Corona Diaries

Cora “The lid’s lifting slowly.

I’ve no idea what it means

for me and other over 70s

on such a tight leash until now.”

Background Information Female, aged 75-84, Retired Social Worker/Teacher, Middlesex, White, Widowed, Two adult children.

March 16th to 23rd 2020: all change another step-change up a ladder to where? ye gods I’ll fall off.

stand too near to someone but still one foot in a world I know.

cleaners come, wary, staring – I feel like a goldfish in a dirty bowl.

visit to the dentist, no choice, mouth to the slaughter. plan for life

at home – cancel gym, order exercise bike, exert control.

evening rendezvous, signatories for lasting power of attorney

circle each other trying for two metres apart in the small room.

all change again – walking group gone, latest poetry meeting gone –

further up the ladder, nearer to falling off. flurry of poems sent round

by email – can’t look at them, my ideas for writing gone hollow.

don’t go to pub lunch – dare to buy fish and chips from the shop.

son keeps away, doesn’t come to supper. exercise bike arrives,

step up, order hair cutting clippers, comb, thinning scissors –

trying to balance – and La Peste by Camus, can I bear to read it?

What’s App call from my daughter, quarantined in France,

as if no distance away. drive (furtively?) to allotment, pick veg.

open Facebook account, what to put on it, reach out but keep private.

cleaners cancel for unforeseeable future. Feel even more like a goldfish

in a bowl, as if stuck on the platform of the ladder, swimming round

and round, gulping, but safer inside a kind of screen – dirty ?

does it matter? Live with the dirt or get cleaning. I dare to go shopping

for food, circling people, hand gel instantly on exit. on exercise bike –

step firmer. latest bulletin from Boris STAY AT HOME. People

buying up hair colouring, ye gods, will I have to expose the real me?

April 20th to 27th 2020: timescale

I’m on a plateau or rather an endless plain

of unpunctuated prose and long for a page break.

Planned trips: a mirage. France in August?

Nothing open there any way my daughter says.

My 80th party on hold: will have to be an 81st.

Roll out a vaccine. The timescale has shifted

to a year, panic’s out, control in, ideas

for poems surfacing, poetry groups zooming.

Box of Garnier Olia Blonde 8.0 hair dye is here.

Do I dare take the risk for a more luminous me?

A comfortable rhythm of deliveries has set in

– groceries, bread, newspapers, prescriptions –

and routine: exercise bike Mondays, poetry

Tuesdays, Thursdays, cleaning Wednesdays etc.

I’m no longer a goldfish circling a dirty bowl,

just one staring out at the view, eyes bulging.

Reminder from the dentist?? He cannot be

inviting me to put my life on the line for teeth?

Reading The Plague by Camus, drawing parallels.

Cousin Angela’s care home is an easy target

for the virus: tomorrow we will zoom in

to her minimalist funeral, grief stoppered.

May 13th to 20th 2020: Stay Alert

The lid’s lifting slowly.

I’ve no idea what it means

for me and other over 70s

on such a tight leash until now.

How is it that suddenly

you can drive as far as you like,

drive as far as we like,

target the same beauty spots, lakes, beaches?

My daughter keeps each eyebrow a fine line –

how does she do it?

At least my home-dyed hair colour brightens me up:

mid blonde may be makes me look under 70

so I say to my partner

I’d love to see the sea

and like uncaged birds we fly off

to Leigh-on-Sea –

my God,

not Southend,

on TV like burnt tapioca

with too many spots –

but we’re still jiggling on the sea walk,

invisible it seems to some

and you can hardly see the beach

for people.