For this year’s Christmas Card, I was planning to provide something in the way of light entertainment – as in the Abecedary series. But there’s no knowing whence inspiration will strike. A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article that cast the whole stable-nativity idea as nothing more than a popular fallacy. To sum it up as briefly as possible, the writer pointed out that the Greek word kataluma, often translated as ‘inn’, was normally used to denote the spare upper room in a house. The room usually reserved for guests. So “no room at the kataluma”  meant simply the guest room was full (presumably because crammed with other travelling relatives). In that middle Eastern culture, it would be unthinkable that Joseph would visit his home town and not call on the hospitality of relatives, however distant. So, with the spare room already occupied, they would most likely have stayed in the only other room in the house, with the rest of the family – where, set into the floor at one end, there would be a manger filled with hay for the animals kept below on the ground floor. Here’s the complete article, including enlightening house diagram.

I guess we were all used to the idea that no one really knew quite what sort of place Jesus was actually born in. But seeing a clear case for something very different from the Christmas card images was quite a jolt. Like finding out the truth about Father Christmas. (I never bought that in the first place myself, but can imagine the potential trauma.)  

So, it seems, a slip in translation together with ignorance of architectural and cultural practices of first-century Palestine has generated a ramified mythology of an al fresco birth, a beastly reception and a grumpy innkeeper.  But it’s not just the cards and the nativity plays that now seem rather wide of the mark. It’s the whole idea of Jesus being rejected from the outset and born outside the fold. “The true meaning of Christmas” is not quite the meaning we’d assumed. Some radical adjustment is needed.

This revelation felt especially pointed at this moment in time, when so much of what we took for granted has been eroded and even our Christmas traditions are threatened from all sides.  It seemed strangely connected to our present moment – and full of poetic possibility. And perhaps, once we have got beyond the disappointment, there is something more, something deeper to discover.

So here is the drawing from front of the card, the poem from the inside, and a reading from me. (Just click to listen.)

When I last wrote, lockdown was beginning to ease and we were cautiously feeling our way towards a slightly more liberated existence. I’d like to say that this was the point at which this series of Reflections came to a clear and natural conclusion. The reality is that other things began to crowd in and the poetry writing was crowded out.  But in a way that’s probably a reflection of how it’s been. There’s been no celebration in the street, and we’re still sliding from one state of uncertainty to another.

I have plans for another set of reflections on a rather different tack in the coming months, but in the meantime I decided to round off this one by collecting all the poems, and some of the accompanying photos, into a little book.

In preparing its pages, I became aware how much of a presence trees had become – in the book as in my life.  So all proceeds will go to the Woodland Trust. You can ‘See inside’, as they say on Amazon – and even buy a copy on this very website – HERE.

Reflections from a home front: 17
We’re in a strange place right now. We’ve left lockdown behind, and everyone’s talking about the ‘new normal’. But who actually feels that this can, or should, be called ‘normal’? The restrictions are helping to combat the virus – that much must be attempted – but at the same time they deal cruel blows to the economy, society, and our psychological state. Much has been made of the first two, because they are manifest and reasonably measurable.  The third may be less easily measured but it’s where there really is something like a ‘normal’ that’s being disrupted.

​The current restrictions strike at the heart of the dispositions and behaviours that make us human: physical proximity of family and social groups, non-verbal facial and bodily communication, or physical touch.  All small, simple things, but all vital for human flourishing. At the same time, the feelings of anxiety and suspicion created by the existence of the disease affect not only our individual mental state, but our state’s mentality. I was fascinated to read about some research that indicates cultures which have historically suffered from high levels of infectious diseases are less extroverted, exhibit higher levels of social conformity, use less physical contact and like to keep further apart. 

What with that and all the uncertainty, it’s no wonder many of us are feeling discombobulated. Stuck in a revolving door, between flashes of the dark interior we’re trying to leave and the light of the world outside, we could be ejected either way – or keep going round. I’m not sure today’s poem is going to help hugely with that, either, except in that recognition is a solid first step to recovery. I’ll try for something a little more uplifting next time. As ever, there’s the option to listen or read.

        Coronaround

       Down the narrow path we go,
       Negotiating friend and faux.
       The quickstep and the smile – or scowl
       For each unbudging so-and-so.
       It looks absurd, a strange dumbshow,
       But life and death for all we know.


       We scrub our hands until they glow.
       Deliveries all undergo
       Rapid disinfection, or
       In quarantine they take it slow.  
       Contamination doesn’t show.
       But play it safe; you never know.


       Outside the store, the strung-out row 
       Shuffles forward, toe-by-toe,
       Till waved to join the masquerade,
       Inside, where stocks may still run low.
       We’d always hoped, but now we know
       We’ll pull as one when storm clouds show.


       And always the continuo
       On internet and radio,
       The vital signs from every place –
       The curve, the R, the ratio –
       Every slide and every show,
       Ensuring that we’re in the know.


       I click to join. But is it you?
       Onto the screen the digits throw
       A patch of light just like your face
       And trace your voice in stereo.
       And yet, somehow, you fail to show.
       But such is what we’ve come to know.


       Such is what we’ve come to know
       In this, our new reality show.
       And yet beyond this present known.
       ​We’ll seek the life we need to own.

Reflections from a home front: 16
Last Saturday, we ran an event at our local parish church, where people shared all kinds of creative projects they’d been doing during lockdown. All online, of course, via Zoom. ‘Light for Lockdown’ (on the eve of the Solstice) was thus fairly risky in all sorts of ways, but actually came together remarkably well.  It turned out people had been busily producing poems, old-fashioned letters, photography, paintings and knitting; they have been practising violin solos, piano duets and choral pieces; they have created community gardens. Of course the acoustic quality of the playing was nowhere near live performance, and photos of woolly hats and mixed borders can’t convey the textures and scents required for a full appreciation. But, somehow, miraculously, spirit transcended technology, and the result was most certainly greater than the sum of its parts.

A couple of people read from books that had assumed fresh significance during this time, one of which was Emma Mitchell’s The Wild Remedy. I hadn’t read it myself but certainly intend to now. For this author’s account of how, in the midst of depression, encounters with nature proved the most effective therapy, seems to touch on the experience so many of us have had in recent months. The selected reading seemed spot-on for this moment. It wasn’t written this year, but could have been:

I find the changing of the seasons fascinating, beautiful and compelling. For us in Britain, at any rate, nature is the seasons. And I know I’m not alone in having become more acutely aware of the nature’s rolling programme. Perhaps it’s just because we’ve had the time to be out there. Here we press Pause for the next instalment of the sea eagle story. Previously, I wrote, in a poetic flight of fancy, about ospreys patrolling the pond. In the following post, I was very excited to be able to report that a friend told me that they did in fact have sea eagles, more or less outside their house in Petersfield. Shortly after reading about these extraordinary birds, apparently on a day trip from the Isle of Wight, we then took our own day trip to the Norfolk coast – and saw a white-tailed eagle. Definitely. Couldn’t have been anything else. On the drive home, though, I began to doubt my binoculars. I’ve just got sea eagles on the brain, I thought. But then some keen ornithologist friends assured us that birds from Germany and Norway are regularly spotted there. And indeed, the sea eagle website confirmed that the Isle of Wight ones have been seen as far afield as Wolverhampton. (Wolverhampton?!)

Anyway, (Press Play) perhaps it’s because the cleared byways and quelled engines allowed us to see and hear, as if for the first time. Perhaps because we had a sense that, though we were halted in our tracks, nature continued her course. The more the hedgerows changed, the more it felt the year was slipping away. The year the calendar forgot. 

Perhaps, too, at some level, we are drawn to the changing seasons because we’re now aware of life changing in a wholesale way. We feel the earth turning. For many of us it’s deeply unsettling. We would like to press Pause. Some days we might even feel like pressing Rewind. But apart from the fact it’s just not an option, to rewind would be to lose perspectives and lessons that might just be the remaking of us. All sorts of initiatives are springing up – just this week, the the BBC’s Rethink, for example  – with the aim of taking stock and taking the opportunity of this auspicious moment to pause, to reimagine, to reshape our living. The hope is that seeds sown in lockdown may produce the shoots and fruits of a more sensitive, sustainable future.

Reflections from a home front: 15
It’s been a postless, poemless time of late, but after a week of illness (completely non-Covid-related) and then a week of dealing with the resulting backlog, it’s a relief to get back to the solace of composing. I am limbering up with another fairly brief post.

First though, an important update on the last one. The poem (Diverting Dactyls for Difficult Days) mentioned ospreys patrolling the garden pond, just by way of surreal humour. Except, one reader, a friend in Hampshire, immediately got in touch to tell me about the sea eagles on their pond outside their front door. OK, so the pond in question is actually a largish one on Petersfield Heath and the birds in question are white-tailed eagles recently reintroduced on the Isle of Wight, apparently heading up the A3 for a spot of lunch. But still!  It’s rather exciting when what you thought was a flight of poetic fancy turns out to be more-or-less fact.

Of course, some of these incursions are not necessarily linked to lockdown. But as the silence is broken by the crescendo of traffic noise and as the air is restocked with fumes, it’s hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for those first, relatively peaceful weeks. And it will be hard not to feel a sense of loss as nature loses territory regained. 

At least, that’s what I’ve been feeling, and hence today’s poem. “Crikey,” said the Wandering Albatross, “it’s a bit … apocalyptic, isn’t it?” “It isn’t meant to be,” I said. “It’s more of a plea.” (Because, like so many others, I really do hope that one of the brightest silver linings to the Covid Cloud will be learning what’s possible when it comes to working together to tackle climate change, to find more harmonious ways of living together on this planet.) “Perhaps you could change the ending. Make it more hopeful?” he suggested, helpfully. Well, the thing is that it’s a palindromic poem, [1] so once you’ve managed to work it out and you’ve got to the end, there’s not a lot you can do. I could perhaps, as also suggested, have solved the problem with the title. But I liked the existing one. 

​So with apologies for the unintended doom, here are the usual oral and textual renditions.

Vice Versa
​
Here,
The quickened air
Drapes the stage with green –
The lavish scene for solo thrush,
Then chorus lines of butterflies and bees,
And from the wings, a troupe of deer and fox and hare – 
A wild, extempore ensemble, streaming live, and free

Until we break the spell. Now see the wild ensemble freeze.
The troupe of hare and fox and deer bow out. They leave
 The bees and butterflies in ruptured lines
The thrush repeats. The closing scene
Unmantling the stage
Where thickened air
Grieves.


[1] Poem with a symmetrical structure, where the second half reads roughly the same only in reverse.

Reflections from a home front: 14
It feels like it’s been a tough week. Nearly everyone I spoke to seemed to have run into a slough of despond.

Locking down was relatively easy: clear the desk, take your belongings, get out, quick as you can. Returning to the world, a very different world, looks much, much harder. And it’s still a return in the teeth of lockdown.  And now we’re really feeling the edge of those teeth.  Even if we began with can-do confidence, quarantine fatigue is quite evidently setting in. As is language fatigue, with words like unprecedented on overtime. In the words of Chekov, “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.” 

Right, I thought. This week, I’ll write something that’s simply fun and diverting. I even adopted a galloping dactyllic metre in an effort to keep things upbeat. [1] But poems have a way of writing themselves, and, well, things didn’t go quite according to plan. But it’s not without its lighter moments. As ever, you can click to hear it or scroll down to read.

       Unprecedented
​        Work was never this homely.
       And home never worked to such cost.
       With virtual school
       And summits on Zoom
       And sing-ins and workouts
       All jammed in one room,
       Our boundaries were never so crossed.

       Our larders were never so laden.
       (Shelves in Waitrose were never so bare.)
       Our loaves are so various!
       (Though our sourdough’s precarious.)
       It’s like the Great Bake Off
       Though not so vicarious – 
       We’ve all got a cake to compère.

       Our street was never this silent.
       The silence was never so loud.
       The larks and the warblers
       Are thronging the borders,
       The lawn has been trashed
       By some feathered marauders,
       And ospreys patrol round the pond.

       Our dreams were never so real.
       Reality never this tough.
       Life leaves us reeling
       And there’s no concealing
       That words can’t convey 
       The freight of our feeling
       And never is never enough.

       The screen stares back. It is empty.
       The speakers are mute. Not a sound.
       But a note or a glide
       Like a cell deep inside,
       Like the song of the outermost 
       Star as it died,
       Will ever forever surround
       Till ever in never is found.

1. Dactyllic metre –  dum-di-di, dum-di-di. In contrast to the more usual, iambic – di-dum, di-dum.

Reflections from a home front: 13
These Strange Times produce a strange experience of time. Certainly, it appears warped. For many, pre-lockdown life seems like a lifetime ago – yet lockdown weeks seem to be flying by. 

At one level, this is accounted for by what we know about the ways the brain registers time. It’s complex but, essentially, the more we are absorbed in what we are doing, the more new information we are processing, the more quickly time seems to pass – at the time. Paradoxically, when we look back on a busy period, especially if we have been deeply engaged intellectually or emotionally, and especially if there have been several distinct events of changes of activity, then it occupies more space in our memory – and the brain perceives it as having taken more time.  Hence a short holiday with lots of new, stimulating activity flies by but stretches forever in recollection. And the converse is true. 

Clearly everyone’s experience of These Strange Times varies, but there are common themes. There are also some conflicting conditions in relation to time perception, which perhaps increases the perception of strangeness.  So a lockdown sabbatical in which one day is indistinguishable from another can feel like a long time when we’re in it, yet will collapse in retrospect. Equally,  the fact it’s a series of novel experiences and requires a lot of emotional processing means that time doesn’t drag, yet early March will seem like another country. That’s the nub of it, you can read more here.

​For some of us, I think, the experience may be further complicated by a different relationship with measured time. I, for instance, have never got on well with watches and now my wrist ticks only to the pulse of my vein. Our calendar, meanwhile, languishes on the kitchen wall, displaying the month that never was with events we cannot bear to cross off – even as the increasingly blank rows seem to gesture to a life of possibility.

Ancient cultures understood time not as a measured commodity, but as a function of nature. It was not so much linear as cyclical, elastic, and with no sense of an ultimate ending. These ideas are obliquely reflected in the Greek distinction between chronos and kairos, both of which we casually translate as time. Perhaps the closest we can get to remembrance of ‘mythic’, pre-chronologically literate time is the kind of time we experience as young children. Or, as Winnie the Pooh begins: “Once upon a time, a very long time ago, about last Friday.”

Of course, things are different now. We understand how time really works. Except we don’t.  “If scientists agree on anything” says Burdick, “it’s that nobody knows enough about time, and this lack of knowledge is surprising, given how pervasive time is in our lives.” 

What does the word ‘time’ conjure for you?  Perhaps an image of a clock or watch. Of course, we need clocks. We are social creatures and if we are to live and work together, we need some agreement on matters of when and how long.  So we live by our chronometers, constantly, consistently checking our lives. But time is also in us. And it is us – “seeping up” from every living cell where the inbuilt clock ticks to both its own internal rhythms and the cycles of night and light. ​

Here is my attempt to capture some of this in a poem. “Will everyone know about Plato and Paley?” asked the Wandering Albatross. “P’raps not,” I said, “but hopefully that won’t matter.” To hear the poem, click the play button.

       Telling time

       ​The calendar on the kitchen wall.
       Like a flickering shadow in the cave,
       Spellbinds these perfect squares, pale days – 
       Now May’s only a notion
       In some other dimension.

       Beached, the bedside watch 
       With blanket of dust, ticks off
       Each second – each minute
       Just one more circuit.
       Scratching the surface.

       Out of the race, we fall
       Into step with trees. We feel
       The grain and ringing cells
       ​And find time isn’t told
       But grows and folds.

It is a big ask. But, as I wrote a few posts back, the gift of this time is that it has invited us – pushed us, even –  to notice the priorities we’ve been slowly nudged into, the programme we’ve inadvertently constructed, and what our human being has come to consist in. The world will be different. But we will be different.

As with reverse culture shock, we may not completely appreciate how different until re-entry. I remember spending a week on a small boat, sailing round the coast of Britain in what turned out to be the coldest, wettest week of that particular summer. I am not a sailor, and so my role was pretty limited. Aside from observing the strict routines of life on board, it mainly involved huddling on the deck and trying to keep warm whilst watching the waves and the sky and the land dipping in and out of view on the horizon. There were a few magical moments: hearing the cries of the wildfowl while moored on a Suffolk estuary at dusk, a visiting porpoise, the thrill of being on the tiller and holding course through an extremely rough patch. But I spent a lot of time wondering how else I might have spent a week’s precious holiday. It was only on my return that the full effect was revealed. There was, of course, the appreciation of simple things (space to wash and cook, enough water, warmth) but more wondrously my soul had been stilled and I experienced a rare lucidity of thought and vision. How I wanted to hold on to it! Despite my best efforts the sensation ebbed away. Transformation of habit and of being takes longer than a week. But there was a legacy of thought and perspective that has influenced subsequent choices. 

We are not the people we were when we locked the door, although we may not realise it immediately. Transformation doesn’t always happen straight away. It happens after you thought it should. It happens behind the scenes. It happens when you’re looking the other way. Like the ugly duckling, you might not appreciate what’s really happened until you return to the world of the river bank. ​

As the world we knew fell away, Wordsworth’s famous line, ‘The world is too much with us’ kept springing to my mind …

Reflections from a home front: 11
A rather different sort of post today. Since the very beginning of this series, I’ve been meaning to put audio versions of these poems alongside the text. Believing as I do that poetry is a multimodal art form whose primary medium is sound and whose instrument is the voice, I didn’t really want to leave my words stranded on the screen. So this is partly to say that, rather belatedly, I’ve inserted a recorded reading for every poem, and will henceforth.

Last time’s ‘Zoom Meeting’, in particular, was fun to do and comes to life in performance. That said, the poem seemed to strike a chord, quite unassisted by my vocal efforts.  I usually get one or two messages or emails in response to these posts, which is lovely, but loads of people got in touch to share their recognition and requesting to share. (Always fine; these posts are completely public.) So if you enjoyed reading it, you can now hear it.

The next reflection and poem are mulching and will be along later in the week. But the thought of venturing out without some verse now feels a bit odd, like going out not properly dressed. So to cover up, here’s bit of unpretentious, non-corona-related fluff from the back of the archive. The justification, if required (though I’m not sure a rubber duck ever needs justification), is the theme of unanticipated benefits. You can hear me read the poem by clicking the play button.

       The Great Duck Diaspora
In 1992, a container ship in the North Pacific Ocean was hit by a storm. Twelve 40-foot containers were washed overboard, and their contents – 28,000 bath toys – released to the waves. 
​
       In nineteen hundred and ninety two
       A stately ship left China’s shore,
       On deck, containers, row on row – 
       The precious cargo that she bore.

       Early in the voyage, a storm
       Sent raging waves across her beam,
       Sweeping cargo overboard,
       Splitting cases, seam from seam.

       Thirty thousand rubber ducks
       Were flung into the ocean’s path.
       Unceremoniously chucked
       ​To freedom, and an early bath.

       Cast upon the circling tides,
       The little ducks began to swim,
       To circumnavigate inside
       Three years, the whole Pacific Rim.

       North along the Bering Strait
       One brave flotilla boldy forged.
       Now in blocks of ice they wait
       To press along their Arctic course.

       ​For fifteen years, Anatid sightings
       Came from distant lands and seas,
       From Malibu to Massachusetts,
       Hawaii to the Hebrides.

       And from these trails, the scientists
       Could trace where ocean currents went.
       (Which helps with the environment.)
       Oh lucky, ducky accident!

       And so, the duck that shares your bath – 
       A cheery, yellow floating smile –
       While dabbling in domestic bliss
       ​Dreams of cousins in the wild.

Reflections from a home front: 10
I thought I’d start with the poem for a change. In a week where I’ve felt less buoyant than previously, I have indulged in playing with some lighter stuff. [1] If you’d like a more thoughtful poetic take, try Malcolm Guite’s second Quarantine Quatrain.

My own experience of Zoom – which includes work meetings, study groups, family chats and virtual drinks with the choir – is that of a mixed blessing. The moment when a familiar face enters the screen, there’s a little hit of pleasureable recognition.  A few more people arrive, and – hurrah! – we’re together again. In spite of everything, here we all are! But here is an illusion, and it’s a less than convincing one in so many ways. 

Although one-to-one works, after a fashion, group gatherings leave me feeling unsettled. I feel self-conscious and find it hard to know when to speak. And when I eventually do, it doesn’t feel as if I’m talking to anyone. This renders me less fluent and feeling a bit stranded. I know it’s suggested you turn your camera off, but seeing the group without me in it feels as if I’ve absented myself from proceedings, which makes me feel even more on the edge than I already do. 

There’s some consolation in knowing not all of this just me. For all of us, video calls eliminate so many of the subtle but vital cues to successful human communication that we pick up brilliantly, intuitively and mostly subconsciously. And this problem is exacerbated by multiscreen screens. It’s a significant challenge to the poor old brain; no wonder we’re left with Zoom Fatigue. (Now officially a thing.) For analysis of Zoom’s fascinating but complicated effects (for certain people it’s actually a better way to communicate) see these articles from National Geographic and the BBC.

Even more unsettling than the neurological challenge is the emotional charge. When forgathering is forbidden, these facsimiles simply remind us of the living, breathing presence we do not have. It reminds me of a time when my daughter was about seven and I went away on a work trip to America. She completely refused to speak to me on the phone, knowing instinctively that it would be more than she could bear. 

Look, don’t touch. Hear, don’t hug. The experience is shot through with ambivalence.

Well, it’s better than the alternative nothing. That’s the obvious argument. But if there’s one thing that the current situation has brought home is that for many things, there isn’t always straightforward way to determine what’s better or best, to put the short term alongside the long term, to put one kind of benefit above another. 

It seems likely that Zoom’s face replacement service will have a place in the emerging post-lockdown world. But if nothing else, we will surely value the simple act of being together, real people in real places – something so ordinary but so vital to human flourishing.  

[1]The Wandering Albatross said I should note that this more the result of pollen fever than cabin fever.
[2] An absolutely brilliant thing on Twitter. Suspect mine would not come out well, though.