Paw Prints ponders: Lockdown

I went to a tea party today. It was a very small tea party at my neighbour’s house, just her and me, in fact. She brewed Darjeeling and I brought a lemon cake and we sat in her tiny, pretty garden – at a respectable distance, of course – and chatted like civilised people. Just strolling down the ginnel (she persists in calling it a twitten) to her house felt like freedom.

Yesterday was gardening day. Time to dead-head the osteospermum. I sat on the low front garden wall and snipped away, careful to let some seed heads fall, careful to garner some fat pods for next year’s crop. It has been blooming non-stop for a year now, truly the gift that goes on giving. And every now and again a couple would walk up our quiet road, and I’d sequester myself behind the garden gate and they’d say ‘thank you’ and we’d exchange a smile.

Later this week a man with a much stronger back than mine will come and tackle the knee- high grass and the front flower bed, which is nothing but a bluebell’s graveyard now.

And, joy of joys, next month we have secured an appointment at Dapper Dogz for Maisie. She’s such a fuzzball at the moment that the local collie keeps trying to round her up. He thinks she’s a sheep.

The panic queues at the supermarket have dwindled, and we wait our turn politely, looking like aliens in our masks and bright blue gloves The assistant monitoring our behaviour is cheerful and has a friendly word for all. The shelves are almost back to normal, with loo rolls and even flour to be seen.

It’s been a long and wearisome lockdown.  I miss pub lunches and strolling into the village to shop, or for coffee with friends; I even miss getting on a train to go to London, to join my oldest friends for lunch or  a theatre.  I miss the groups: even though we exchange poems and stories by email it’s not the same.  There has been talk of Zoom meetings but we have never really got it together. These are tiny, trivial things and others have it far worse.

The weather and the garden have helped, but I grant we have been lucky. Maisie gets her walk early every morning and we shout hello at the other regular dog walkers from a distance. We shop, or not, then go about our chores, usually gardening or, in Himself’s case, tinkering with the van.

The garden is a delight. After the early alarm – help! The garden centres are all closed! What will we do for bedding? – the nurseries and garden centres got their act together. The word went out on Facebook: such and such a nursery is delivering. Sheer relief made us all over-order; I’ve never had such a riot of colour.

Theatre and opera companies have fallen over themselves to entertain us: the National, Chichester, Andrew Lloyd Webber and others have all dug into their archives and streamed productions online free of charge. Television, of course, is in its summer doldrums, but who cares?

So we have endured the Covid crisis with a certain amount of good grace – but oh, the joy of normal things! Tea with a friend. A picnic planned. A visit from the gardener. A long- overdue appointment at the beauty parlour – for Maisie at least, if not for me. And now the weather seems to have settled; the wind has died down and the sun is coaxing out colour on the petunias and violas and fuchsias. Even the weeds look pretty.

Here comes summer. And with it the first green shoots of hope.