Day One Hundred and Thirty-one

Feest Isolation Days – 23 July

A real face to face sitting in a garden book group session!  We started early and sat in the sun in a gorgeous garden.  When the sun went down the fire was lit and we were all grateful for being able to spend time together. Zoom was better than nothing but doesn’t reach the soul quite the way human contact does.  The book we read  was my choice this time, “To Kill a Mockingbird”. It seemed the right time to reread this and to my surprise over half the women in my group had not read it before.  As a child of the 1960’s it was a book I devoured.  Everyone without exception loved it then (all my friends did anyway) and now.  The book stands the test of time and remains fresh and timeless.  I can’t remember when I first read it or how often I have read it but it was not in the least dated. This time round I read it in a day.  I haven’t read an entire book in a day for a long time but remember a time in my life when the only important thing was reading and finishing a book so I could get onto the next one.  I was a flashlight under the covers girl.  I always had my nose in a book when I was younger. It’s a pleasure and delight to read now, although I admit that I probably spend more time writing these days than reading.  I have read thousands of books in my lifetime and suspect that my blood has a tiny bit of ink in it these days. My soul certainly is enveloped in words.

At book club we predictably discussed how lockdown and the virus was affecting us and several women said life felt more like what it used to be like when they were kids. There weren’t the fabulous holidays abroad that we all consider normal; pubs and restaurants weren’t places you went to for food. Very occasionally, as a treat you might head to the pub for a meal.

It reminded me of when I first arrived in England forty years ago. Life was certainly very different then! Pub meals were either fish, scampi or chicken in a plastic basket filled with greasy paper and served with a mountain of fries. There were no other options!  Oh yes how could I forget…sausage and chips!  Yum!  The pub was a place to drink beer. Even wine was an unusual pub drink and if you did go for wine it was served in a tiny glass not much bigger than a sherry glass and tasted like it should have stayed in the bottle it came it.   Fish and chips and the Indian were the options for take-aways. There were no Deliveroos, or Uber drivers to bring someone else’s cooking to your door. Forty years ago there was no internet, which meant no emails, and there were no mobile phones. Red phone boxes were everywhere and the mountain of ten pences you needed to make a call was heavier than an iPad.  Life had a different tempo.  Television didn’t have hundreds of channels and went off the air after the national anthem was played somewhere after midnight.  Central heating didn’t seem to exist in any of the homes I lived in, and the ice on the inside of the windows (my spell checker just made Windows capital…which windows do you think it thought I meant.!) on a winter morning was a good reason to creep back under the duvet. Books were read in front of fires in the evening.  There did seem to be more time to read them. 

Now I’m on line a great deal more and life is lived at a much faster pace. Or was. Lockdown has eased but we older folks continue to observe many of the same rituals that we did at the beginning of all of this.   Our easing means careful book group meetings can now occur.  None of us are planning yet to board a plane or travel to a hotel for a special spa break.  We don’t seem to need a break quite like that these days. Just as well.  Our lives have eased up a bit. Our diaries are not filled to bursting with all sorts of events.  When looking for the next date for book group, I had my friends in stitches reading out what my iphone diary told me was happening over the next weeks…rubbish out….garden bin out…rubbish out….not much else.  Instead, we now have time and with that precious time we seem to have the inclination to do some of the things we once did as kids. Like spending the entire day reading a book!  Two of us did just that.  Life it seems is finding a new normal.  But maybe it’s not so new after all.

Enjoy! 

With love

Kathy x