2020 Blog Week 11: Sundays
Five Sundays ago, before the whole world went mad, I was sitting in bed contemplating whether I should stay up for the Oscars. With my Monday classes not starting until 3pm, this seemed the perfect opportunity to stay up and catch the whole show without dying the next day. I figured I’d see if I could find a good stream, and to my surprise I did. Still didn’t think I’d see it through, particularly considering on Italian time the ceremony wouldn’t even start until 2am.
Then some friends messaged: an obscure group chat with an obscure name referencing some half-recalled in-joke which must be 5 years old. They were watching too, and the three of us chatted away through to the Best Picture announcement at half 5 in the morning. It was nice, it was like having them in Italy with me. We had plans for them to visit in person, in May when the nice weather rolled around. Most of the films that I liked won their Oscars, and I drifted off thankful to sleep.
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Four years ago, I waited for the Sunday morning bus near my University house, so anxious I felt ill. As part of the Warwick Mountains exec, I had planned a trip to the Lake District for 30 awkward, gangly kids who didn’t like me very much. The responsibility was getting to me. What if the bus broke down? What if we arrived at the clubhouse and the code I’d been given by a man I hadn’t met didn’t work? And the whole group, as one, turned towards me and said, this is your fault. What do we do now?
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Four Sundays ago, I was in Genova. I don’t generally get depressed but I really struggled to get out of bed that day. My ankles, sporadically painful for the last few months, had worked themselves into an arthritic frenzy which caused them to seize up painfully whenever I put weight on them. As well as that, I ached. Knees, elbows, wrists, like I’d never experienced before. Too stubborn to renege on a trip that I’d planned for weeks, I took the three hours of trains to Genova anyway, gritting my teeth as my body stiffened into ugly train seats.
Saturday was sunny, and I distracted myself as best I could with narrow streets and churches, but my ankles pounded and I couldn’t ignore it for long. Sunday dawned grey and miserable. I ate breakfast amidst a collection of eccentric guests, but my appetite for people-watching wasn’t any broader than my actual appetite. I went back to bed and slept until the afternoon.
I went to the aquarium, which was in itself depressing. Jellyfish whipped endlessly through artificial currents; the benign helpless against the malign. After an hour my ankles felt like they were going to snap. I got a train back as far as Stresa, and then my second train was cancelled.
I waited on the platform, and felt a sharp pain in my ankle, as if it had been momentarily gripped by a vice. We’d breached a new barrier of pain: something was seriously wrong. Sitting on the platform, I cried, longer and harder than I ever remember crying before. Fortunately no one was around.
I realised I had everything I needed on me to get back to the UK: passport, phone, charger, some money. I looked at the two train tracks, and figured I had two options. Go back to Verbania and teach my final week before the holiday, or return to Milan and get the first flight home. Give up. I checked skyscanner. There was a flight home that evening for £35.
I had a long time to think about those two options. At one point I looked again at the worn steel tracks and thought, three options.
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Three months ago, or possibly two-and-a-half, I was eating Sunday lunch at the table, enjoying the unseasonal sunshine pouring through the window. It had rained for solid months before Christmas, and this was a notable improvement. I chewed my Parmigiano sandwich and wished for Cheddar, but otherwise I was content. Then on Facebook I saw a meme:
It wasn’t this one, but it was to the same effect. I googled “coronavirus”: some health scare in China. I’d heard of the province but not the city. I worried a little about my friends in China, and then forgot about it.
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Three Sundays ago, I landed in Cologne, Germany. It’s a beautiful city, with a world-famous Cathedral, but I only had 7 hours between my flights, so didn’t have time to see it. Besides, I wasn’t much up to walking.
I’d finished my final week of teaching and took my pre-booked flight home for the Carnivale holiday. This might not sound like much of an achievement, but it was significant for me. Smiling and playing with the kids, and focusing on the most complex intricacies of the English language with adults, all while trying to ignore the agony in my ankles was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and an experience I refuse to repeat. To say that I was close to cracking would be a lie, because I was cracking, several times a day, just never in front of my students. I really liked them, pretty much every one of them, and I wanted them to have a better last memory of me than that.
I spent a cold and miserable night in Cologne airport and then got my final flight to Bristol in the early hours of the morning. It was a huge relief to finish a journey that I’d been seriously doubting I could manage, heavy suitcases and all. In the arrivals lounge I collapsed into my girlfriend’s arms. I tried to tell her that I needed to go home straight away, and I called my parents to say I needed them to come and pick me up, but neither of them really believed me at first. I felt a pervasive numbness sucking the air out of my lungs, and couldn’t figure out how to articulate that I was Really Not Okay™. In that state of mind you feel like you want to push everyone away, but when your parents actually push you away, you see how far that self-indulgent depressive mindset gets you. Anyway, everyone realised I was sufficiently desperate in the end, and I spent that night warm and well-fed in my own bed.
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Four months ago, in the arrivals lounge at Bristol airport, I saw my girlfriend for the first time in seven weeks. Seven weeks in which she’d moved to University and I’d moved to Italy: it had felt like the longest seven weeks of my life. I’d struggled with a health issue which I’m beginning to think was more in my head than in reality, and she’d struggled with all the usual bumps in the road when you start Uni. But we’d both pulled through, and I’d had an image in my head of picking her up and spinning her around when I saw her — I’m not sure why. Regardless, that is exactly what I did.
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Two Sundays ago, I had been home for a week, and it has been decided that I won’t return to Italy. I had been fortunate to get an appointment with my fantastic rheumatologist at short notice. He had given me a shot of steroids to keep the inflammation in my ankles at a low. These shots are administered by butt, thrillingly. As I lay on his table and shifted down my boxers, we made awkward small talk about the coronavirus outbreak in Italy. I said that it had kicked off the same day that I left the country. He said I was very lucky, and in a strange way, I felt it.
On the Sunday evening I gave my girlfriend a lift back to Uni. It was a long way to drive on dodgy ankles, but she’d been a complete rock in the last week, so it felt like the least I could do. I’d been better since the steroid shot, but driving was still painful. While I drove she sort of stroked the back of my head- maybe a weird habit, but very therapeutic. I tried not to think about what she has gotten herself into.
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One year ago, I was hoovering the bookshop on a Sunday morning before we opened. Sweaty after more than an hour of intense hoover action, I’d taken off my unofficial Waterstones uniform — the woolen jumper. At half ten my colleague arrived and I felt self conscious about my skinny arms, so I put the jumper back on. During the day she mentioned how she was interested in various philosophers, so when it was time for my break I found a book I’d noticed before, Philosophy for People in a Hurry. I read it as I ate my lunch and made notes, thinking I might try and impress her.
Pictured, a gormless idiot trying too hard.
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One Sunday ago, my ankles felt no better and I’d been feeling increasingly nauseous for the last few days. The coronavirus outbreak has well and truly hit the UK: the worst public health crisis in a generation, and the true worry is how people are reacting. Hoarding, turning on one another the second things head south. How strange that I can now pass off my return home from Italy as a coronavirus precaution.
For the last week or so, like clockwork, one person a day has messaged to ask how I’m getting on in Italy with the quarantine. Mostly friends who I don’t speak to all that often, which is nice. Of course, to explain the arthritis is embarassing, difficult and complex, so I simplify the story. I came home for a holiday, coronavirus happened, I didn’t go back. Phew. Yet without realising, each of the messages feels like people checking in on me at a time when I am undoubtedly in need of it. To have this sentiment of care expressed, without the context of something being wrong with me, without having to explain about arthritis, has helped more than a little. I know it’s a little deceptive, but if any of you read this I hope you’ll understand.
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Many years ago, but still a Sunday. I’m not sure how many years, but probably twelve or thirteen. It was a warm weekend, and my family had planned a day trip to the Isle of Wight. I remember the day pretty vividly: driving through lush countryside to the ferry, across the freezing channel and onto the island, exploring a castle (I have always loved castles). In the grounds we spent forever throwing conkers at a telegraph pole, and I finally hit it, and celebrated in the wild way that you’re allowed to do when you’re young.
A picnic in the field, packed by Mum beforehand, then we went to the Needles, where it was much windier, but very scenic. We had a snack or something at a pub, and I think possibly skimmed stones at a beach, although I may be mixing memories here. And then we headed home, a little sunburnt. We got fish and chips on the way back and munched them together in the living room. It was such a clear good day, such an obvious symptom of good times, that it permeated through into a head which didn’t normally think in such terms, and it made me so happy, and I loved my family so much that it made me a little sad. My most vivid memory of the day is going into the downstairs toilet after eating and thinking it’s all going to end, and then bursting into tears, purely because this couldn’t last forever.
I have not been back, and I never want to. Superstitious, pointless, I know, but I want the Isle of Wight to be a time capsule for me, a place where only the best of life happened, only the happiest of times, continuing into infinity and never overwritten by the dark.
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This Sunday, I got up late. I cleaned my room, and found a forgotten notebook with some scribblings about philosophers in it. Later I went for a walk. Old ankles, aged knees, wizened elbows, were not so bad today. Not good — an almighty distance from good — but better than the Sunday before.
