In the sweet book I read at the start of the year, Walter de la Mare laments the fact that the recent weather where he is has been so dismal it has been as if "there had been an old Victorian meat-cover put over the sky." Sadly just at the moment I know exactly what he means. After what has been a surprisingly sunny, if icy, winter, suddenly the weather has changed in Budapest and the meatcover has come down. This, combined with the continuation of curfew and a slightly increased zeal on the part of the local police about people hanging around near cafes after buying drinks there, has made me feel melancholy. Will we be at the mercy of risk-averse scientists and their media back-up forever?
Mind you, this time of year always brings with it a faint sense of the forlorn. Christmas has gone, the winter seems endless and cast off Christmas trees loll about the streets. The trees always make me think of stout ladies who have somehow succumbed to the temptations of liquor, to the extent that they have been unable to stagger home. Before this new Coronavirus panic or pandemic, most English cities had their fair share of these creatures teetering about on weekend evenings. In Liverpool one Saturday my husband bent down to offer a hand to one such. She was lying half in and half out of the gutter and seemed to be having trouble getting up, but all he got was a stream of vicious abuse when he asked if he could help.
I wonder what the manic Liverpool weekend revellers are doing now, during lockdown. Drinking miserably, alone? In the past, I thought the scenes I saw there - and also in other places such as Exeter - on weekend evenings were Hogarthian, and I was prissy enough to feel shocked. Now my dearest wish is that people have the opportunity to be Hogarthian again, if they want to. The oppressive sense that those who think they know best are going to be making our decisions in the future has transformed me from a wowser to someone nostalgic for decadence, however louche. I suppose the long and the short of it is I have always very strongly objected to being bossed around.
The especially worrying aspect of the current situation is that I am apparently almost alone in my irritation. Judging by polling, many people actually welcome being told exactly what to do and hope this regime of technocratic government will never come to an end.
m now on
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