All Manner of Ungodly Things
A day for catching up with the stack of unread magazines lying around the place, although I spent exciting time this morning refreshing the paint on the house number at the bottom of the drive. One of the magazines was the May print edition of The Atlantic, and one of the articles set me thinking
You Won’t Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will, by Melissa Fay Greene in The Atlantic.
What struck me was that the article talked about memories of the pandemic and how memories are structured and tend to become narratives. This is rather like those music documentaries or popular histories that see things in terms of coherent movements and neat packages of explanation built around key people, usually men. It doesn’t work like that, though, does it?
One of the things about this daily blog is that it has been written in more or less real-time, and hasn’t developed into a coherent narrative, though the occasional theme has emerged. I’d need to read through it all again to be sure, but I hope that one of the things I’ve captured, deliberately, is not the startling things that might have happened, but the everyday mundanity of it all. Were I to try and structure it as a thriller, it would have it’s core characters and arcs and inciting incidents, conflict and drama. There will be documentaries about the pandemic in due course that tell the story in precisely that way; and they will be bollocks.
I was also taken by someone in the article talking about the eerie silence of freeways in the US. I know that I’ve commented several times on the quietness of the roads and, especially during ‘first’ lockdown, and how deserted they were. However what I also hope I’ve captured is that I really liked the absence of traffic and the associated emissions and noise, and I’m irked by the emergent ‘normality’. I hoped, naively, that lockdown might show the way to something better but, at least right now, it seems not to have.
***
I managed to sit out for a while last night, until it got too dark to read. True, I had a blanket over my legs to keep me warm, but I enjoyed it. It was still light in the NNW at 00.30.
***
In other news, it looks as though fruit has set on the greengage and, despite the best attentions of leaf-curl aphids, there could be decent damson crop later in the year too. The apples look set for another bumper year. I foresee a garage full of home-made jam in September.
***
Music : shall we have some Misty In Roots? Yes we shall. Own Them Control Them
Recent Comments