Day 14

So Lockdown is easing at last, but I think we are all beginning to realise that it will be a long time, if ever, before things go back to the way they were. How are we going to cope with this, because cope with it we must.

. . . And we have to get used to being masked for much of the time when we are out. Don’t let the bureaucrats dictate to us. We must find our own masked identity. Let our imaginations fly!

Perhaps we could share our strategies for coping?

Here are a few of mine:

1.    Making sure I have something planned to do each day – something specific, achievable and not too taxing. It gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It could be sorting the larder, doing the Guardian crossword, making ice cream, making masks fun . . .

2.    Ferreting around on YouTube. It’s amazing things you can find. Best finds to date: a 1969 version of Julius Caesar with Edward Woodward, Robert Stephens and Frank Finlay and a 1974 version of the Changeling with Stanley Baker and Helen Mirren

3.    Identifying what gives me pleasure and indulging in it. So many things we enjoy have been taken away from us, it is not a sin to take pleasure where we can, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. Most of my pleasures are so innocuous – no great revelations of sin here!
Starting the day with Breakfast on Radio 3, eating a Danish pastry and drinking a good cup of coffee
Watching Grand Designs from Series 1
Window shopping online – you can fill your cart with loads of stuff and then delete it. It gives you all the retail therapy you need without the pain of paying for it or finding a place to put it when it arrives.

4.    Identifying what is likely to upset me and giving it a very wide berth:
No dystopian programmes, films or books
No unresolvably sad programmes, films or books
No Question Time or current affairs programmes

 

What are your strategies?

Today’s Book

A Quiet Life by Natasha Walter

Natasha Walter has taken the story of Burgess and MacLean and told it from Melinda MacLean’s point of view. She emphasises that it is a fictionalised account and that is probably true as far as the personal details are concerned, but Edward and Laura Last’s lives follow closely the pattern of the MacLeans'.

The book starts in 1953 in Switzerland. Laura, her small daughter and  her mother are living there in limbo following the great scandal two years before. Laura has heard nothing since her husband’s defection. Then on a lonely road, contact is made.

The action changes to January 1939. Laura, a young American woman, boards the ship taking her to England to stay with her English aunt and cousins. On the way over she meets the left wing Florence who fascinates her and introduces her to communism. Although welcomed by her aunt and cousins, Giles and Winifred, she feels isolated, that she doesn’t fit in with their set. Then at a dance, a chance remark to one of Giles’s friends, Edward, reveals that she is familiar with left wing ideas.

Slowly, their relationship develops, and thinking that she knows more than she does, Edward reveals that he is a spy for the Soviet Union. Laura is drawn into the espionage ring, copying and photographing documents for him, eventually onto more risky assignments. They are posted to the embassy in Washington and we see the toll the double life takes on Edward and how the levels of secrecy they have to maintain, even between themselves, affects the nature of their relationship. Edward has a breakdown and is returned to England where he eventually resumes his Foreign Office work, until having got word that he is about to be arrested, he disappears, telling Laura, who is eight months pregnant, that she has not been abandoned and that they will be in contact.

The rest of the book deals with how Laura copes on her own. The Press, the Secret Service (who interrogate her regularly), her friends and relations batter her with contradictory and mostly unpleasant views of Edward and her relationship with him. She reviews the past (which we have experienced with her) and wonders whether she got it all wrong, whether she was just a useful tool for Edward and the Soviets – a useful appendage, but never part of ring or of Edward. Her belief in the strength of her friendships is shattered by their hostility and sometimes outright betrayal, which causes her to doubt her judgment even more.

It is a fascinating book and, regardless of one’s politics, one is wholly caught up in Laura and Edward’s lives and in the pain that their ideals have brought them.

Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw1kcQ-QbZw Mendelssohn: Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 - Janine Jansen - International Chamber Music Festival HD

The Mendelssohn Octet has fond memories for me. It was midnight. I was coming home after stewarding at the Hay Festival. It had rained relentlessly all day and most of the way home. I opened the car door, the rain had stopped, it was warm and the smell of the roses was intense, in the background, the Mendelssohn Octet. I think, at that moment, I was completely happy.

Food

A ridiculously quick and easy pudding

Lemon Posset

Ingredients

600ml double cream

200g golden caster sugar

The zest of 3 lemons

Lemon zest, plus 75ml juice

 

Method

1.    Put the cream in a big saucepan with the sugar and gently heat, stirring, until the sugar has melted.

2.    Bring to a simmer and bubble for 1 min.

3.    Turn off the heat and stir in the lemon zest and juice.

4.    Divide between pots or bowls

5.    cool to room temperature, then carefully cover and chill for a couple of hours

Serve with shortbread, sponge fingers or brandy snaps – or by itself.

Today’s picture

Still Life with Apples, Paul Cezanne, MOMA

In Mary McCarthy’s book, the Group was formed by those who sided with Libby Eastlake when she snubbed ‘mushy’ state school student, Norine Schmittlap. Norine, sprawled on a sofa, had declared  to the smoking room at large, that the picture (Cezanne’s Still Life With Apples) was about the spirit of the apples. Libby looks up suddenly from her solitaire and says coldly and distinctly that the point of the Cézanne was the formal arrangement of shapes – its significant form.

(McCarthy, Mary. The Group ( Little, Brown Book Group.)

What do you think?

Does it really matter?