Womad! Very keen to try and do that next year! I've missed out on too many things these last months, got to make up for lost time!
This song makes me miss being in a crowd, it makes me miss all the benefits of living in the city. I don't think I've stayed home so much since I was a child. I am having fun but it just seems such a waste of life.
All we can do is all we can do. So for now, I'm planning all the wonderful things I will do to make up for lost time (in my head) and play music. Lots of happy music that fills me with joy.
Add your post with a cover that you love. (I will delete non-related posts).
As the app is taken up, I have noticed an alarming shift in conversation and behaviour. "We need everyone to download the app to stay safe" or "The sooner we all have the app, the sooner we get back to normal". As restrictions ease (and the dubious decision to go back to schools is implemented - discussion for another post), I've noticed a lack of social distancing in the streets.
The app doesn't work that way. You still get infected, you still go to ICU or not as you would have before the app. It just means you get pulled out of circulation and quarantined earlier (hopefully). However, as Singapore had the app for a month and is now in a 2 month lockdown (longer than ours has been), it is evidently not fool proof.
All the app does is assist manual tracing. The human team need to interpret the data. That's it. You are no safer than you were before the app, until the virus is eradicated completely. The app does help achieve that goal.
Download the app but (1) as restrictions ease, keep a manual diary of who you were with and where you were (as the app won't pick up everyone). (2) Keep social distancing properly (that is literally the only thing that keeps you safe). (3) Continue to wash your hands and sanitise like a mad thing whenever you go out or as soon as you enter the home.
The app actually requires you to take extra care because it appears a lot of people are now taking less.
If our numbers are correct (I am still dubious given global data), then we have been really lucky. Let's not have to lock down again in a month because we were stupid. Jacinda Adhern gave a great speech where she said Covid19 was like a bushfire, and while the blaze was out, there were still embers around that could flare up at any time. Remember you are walking through the embers and you need to be vigilant.
On the positive, I am hoping the mass testing in Victoria gives us adequate data to see if it's safe to open schools (and what the real rate of COVID19 is with the asymptomatic people -and if , for us, the reports of 25%-over50% are correct).
