Lockdown Diary - Wednesday 1st April 2020
April Fool's Day. Hmmm. Can this day bring a surprise or prank that can top reality?
It's 7:30am and I've just finished a 30-minute Pranayama / breathing exercises yoga session on Zoom with about 5 other people plus teacher. I probably should say yogi, but that always reminds me of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo and then I've lost it ("Smarter than the average bear!", for those who remember), attempting to do the voices. Alone. (Is this an early sign of losing the plot?) (I must admit I did wonder if the 7am start was an April Fool's joke, but, luckily, it wasn't.)
...later in the day...
Work has kept me pretty busy again today, but I did manage to get out for 10 minutes or so to go for a walk and post a letter. It's quite funny walking now, as everybody else who is walking switches pavements as you get closer to avoid getting near you (either that or the deodorant's off) and cyclists suddenly move into the middle of the road like you've got a giant pair of clown's shoes on (you know the sort) and they don't want to crush your (presumably equally huge) feet.
Managed to squeeze in a chat with a friend on lockdown in Bracknell - his sense of humour is as dark as mine so we did have a few laughs as well as concluding that out the other side of this the world will never be the same, or at least it damn well shouldn't be. We're gonna speak each week from now on during this period of enforced captivity, which would be cool - we've known each other since the mid-late 1980s, off and on, as our lives have diverged and now come back together again.
Done all the usual things and finished Book III Chapter 2 of 'the Wake', which I was pretty chuffed about, now I just have to read up on it and discover just how much I missed, didn't understand or can't see where they got it from.
My poem for this week is 'Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' by W.B. Yeats (subsequently renamed to 'He Wishes etc', for those who are interested in such trivia.) It's a love poem or rather a poem about unrequited love, something many will have experienced in a life of any length. It was written to or for a specific woman - you can read up on that fairly easily if you wish to know - and was a passion that remained unrequited. Perhaps a bit ethereal in its passion, but one can appreciate where the thought comes from, though...well, I'll leave that thought dangling...
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Those of us who can got together to eat and to watch some TV (the last episode of 'The Trip to Greece' and an episode of the latest series of 'Better Call Saul', if you're asking), before - and you're gonna love this detail - we put the bins out and I retired to my chamber to read and then fall into the arms of Hypnos.
A song I keep returning to of late, titled after one of the weakest words in the English Language (that prize going to 'the', about which I could say more, but not now), is 'And' by Microdisney. I love the duet between Cathal and June and the lyrics have always held a special place in my heart. It's a rather fatalistic song about life's only certainty...
It's 7:30am and I've just finished a 30-minute Pranayama / breathing exercises yoga session on Zoom with about 5 other people plus teacher. I probably should say yogi, but that always reminds me of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo and then I've lost it ("Smarter than the average bear!", for those who remember), attempting to do the voices. Alone. (Is this an early sign of losing the plot?) (I must admit I did wonder if the 7am start was an April Fool's joke, but, luckily, it wasn't.)
...later in the day...
Work has kept me pretty busy again today, but I did manage to get out for 10 minutes or so to go for a walk and post a letter. It's quite funny walking now, as everybody else who is walking switches pavements as you get closer to avoid getting near you (either that or the deodorant's off) and cyclists suddenly move into the middle of the road like you've got a giant pair of clown's shoes on (you know the sort) and they don't want to crush your (presumably equally huge) feet.
Managed to squeeze in a chat with a friend on lockdown in Bracknell - his sense of humour is as dark as mine so we did have a few laughs as well as concluding that out the other side of this the world will never be the same, or at least it damn well shouldn't be. We're gonna speak each week from now on during this period of enforced captivity, which would be cool - we've known each other since the mid-late 1980s, off and on, as our lives have diverged and now come back together again.
Done all the usual things and finished Book III Chapter 2 of 'the Wake', which I was pretty chuffed about, now I just have to read up on it and discover just how much I missed, didn't understand or can't see where they got it from.
My poem for this week is 'Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' by W.B. Yeats (subsequently renamed to 'He Wishes etc', for those who are interested in such trivia.) It's a love poem or rather a poem about unrequited love, something many will have experienced in a life of any length. It was written to or for a specific woman - you can read up on that fairly easily if you wish to know - and was a passion that remained unrequited. Perhaps a bit ethereal in its passion, but one can appreciate where the thought comes from, though...well, I'll leave that thought dangling...
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Those of us who can got together to eat and to watch some TV (the last episode of 'The Trip to Greece' and an episode of the latest series of 'Better Call Saul', if you're asking), before - and you're gonna love this detail - we put the bins out and I retired to my chamber to read and then fall into the arms of Hypnos.
A song I keep returning to of late, titled after one of the weakest words in the English Language (that prize going to 'the', about which I could say more, but not now), is 'And' by Microdisney. I love the duet between Cathal and June and the lyrics have always held a special place in my heart. It's a rather fatalistic song about life's only certainty...
Sweet dreams
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