1 APRIL
I have had to cancel a large family get-together in my home county of Northamptonshire planned for 25 April; there seems to be no way that it is going to take place. I suggested to my brother that we might rearrange it for late summer. He said that Christmas might be a better bet – and he was only half-joking, I think. Not only am I close to deconstructing my odyssey, but I am also now wondering if there is any point to this journal. It was started in the hope that it would be a prologue to the story of the journey itself. If I keep going, the prologue will be longer than the story. Or perhaps this is now the story – the odyssey (dictated, appropriately, by forces outside my control, with no indication of how or whether it will end).
2 APRIL
I have decided to cut down the time I spend reading the news, i.e. reading about the virus. Watching a Trump "press conference" in which he deliberately announced a new war on drugs and a supposed threat from Iran on top of the usual evasions and falsehoods (anything but face the reality of the crisis), I decided I couldn't take too much more of this shocking mess. Things are slightly better here – but not much. One UK government "spokesman" after another has failed to deliver any worthwhile information, inspire any confidence or fully answer questions. For the moment at least, I can't take too much more of these miserable tidings. Instead of checking the news through the day (I suppose in the hope of there being some good news), I'm going to look at it once in the morning and once in the evening.
3 APRIL
Approaching the end of the second week of lockdown. And approaching having to start taking the odyssey down – and then maybe building it back up again. It's another two weeks before I really have to start cancelling and dismantling. Having completed a basic Italian course with Michel Thomas, I'm now well into a Teach Yourself course of Greek. The illustration on my Greek notebook cover is of a little church that sits at the end of my favourite beach on the island of Tinos. As with all the best pictures of Greece, it's a confection of white, blue and more blue. I'm there in my mind and would love to be there in reality. It's one of the stopping-off points on my odyssey, so maybe I'll be there in a few months from now.
4 APRIL
I was up most of the night waiting for an ambulance for my younger daughter (who lives about a mile away from me). She was already in quarantine with a high temperature... and then had rapid heartbeat and breathlessness about midnight. Paramedics finally arrived about 4am (over three hours for an ambulance to arrive! they're quite busy, it seems) and they decided it was a panic attack not coronavirus... which seems to be the case. She's feeling better today... but in all this, I couldn't actually see her or get close to her because she's quarantined... and also I can't afford to pick up anything for fear of passing it on to others close to me. No doubt, we'll laugh about all this one day... On the plus side, the sunshine is hotter here than in Athens and I've put on a pair of shorts for the first time this year.
5 APRIL
The daisies turn their heads throughout the day so that they are always facing the sun. It's amazing to watch...
6 APRIL
The Prime Minister of the UK is hospital with coronavirus. After the cavalier and wrong-footed way in which he approached this mess that we are all in, it may be difficult for some people to summon up much sympathy. Or any sympathy.
7 APRIL
More people have died of coronavirus in New York than died in China, where things seem to be returning to some sort of normality. More people than that may die in the UK, where the lockdown is now in its third week. The lockdown in China lasted three months. Italy, locked down for five weeks, may be starting to come out the other side of this thing. Greece, where there is a serious lockdown, has so far kept deaths down to double figures. I'm waiting for news from the Odyssean Coast of Italy before starting to decommission the odyssey – it can't go ahead but I may be able to postpone bookings rather than cancel and make the journey at the end of this summer. Being able to travel anywhere at the moment seems like a dream rather than a possibility...
8 APRIL
Instead of being a month away from setting off, I'm probably four months away from setting off. Nothing to compare to 10 years stuck outside of Troy with the Ithaca blues... or 10 years being blown around the Mediterranean, thrown back and forth between monsters and nymphomaniacs.
9 APRIL
The sun setting beyond the silhouettes of trees has been wonderful for the past two evenings. This is the same sun that I was bound for Italy and Greece to see. The same sun that I remember seeing going down behind the mountains of Crete in 1977. Why is there this urge to travel, when this constant companion is with us every day of our lives? (OK, well not every day if you live in the UK – that's perhaps got a lot to do with why we travel.)
10 APRIL
It's a month since Italy was locked down – and a month since I started writing this journal. In another month from now, I should have been getting ready to set off on my odyssey. And this journal would have started to get a bit more interesting! Now, not only do I have to decide whether the odyssey is to be cancelled or postponed, I have to decide whether there is any point continuing to write what was supposed to be a prologue to the adventure. The word from Italy is that its lockdown is about to be extended to 3 May and that this Easter weekend will see the authorities crack down even more tightly on anyone who attempts to go out.
11 APRIL
The sun shines again and I've been reading about the assassination of Cicero at his villa in Formia – one of the places on my odyssey itinerary, although I didn't know about this truly historic connection. It's had me looking longingly once more at maps of Italy.
12 APRIL
After this crisis is over, I fear the powers will only want to turn the clock back rather than forward. But wouldn't that be a tremendous failure to learn a lesson? Many of us, deep down, know that we need a fundamental change of course in the way we take care of ourselves and each other. In a way it's quite bizarre that at a time when people are all keeping their distance from each other, they are potentially closer together than ever before?
13 APRIL
Time to bite the bullet. I have accommodation booked on the island of Ithaca – home of Odysseus – for the beginning of June. If I'm going to cancel it, I have to do it by the end of this week. It is truly amazing to see how much the leaves grow on the trees in the space of 24 hours. Every morning there is so much more green dancing in the sunlight.
14 APRIL
The sky is blue and clear and the light seems sharper. There is good news and bad news from Greece... The British Airways flight that I bought as an insurance policy to get me to Athens has just been officially cancelled. No refund. So now I have to apply for a voucher – which I can spend on a flight some time in the next year. The good news is that, unlike the UK and the US, Greece appears to have performed a minor miracle with its hardline lockdown. It's kept deaths below 100 so far – compared with 10,000-plus in the UK and 20,000-plus in Italy. However, while the UK managed with a non-Easter, in Greece Easter is this coming weekend and is much more about deep-rooted religion than bingeing on chocolate. In a country where some Orthodox clergy argued that their services and the giving of Communion were not covered by a secular lockdown, this weekend will be a serious test of whether Greece can hold its hard line.
15 APRIL
Some shops and business in Italy are to be allowed to reopen as long as they arrange "security measures”. But it looks like it's still going to be a while before Italy and Greece are properly opened up to travellers. With a heavy heart, I've just cancelled my accommodation for staying three nights on Ithaca in June.
16 APRIL
I've been reading Ulysses... the James Joyce one... another odyssey... and maybe we don't need to travel very far to be on our odysseys. Why do I need to be trying to get to Greece or Italy, when the sun is shining here and I have everything that I actually need? Is it because we want the very things that we don't need? Is uncertainty far more appealing than basic securities? Voyages tend to be voyages of discovery on all sorts of levels. Can one stay at home and still make discoveries?
17 APRIL
A friend tells me that the Tarot features the World and the Moon – the World representing the outer place to be explored, and the Moon representing the inner place to be discovered. I don't know anything about the Tarot or whether that's correct, but that information came just after I'd been musing on whether it was possible to embark on an odyssey without really going anywhere. Perhaps that's what we're all doing now – whether we know it or not. Back in the World world, I've just cancelled nine accommodation bookings in Greece and Italy... leaving just four more to do. It's a bit sad... but there is now no choice. The only dilemma is whether to rearrange things for later in the year.
18 APRIL
The hell with it... A friend just pointed out that Odysseus didn't make too many advance bookings – he just set off and kept going (when he wasn't being forced to have sex with assorted temptresses). So I'm going to (semi-Odysseus-like) recklessly reckon that I'm heading into the blue in late August. That's four months now... and if things haven't improved and relaxed by then, then we might as well all give up on this life. Yes, an internal odyssey is possible and perhaps sensible and has perhaps already begun, but life for me (at least up to now) only seems like life when I'm on the way, on the road, going somewhere... travelling rather than arriving. But then again, as the Buddha of country, Willie Nelson, once observed: "Still is still moving to me."
19 APRIL
Greece hopes to open up again in May but more likely June at the earliest. This hint of optimism made me wonder if I should try to get there in June/July but, no, I'm going to stick to the more safely reckless August/September.
A fifth of Greek workers are employed in tourism, so the country is being hit really hard. One forecast suggests that over 60 per cent of hotels there could go out of business. Things may have to change in a post-plague world, but there must be many Greeks who are praying for a return to business as something like usual.
20 APRIL
It's my younger daughter's birthday today and she's locked down a hundred miles away. We'll have an online link-up later. All three of my children seem strong, talented, intelligent and decent – and I never cease to be impressed by them. Their generation has had to go through so much – but then perhaps all generations do. I'm glad that my mother died last year (messily, at 93 years' old, at the hands of a failing health and social care system) and did not have to go through her final months in an even more awful situation of quarantine, no visitors and an even more lonely death. Strangely, just after I'd written these words, I had a call from a musician friend whose mother is nearing the end of her life and stuck in a nursing home. Thankfully, he is able to visit her but he says she is terribly depressed, and that he is finding it all difficult. As David Lynn Jones – more country music – observed: "There ain't no easy way out."
I've just been taking photographs of the grounds surrounding my flat. I had decided to put it up for sale in June, on my return from the odyssey – but now maybe that will have to wait. If I have to sell later in the year, I thought it would be handy to have pictures showing how beautiful the trees are here in the spring. In fact, the photos make it look so beautiful that it made me think for an instant about staying here – but really I have to make a move some time soon. I've been in London a fraction too long. That old stuff about if you're tired of London, then you're tried of life doesn't really hold up. I'm just tired of London life... and want a better-quality (last part of) life.
21 APRIL
Italy is at least talking about starting to open up again. And in Milan they are talking about not going back to automotive normal, ie some street space is going to be for cyclists and pedestrians only, rather than back to cars – and their pollution. Milan has in the past been one of the worst polluted cities – and the lockdown has shown that it doesn't have to be like this. Just as New York has begun talking about a "reimagined" future, so is Milan. One can only hope that London might follow suit in some way. In the area around my home in south London, I have never seen the air so clear, the light so sharp, and the leaves and the grass so green. Spring sunlight helps of course... but there are far fewer cars, particularly at night, and the every-five-minutes planes on their way to Heathrow have stopped. The latter are certainly normally the source of day-long noise pollution and most likely a major cause of air pollution – and hence ill health and reduced resistance to disease.
22 APRIL
One of the pluses of the lockdown has been that Bob Dylan, for whom I have infinite respect as a songwriter (make that THE songwriter), has been moved to put out not one but two new songs, after going for eight years without releasing any new original material. Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature four years ago (almost 50 years late) and the present circumstances reminded me that he referenced The Odyssey (along with Moby-Dick and All Quiet on the Western Front) as one of the three books that had been major influences.
He says of Odysseus' journey: "There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and on the other you could starve... Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities... Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel... Some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back... When he gets back home, things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ‘em. And though he’s greater than them all and the best at everything... his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will... And when it’s all said and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife, and he tells her the stories."
23 APRIL
Nothing changes... well, at least nothing much for the better. People are beginning to talk about the lockdown (currently in its fifth week) lasting for several months. The family-get-together originally due to take place on 25 April that I cancelled at the beginning of this month... I was hoping to rearrange for July or August. But one of my cousins suggests that that could be too soon. She is, she says, fairly happy being locked down and doesn't want to emerge until it's safe to do so. (The opposite of some of the good folk in the Southern states of the US, who are determined to reopen shops etc from tomorrow. God Help America!) My brother and I have decided to pencil in the family meetup for August – with October as the backup. His earlier joke about arranging it for Christmas has definitely ceased to be funny.
24 APRIL
Greece is extending its lockdown by a further week to 4 May. The government there says that “transition to the new normality" will be slow and will "unfold progressively" in May and June. This sounds like grounds for a little optimism. I wrote to Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie magazine, to warn him that the odyssey piece he had commissioned from me was likely to be coming a few months late. His understanding reply ended, typically: "I wonder what Odysseus would have done – probably stayed in the ruins of Troy!" Well, maybe that's where we all are now – in the ruins of Troy. Our "civilisation" has been brought low not by a wooden horse but by a Trojan virus.
25 APRIL
I guess we are all looking ever-increasingly into mortality... Everything in nature – the light, the trees, the flowers, the birds etc – is seen more sharply now. And with that comes the inescapable fact that the leaves "reappearing" on the trees have, in fact, never been here before. They will be here this year and then gone. Like the leaves, like the virus, every one of us is just passing through... living and dying. And that leads, for me, into the question what actually am I? And the answer to that may be: nothing... or an hallucination... The other thing clearly taught by this crisis is that we can only count on being here today... And we may only have today to answer the questions that gnaw away at us...
26 APRIL
It's being reported in Italy that a four-week period of easing of restrictions there will begin soon. More than 25,000 have been killed by the virus there; the UK is well on the way to catching up with that total – if not with definite plans of how to deal with the crisis. Greece is also looking at the possibility of opening up – and opening up to visitors from July. But there is talk of temperature checks and pre-flight blood tests; presumably, quarantines are also likely to remain part of the picture for some time. So do I continue with plans to get there in August? BA tells me it has switched my insurance-policy flight from May to August but I'm still waiting confirmation of that several days on.
27 APRIL
In a month's time restaurants, bars and cafés in Greece will start to reopen – gradually. And Italy has confirmed it has plans to ease the strict lockdown it began seven weeks ago – when I started this journal. Parks will also reopen, but Greek children will not go back to school until September.
28 APRIL
Vivid dreams seem to be a feature of lockdown. And in the past week I've had dreams about five people I know who are dead: my father (twice), my mother, two good friends and one enemy. All of the dreams and encounters were sharp and clear and mostly not at all disturbing; one in particular was joyful. What does all this mean? Perhaps nothing apart from the fact that death is increasingly on my mind.
29 APRIL
Greece has confirmed that it plans to open for (tourism) business this summer. But there will have to be social distancing and strict hygiene rules. Precautions being considered also include health "passports", and restrictions for countries with high virus infection and death rates (presumably that means the UK). This is how Odysseus must have felt – hemmed in and diverted at every turn. Am I ever going to get to Greece?
BA is making thousands of workers redundant but has still reserved a place for me on my insurance-policy flight to Athens at the end of August (with the proviso that it could be cancelled). Meanwhile many of the major airlines are starting to implement new policies that will see masks given to travellers who don't have them, a sort of social-distancing seating and, of course, lots of cleaning. Was cleaning not important anywhere before all this? We are being told that the buses and tubes are now being cleaned thoroughly. Why weren't they before? And will they continue to be cleaned properly after this crisis comes to an end?
30 APRIL
There appear to be differences of opinion in Italy as to what is going to reopen when. The central government is about to crack down on Calabria for saying bars and restaurants with outside tables can start serving customers again – because national policy is that they shouldn't reopen until June, and then only for takeaways. It seems to be a mirror of the chaos in the US where there is a national lockdown but every state is evolving its own reopening strategy (or in some cases not really bothering with a strategy but just opening stuff up). My friend in Latina, on the Odyssean Coast, near Rome, reckons a major trauma for Italians will be returning to some sort of normality – but not being able to kiss each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment