The Man of the Crowd

As though we are talking about Godfather films, one of the teenagers asks me, "Which is your favourite lockdown: 1, 2 or 3?" I tell him that it was the one that wasn't really a lockdown, the one where everything was normal except for... then I can't seem to remember exactly what we were not allowed to do in November and, despite a discussion that involves the whole family, we cannot agree what the restrictions were during that ineffective pre-Christmas lockdown. What we do agree on is that number 3 is the worst in terms of both lockdowns and The Godfather sequence. 

In the first lockdown we were able to spend a lot of time in the garden, which was particularly good respite for the teenagers having spent their days hunched over screens doing school and college work; in the bleak midwinter, however, that is not an option. Instead, we have initiated a Friday night ritual in the kitchen: Uno, beer, party food and everyone taking it in turns to choose music. I have lost a lot of card games, eaten too many mini-samosas and listened to Kanye West more than I care to over the last few weeks; but it brings us together and marginalises Instagram, TikTok and Xbox for a time.

With the usual sporting activities all suspended, there are few opportunities for the teenagers to exercise outdoors: by the time each day's studies have finished, there is a finite amount of daylight left to allow for a short walk if they can be persuaded out into the cold. Even at weekends options are limited: our usual winter routine would be to drive to Bexhill or Hastings, walk dogs along the seafront and eat fish 'n' chips; but observing the instruction to stay local we are left with the nearby footpaths and fields which are wet, wet, wet.

The countryside can be a forlorn place at this time of year in normal circumstances; but a pandemic in winter is testing even my perverse enjoyment of bleak isolation. Skeletal trees and bare fields stretching into the distance under grey skies is no longer liberating but suffocating. I know I should not complain: many are stuck in flats in towns and cities truly experiencing claustrophobia; but I long to see people when I step out of my front door instead of rooks and crows. Birds may be allowed to assemble in their parliaments and murders at the moment but, quite rightly, crowds of humans are forbidden.

When this is all over (how many of us begin sentences with that phrase, now) and life is safe again, I will be Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd. In Poe's short story of that name, the narrator follows an old man who he spots in the street outside as he people-watches from a London coffee shop. Intrigued by the man's determined expression and dishevelled appearance, the narrator follows him through the teeming city streets. Never stopping, the man passes through shopping districts, markets, rich areas, poor areas and the pursuit continues into the evening and through the night. When the streets thin out, the man doubles back seeking the crowd afresh. By morning, the exhausted narrator realises that there is no purpose to the man's walking: he speaks to no one, he never buys, drinks or eats. He revels in being at the heart of the metropolis, part of the energy and throng of the city; he is simply the man of the crowd. I can't wait to join him.

To Autumn

All too quickly, summer is spent. The intensity of the heatwave at the start of the month seems to have exhausted the season and we are now suffering from early onset autumn. In the vegetable patch, the lettuce has bolted and the courgette plants have stopped offering up fruit; in the greenhouse, the tomatoes have all been harvested and the cucumber plants have collapsed. In the hedgerow opposite, the blackberries are already ripe and are being rustled by a cool north wind. At home, there has already been mutinous talk of lighting the wood burner but there are no logs yet and it seems heresy to wear a jumper in August.

Usually, I would embrace the arrival of autumn and the sharp focus it brings after the hazy wide-angle sprawl of summer; but I am in denial and want to put off its arrival for as long as possible: because not everything is normal and not everything is early. Some things are late or not happening at all: the familiar marker of the football season is delayed and mass music events have been cancelled. Usually at this time I would be preparing for End of the Road, the final fixture in the festival calendar; but this year my tent is staying in the shed and I will be watching an online stream from an audience-free Larmer Tree Gardens.

Mostly, I want autumn to wait in the wings a bit longer because of what it may bring. With schools attempting to return to normal, office workers summoned by the clarion call to save the sandwich shops and a stubbornly unmoving R number, we can only wait, watch and wonder while autumn's 'barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.'

The Old Normal

We venture out. As a whole family. The teenagers are a bit nervous: since the Covid-19 lockdown began to ease they've seen friends in parks and gardens but none of them have been to a built-up area, let alone go into a public building, move around in the same space as other people, sit down and eat and drink in a restaurant.

The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea has just opened up again after a long closure and we wanted to support our favourite local institution. Numbers are obviously limited so we booked online for a two-hour Sunday lunchtime slot. This gave us access to the exhibitions, the shops and the café.

When we arrive it's all very welcoming. We are asked to wear our masks in the gallery spaces and the shops but we do not have to as we move around the building or in the café. The café is where we head for first as the teenagers find it difficult to go more than two hours without food. The staff seem genuinely pleased to see us: these are their jobs and they're still here; how many jobs is the country destined to lose when the furlough scheme ends?

The food comes and the lime and coriander chicken is a hit with the carnivores; the black bean and beetroot falafels are a hit with me. The Guinness is even better: home drinking is ok but being out and having a pint feels like a liberation. We all admire an elderly gent sitting in the corner: he has a sea-facing table for one, iPad and earphones, pint of bitter. He alternates his gaze between the horizon and his screen and every so often lifts his mask to have a swig of beer. He looks inordinately happy to be out in the world. The middle teen asks me if that's what I aspire to in old age; damn right.

Afterwards we don our masks and wander through the Zadie Xa and Marc Bauer exhibitions and then the kids go off to walk along the seafront and search for ice cream. We mooch around the gift shop: my wife picks up some Eric Ravilious cards and I get a Derek Jarman book. I start to flick through the racks in the Music's Not Dead record shop, now located in the main foyer. I stay too long, obviously, and am left on my own. I buy a Fall album and find a rare Nico LP that I can justify the price of.

The two-hour slot comes to an end so I step outside into the afternoon to find the others. They are all relaxing on a wall eating 99s; the terrace bar is open and some people are soaking up the sun and the beer; a smattering of cyclists and dog walkers are parading on the promenade; this all feels (almost) like the old normal.

Saturday Fever

Saturday morning. The teenagers are still in bed, freed for the weekend from the surprising pressure of remote learning. Suffering from cabin fever, we think about going to the beach; but even though we can now, we don’t. Stay home. Stay alert. We stay home. We sit in the garden. We are lucky. The quiet of the missing planes heading for Gatwick is still a joy. We watch the jackdaws desperately clinging on to the birdfeeder to peck at a fat ball; the sparrows sit on the veg plot fence trying to find a way through to eat the young beetroot seedlings like they did last year; I must put a net over those gooseberries.

I make some more coffee. I am almost sick of coffee – but not quite. The radio – what would we do without radio – is playing Nick Cave. I wonder if Nick’s sitting in his garden wearing a three-piece suit; I like to think he is. The continual temptation to check the news has eased. I am past caring which government minister has revealed their ineptitude in the morning round of media appearances. Still people will vote for them, even with 40,000 dead. What would the toll need to be to stop them being elected? 50,000? 75,000? Vote for me and I promise to keep casual slaughter and immigration both below 100,000.

Power Tool Pete on the end is out; furlough has pushed him to the limit of his tether. There is no drill, mower, blower that he cannot deploy hourly in the relentless cause of maintaining a tiny terraced cottage and garden. Daughter has reported from her back-bedroom eyrie that he is instructing his ten-year-old son in the art of shed-building.

Back indoors, the excitable long-legged dog dances about in front of us, like a prancing show pony, in anticipation of a walk. We take him out. The little-legged dog has to stay home. He is eleven and feeling it; on the last lengthy walk, I had to carry him home for the last two miles. A saying kept popping into my head: there’s no point in keeping a dog and doing the walking for both of you - or something like that.

We have always walked the dogs along the local footpaths and fields, here. Even walking every day, we rarely saw another soul. When lockdown started, we kept coming across dogs and people we had never seen before. Where had they come from? Didn’t they walk their dogs in normal times? Today the paths are deserted again; they’ve all gone to the beach. Coming home we nod and smile to some of the neighbours we nod and smile to during the weekly Clap for Carers - even the ones who had a Vote Conservative placard up in December. You want to save the NHS? I’ll tell you how you can fucking save the NHS…

We eat and read and doze and drink through the afternoon; teenagers concoct ever more unlikely snack combinations to sustain the TikTok and Xbox activities. The temperature drops a few degrees and the smell of cooking meat wafts across the gardens. The young couple next-door-but-one have friends round for a barbecue. Is that..? No. From the other direction, Pete fires up his patio heater to compensate for the grounded aircraft. We head indoors for the evening and torture ourselves by listing the things we’ll do on a Saturday when this is all over: go to The Codfather in Hastings for fish ‘n’ chips; sit on the balcony of the De La Warr in Bexhill and buy records in Music’s Not Dead; wander through The Lanes in Brighton; go to a gig. The ordinary. We crave the ordinary. If we can just have the ordinary back we’ll never complain about anything again, we say. Except Pete and his one-man war on the environment and those bastards up the road who vote Tory.