Friendship

The experience of lockdown is different for everyone. I feel hugely lucky to be here (Devon), untroubled by concerns over ‘staying local’ for exercise. The side door leads through the churchyard into open country.

And working from home is something I have been doing for almost a decade – but before the pandemic this was something I chose to do. It is not quite the same when there is no alternative. Above all, I miss London and I miss friends.

In the Weekend FT Rebecca Watson’s closing paragraph in her piece Alone together: friendship in a pandemic (behind the FT paywall) resonated very strongly,

The world will not return to normal, instead the pandemic will yield. There is a difference. Friendships will not simply revert to what rather once they were: but that need not be a bad thing. I find it easy to live to a schedule: what I am doing and who I am seeing next rising to meet me before the previous event is over. When it safe and possible, I will want to see my friends. But when I do, I will try to appreciate the moments as they happen, fortified by the memory that for a time they couldn’t.

When it is safe and possible, likewise.

Snow dusting the high moor

Walking down the road towards Uppacott. Chagford in the middle distance and on the skyline snow dusting Steeperton and Oke Tors, and to the far right High Willhays and Yes Tor.

And walking the long hill home from Uppacott, long tailed tits in the hedgerow, bumbling along with us, chattering to each other, and early honeysuckle breaking leaf. Spring isn’t quite here but it isn’t far off.

Epiphanies

I have been reading Enuma Okoro in the Weekend FT. Her New York Diary – a reflection on Epiphany and epiphanies – was wonderfully thought provoking. Sadly it is behind the FT’s paywall.

For better or worse, I left faith and religion a long time ago. Although I started to train as a priest I never reached journey’s end. We were warned that the second year would be difficult. It was in fact surprisingly easy to find a different way. Nonetheless, I have always been captivated by the journey of the Magi. Whether in the art of the Renaissance – I first saw Gozzoli’s beautiful fresco in the Medici Chapel some 50 years ago – or in T S Eliot’s retelling – a cold coming for Birth or Death.

And this morning I was struck by Enuma Okoro’s reflection,

The Magi were said to be priestly people, astrologers who could read the skies and stars and signs. One of my favourite parts of the story is that the wise men travel home by a different way because they have been warned that the old way is no longer suitable. Now they know what they know, and they have seen what they have seen, the former way home can no longer lead to preserving life. They were not the same people returning as those who left.

And as we set out on our different journeys in 2021, she puts it perfectly

The reality of 2020 still sits before us all. . . Knowing what we know, and seeing what we’ve seen, none of us can really be at home with ourselves and with the world as before . . . it seems clear that most of us want to return by a different way. Whether we wanted it or not, the past year has allowed, if not enforced, the unearthing of things — in our relationships, in our life choices and negotiations, and in the journeys we’ve found ourselves on.

Our challenge what we are going to do about it.

Another cold morning here

It has been a cold morning. Looking out over the garden, in the quiet of a Devon lockdown, it is sometimes hard to reconcile what happens (or doesn’t) here and what is happening elsewhere in the world, whether it is the pandemic threatening to overwhelm the NHS or Trump inciting the mob to threaten the foundations of US democracy.

The last chapter of what Trump has laughingly called “the greatest first term in presidential history” is more like a US Götterdämmerung than anything else. If I was worried about British soft power draining away (see my post A New Year), that is nothing to what is happening to the reputation of the US.

Behind the FT’s paywall but still worth reading Western democracies stunned by images of unrest in Washington.

Trump has always been and remains Putin’s useful idiot. The ‘bigly’ question left unanswered, even now, is why?