Monday
At last! The nights are drawing in. A chill is in the air. A cardigan is in my bag. My favourite time of year has arrived – the final quarter, the point at which the hunt for next year’s diary can legitimately begin.
Imagine my dismay when I sallied forth, rucksack on back, cardigan at the ready, to make my first foray into the realm of options the stationery emporia of the capital had to offer me only to find that – not for the first time – the world has moved on without me and in entirely the wrong direction, viz to wit: in order to organise your life in 2024 it is now incumbent upon you to state your Goals first. Every diary (bar the tremendously formal, proper-office stuff that I don’t want because it gives me flashbacks to my ill-advised years as a trainee lawyer) now has space for your Goals. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, life – all sorts of Goals. And frequently space for dreams, affirmations, manifestations and I don’t know what all else because I’d set fire to them by then.
My only Goal – or Dream – is to manifest a diary that allows me to record appointments and deadlines without being interrupted by drivel. Could someone affirm that this is still possible in 2023?
Tuesday
Not NOW, Cimex lectularius, NOT NOW.
Fears are growing that the bedbug infestation that is consuming Paris and other major French cities is about to make it over here, via the Eurostar. Via the clothing and luggage of people using the Eurostar, that is. I don’t mean the bugs are booking tickets, stretching out their six legs in comfort with a small bottle of pinot noir and maps for a well-planned invasion spread out on the table between them.
It’s one of those news items you read and think: “Goodness. In better times that would really perturb me. But – hi! – I’m absolutely maxed out by every other thing in the entire world that’s happening and so … No.” Bedbugs go on the list of things you would love to be able to worry about one day because it would mean life had got so, so much better.
Wednesday
Here’s a trend I never, ever saw coming, especially not here in the UK and especially not now: sober weddings. Apparently it is increasingly common for guests simply to choose not to drink at a nuptial gathering.
Who, who can get through a wedding without a drink? If you’re not bored out of your skull during the whole tedious day it’s because you’re in love with one (or in very difficult cases both) of the happy couple. Either way, booze is required. If you are enraptured by the whole thing, you will drink to try to wrap your head around the infinity of love that can somehow be encompassed by two people (and I will make sure I am sitting far away from you throughout the ceremony and wedding breakfast). What other state is there at a wedding? What have I missed? Who is choosing not to drink? Identify yourselves – I am wholly intrigued.
Thursday
National Poetry Day is here. Now, as a general rule I cannot stand poetry. I don’t do well with emotion generally and when it gets distilled and compressed into little short lines that your eyes cannot help but take in if someone thrusts it in front of you I go into meltdown. But I make an exception for one poem and one poem only, which is the one that, when I was a child, Dad would suddenly draw himself up to his full 4ft 7in and begin to declaim in a bloodcurdling fashion to which the paltry resource of the printed word can do no justice and which went thus:
“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell …”
[Insert pause that rolls out to just short of the crack of doom while his six-year-old daughter whitens with terror.]
“The reason why, I cannot tell …”
[Why? Why not? Forbidden to utter it? Bound by the doctor’s illimitably evil powers? What was the reason? Imagination supplied a thousand unwanted possibilities during another lengthy pause as my knees buckled and I fell quietly to the floor.]
“But this I know …”
[Quivering daughter curls herself into the foetal position and dreams of a life a long, long way from here.]
“And know full well …”
[Dad’s voice drops an octave and he goes full Olivier]
“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”
Hours later, Mum would pass me still gibbering on the floor and shout at me lovingly until mental equilibrium was restored.
Now that’s a poem.
Friday
Attention has refocused this week on the Partygate scandal, thanks to Channel 4’s dramatisation of the illegal, wine-filled and -fuelled gatherings that took place in Downing Street between early 2020 and the spring of 2021 when the rest of the country was on lockdown. Not partying. Not seeing friends or family. Not even when they were one of those dying in hospital, alone.
My aunt is thinking about it, too, but then she always is. It is coming up to the third anniversary of her son David’s death from Covid, on 13 November 2020. That’s the day the alleged party in Boris and Carrie’s flat was being held to bid farewell to chief adviser Dominic Cummings and communications director Lee Cain. I hope they had a good time. David was asking where his mum was, and Judy was trying to tell him she was on the phone that a nurse was holding up to his ear, as he died without anyone who loved him there to hold his hand.
I heard her grief the day he died. On the phone, again, because – thinking the rules applied to us, thinking they applied to everyone and understanding the reasons for them – we didn’t travel to be with her nor attend the funeral, except online. And I heard it again in full and overflowing measure when the news broke last year about the parties. You think there is nothing that can make the pain of losing a child worse. But hearing that the people who kept you from him were toasting their colleagues and playing Abba – The Winner Takes It All, according to reports – while porters wheeled him down to the morgue? That does.
David is one of hundreds who died on that day, and thousands who died while the government danced and drank. The pain they have caused is indescribable. I wish they could feel a mere fraction of it.
