Lockdown Diary - Thursday 18th March 2021

Up early for the cleaner today - she's back into her old habits of getting here before 7 a.m.  On the plus side it does mean I get up and ready much earlier.  Given I've got the afternoon off work as compassionate leave, then it means I can start earlier, get more done.

The carer arrives about 30 minutes later, though with the cleaner here our chat is little less engaged than usual, not that I spend every day banging on about the same shit, but walls have ears, as well as sausages and ice creams (different walls, I believe?)

Apart from a brief trip to the Post Office to post a message in a bottle, it's work all the way through to lunchtime.

The laptop we have is old and used to belong to my wife. It has been upgraded to Windows 10, but is a bit creaky and barely has the grunt (neither CPU nor RAM) to run anything.  Nevertheless I am planning to use it to attend the online funeral, so start it early (it takes about 10 minutes to start) - 2 hours early - to try and reduce the likelihood of it not working.  After a restart (there were updates) and killing the AV I managed to get to the funeral site before 2 p.m. and to be viewing the empty chapel of rest before the service started.

The service was alright, though with few attendees owing to Covid and, of course, no singing, so all the hymns were with choirs singing them. The service was moving, despite being viewed, a little surreally, on our television.  The sound was very clear, to the extent we could clearly hear how upset my father-in-law was, even before they'd entered the chapel. I don't know if it's just me, but I was constantly being transported back to other funerals I have attended, and with similar feelings. It was a good service, and I learned a lot about my stepmother-in-law's past that I didn't know, but sad to see so few attendees. It's never a good time to die, or at least under most circumstances, but death during the times of Coronavirus is worse still.

As it turned out having had the afternoon off from work was a good idea.  The whole thing affected me more than I'd imagined it would and afterwards my mind wandered from funerals to come (which I really don't want to dwell on) and flashbacks to funerals past: my mum's in particular, which I did a reading at, or at least attempted to, and also to a friend's funeral - apart from the fact that she died far too young, the thing that always sticks in my mind was the coffin.  I'd always thought of coffins as being a six foot box, but hers was her height, which suddenly made it so real. I have never forgotten that, though it's well over 30 years ago. Anyway, I seem to have lost the plot. There was a point, but I'm not sure what it was.  

This evening's Idler drinks was with author, professor of English Literature and psychoanalyst, Josh Cohen. I didn't have any expectations about the session as he is a new name to me.  Josh turned out to be very interesting and the discussions about the importance of fiction and the imagination to real life and general mental well-being was fascinating. I must investigate further.

After the Idler, time to be less idle and make dinner. Tonight I am making Beef Meatball and Black Bean Chilli.

Initially I get dinner underway on my own, but am joined for the latter stages by son #2.  We are running a bit late, which is largely my fault as I wasted a load of time trying to order a book from the Blackwells website using book tokens. An incident has been raised.

Chilli served with rice and we're sitting down to watch the final episode of 'Mr. Robot'.

Luckily the final episode actually manages through a couple of clever swerves it managed to neatly avoid the 'Lost' / 'Dallas' tropes I feared it was about to lay upon us. I shan't spoil it, but I will just say it's worth watching the series to the end, though it's good to be awake and alert during the final couple of episodes.

Sleep, thankfully.

Nico / 'No One Is There' / 'The Marble Index'

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