Lockdown Delights 1/3

The pace of life has slowed, our worlds have become smaller, but the bandwidth of our experience has widened.

The Covid-19 lockdown, despite its inconveniences, distresses and tragedies, has provided a unique opportunity for peaceful reflection. Newhaven is, under normal circumstances, a week-round frenzy of industry, commerce and traffic, a hive which radiates far and wide its organoleptic bouquet and soundscape of fumes and white noise. That has mostly fallen silent to reveal sounds and smells which have not been enjoyed for decades and certainly not in my own memory.

The absence of aircraft and road traffic has given way to birdsong and wind whispering through the bare branches of the big ash tree – a singleton, ivy-clad tree which has so far avoided the ravages of its own Chalara health crisis. The natural soundscape is punctuated by occasional sounds of lawnmowers, barking dogs, the cross-channel ferry, trains, farm machinery, a braying donkey and, during calm nights, the incinerator and migrating birds. The unfamiliar yet welcome sound of a blackbird calling at the front of our house has even awoken us some mornings. The woodpigeons’ rooftop calls seem more boastful than usual. The reek of industrial and traffic exhausts has not been suffered for weeks and instead, our open windows are filled with the sweet garland of flowering shrubs and garden bonfires. The world feels as if it has become lost in a sort of perpetual bank holiday. There is a rare beauty in this.

The world as we knew it shrunk for most of us when the lockdown was announced in March, but for some the term ‘lockdown’ is off beam. The Covid-19 restrictions have been a release from the stifling weight of modern society. Being rather introverted by nature (and not wishing to trivialise the C-19 crisis’s terrible impacts upon others), I have taken to the ‘new normal’ better than most. Empty roads and skies, country walks virtually free of human activity (when timed well), days spent at home and in the garden, a changed emphasis on staying in touch with family and friends; this has in some senses been the stuff of fantasy. A weight has been lifted. Consequently, I have found it easy to find joy in the positive aspects of the crisis and I have resolved to do just this. I have even found that my creative juices are flowing again (for whatever that is worth). I have even taken the plunge with reading a long history of Roman Britain that felt too much of a challenge before the crisis. How different the lockdown might have been if the weather had not been so kind. How fortunate Amanda and I consider ourselves to be to have a nice garden and a view of the Ouse estuary and sea.