Our volunteer Annie can usually be found taking part in a workshop or welcoming visitors at the front desk. In this blog she reflects on how her life has changed since the UK went into lock-down on 23rd March.
Is it really just a few short weeks since we flew back to Glasgow? A dozen or so days that have tilted the axis and rocked our equilibrium: left us shaken but strangely unruffled amidst seismic changes at home and around the world?
Our days have developed their own peculiar rhythm; our apartment has become a sanctuary; but the neighbourhood has shifted from familiar to oddly incongruous, and there are times when the streets feel unsafe, unsound and unreliable. Small clusters of people whose raucous outbursts and hands-on interaction, may, just weeks ago, have elicited a wry smile, have suddenly become more sinister. Social distancing, two metres between us and every passer-by, has mutated into a psychological barrier. Glaswegians, the friendliest people in the world, are turning inwards; withholding eye contact; forgetting how to smile.
(**NB Note to self: Look social-distanced passers-by in the eye, and S-M-I-L-E.)
Check-out queues are stretched by black and yellow tape marking the government allotted space between us – remember how once we tumbled together, sharing our day, our week, our life with whoever was standing next in line, and they with us? What’s happened to all that cheery chatter? Evaporated, fizzled out, mislaid? Or maybe squirrelled away for future use, to be reclaimed and regurgitated once the lock-down’s lifted.
(**Note 2 to self: Talk to yourself if no-one else available.)
The coffee catch-up with friends and colleagues has been hijacked by technology – we WhatsApp, Zoom or meet on Messenger, conspiring to outwit the regulations imposed to keep us safe. Facebook is our rediscovered confidant where we bare our souls, and share our indiscretions. People post their lives in miniature: making unexpected excursions into creativity; suggesting links to places never visited before; discovering proxy pastimes to replace previous activities.
(**Note 3 to self: Applaud artistic endeavours of friends on FB; try out their suggested blogs and websites; make suggestions of my own:-
1. Reading Suggestion from the Guardian
2. Japanese Artist Draws Every Meal He’s Eaten
3. 25 Greatest Women Film Directors – Critics Choose
4. Podcasts from London Review Bookshop
5. Museum Collections from GWL
6. For ‘Handmaid’ Fans – Margaret Atwood in The Guardian
7. A wonderful website brimming with poets and their poems.
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Ah, but then, perhaps like me, you are feeling somewhat overcome by the sheer volume of recommended distractions. I realised today, that I am merely dipping into many of the proffered pastimes. My powers of concentration have been shattered by the demands on my attention. News programmes have become an obsession; politicians enrage me with statements that are often asinine, and lacking in humanity; statistics fill me with dread and leave me spinning; and focusing for longer than a heartbeat threatens my mental equilibrium. I even find it difficult to stay the distance in a filmic sense – movies which have always been seductive, stimulating and satisfying are suddenly too challenging. Episodes of foreign crime dramas on Walter Presents occupy the limits of my attention span.
But I stand in awe of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances, who use the time we’ve been allocated to write, and paint, and make, and bake; to participate, communicate, and ruminate; and to parcel up and share great dollops of kindness and compassion. You are the ones who make this weird and wacky world go round. And I salute you.
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