Having been tempted for some time to go back to The Isle of Man, they’ve now got themselves into the news for being mask free. Mel had heard about it all the way over in New Zealand. “I wish you were out here,” she says, and I concur. It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and there aren’t people suffocating to death on wards. I try to explain to her how it feels over here and I just can’t. All the precautions. Everything being cancelled or postponed. The different types of anger and grief. People aren’t well in the head in London. They never are. But it’s worse than usual.
Mel goes to the pub quiz every Thursday. She’s directing theatre in the daytime and socialising in the evenings. She’s barely been touched by this thing that has left so many of us with invisible scars. New Zealand tourism is gonna get bumped right up once they open the borders. “Why not visit a place where everybody isn’t suffering from PTSD! New Zealand! Where you can clear your throat and nobody screams!” New Zealand and maybe The Isle of Man – future popular holiday destinations to look at the unbroken humans.
Maybe I should wrangle a ferry ticket and sit in the flat on the island and eat Ocado for three weeks over there safe in the knowledge that things won’t have improved in London in that time frame. Likely there’ll be all sorts of admin involved. If I were to suddenly appear on the island, my neighbors would come round wearing horses heads and carrying torches. They know my business when it isn’t Covid times. I’d end up getting burnt in a giant wicker motorbike for accidentally breaking one of their obscure bylaws. Best keep hibernating in my nice flat.
My flat is beautifully warm and comfortable, up on the third floor above the miasma. I’ve filled it with daffodils.
Every obscure receptacle capable of taking daffodils has them. Those ones are in a pretty little Royal Worcester Pheasant Vase that I pulled from Tennant’s cos I liked it. The grey thing they’re leaning on is the compass from the destroyer HMS Vanguard that my grandad pulled from the wreckers for the same reason. Still tons of random stuff in here…
I haven’t finished decorating the spare bedroom. Chelsea Flower Show is postponed to September but I’m an idiot. I need to get on with it.
AlBarclay 