Craig Sillitoe Photography / http://www.csillitoe.com By Ed Thexton
I LIVE in the privileged space of Inverloch where circumstances have allowed me a surprisingly good lockdown. My working life involves short-term contracts and travelling, so it’s been a total wipeout as far as business goes, but with a boy doing home schooling and a big new trampoline it’s been anything but bad.
I never liked shopping and last November gave up the booze. I have just taken my sixth batch of sourdough loaves out of the oven, never having baked before this pandemic. (Fool-proof baking for the foolhardy perhaps.)
The time of limited distraction has emerged as less of an imposition and more of an opportunity. It’s not so much about what I’m missing but more about what I’m unexpectedly experiencing. Things that see the light of day now there is less noise.
I LIVE in the privileged space of Inverloch where circumstances have allowed me a surprisingly good lockdown. My working life involves short-term contracts and travelling, so it’s been a total wipeout as far as business goes, but with a boy doing home schooling and a big new trampoline it’s been anything but bad.
I never liked shopping and last November gave up the booze. I have just taken my sixth batch of sourdough loaves out of the oven, never having baked before this pandemic. (Fool-proof baking for the foolhardy perhaps.)
The time of limited distraction has emerged as less of an imposition and more of an opportunity. It’s not so much about what I’m missing but more about what I’m unexpectedly experiencing. Things that see the light of day now there is less noise.
As I write, I flick through Saturday’s Age newspaper and cannot find the once weighty, high gloss Domain real estate section, a restaurant review travel section or the travel section. The frenetic pre-COVID travel advertising in which it was almost cheaper to fly to China for a 10-day trip than stay at home. Or go on a cruise, to just about anywhere. This unearths a memory of a rather large and thoroughly disgruntled bloke who happened upon me in my only up close and personal contact with a berthed cruise ship. Slumping down next to me, he described his love of the outdoors and his regret at having given in to his wife’s implorings to cruise. His words – “It’s like being locked in a Holiday Inn for 10 days” – have never left me.
The whole “travel as of right” was exemplified by my son when at primary school telling me, by way of suggestive complaint, “Dad, when I ask around my class, I’m the only one who hasn’t gone overseas yet.”
We are living our own form of war, with luck never to be repeated in our life time, where those on the frontline assume the risks for us all. It reminds me of Churchill’s description of the fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain in 1940: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few”.
I often wondered at those black and white, but mostly grey, photos of people going about their daily lives in the London blitz. How could they do it? Women and children picking their way along a street through the spillage from utterly devastated tenement homes, just like theirs, picked out by a high explosive dropped at night from an aircraft flying from another country.
Just like the virus, nothing personal in intent but thoroughly personal in execution. How did they cope? By habituation, I guess. The first time would have been terrifying. After months it was different. They and their government, having done all they could to mitigate the personal risk, live with the uncertainty. And then the bombing stops. And then what? How could anybody not be affected?
So here we are at the dinner table, my son on his computer on one side, me on mine typing this and it is raining and cool outside. Fittingly we are doing climate. Did you know Tully gets 7900 millimetres of rain a year and Lake Eyre 125? Yesterday it was revisiting stuff from quite literally 50 years ago, adverbs and verbs. Fantastic stuff, rediscovery.
All this would have been hidden away from me at school. Completely and utterly inaccessible behind the monotonal single word or, if lucky, single sentence response of the 12-year-old to the question “What did you do at school today?” Restricted to the same list that I probably used at the same age.
And then there is the trampoline. With 50 years between us I can attest to the benefit of 400 a day. That is 400 bounces. Not to mention the laughs from play fighting nor the triumphs of nailing a forward flip. Fitter, stronger, happier.
This will be a time, like war, around which memories pivot. In a few weeks we will be in a different phase, never to be revisited, even if we have another lockdown. We will never have a situation of such all consuming global uncertainty where we were completely naive to the potential.
I encouraged keeping a COVID diary. I was the only one who took it up and, true to form, I did just the one entry – April 3, 2020. ‘It is the change of season, autumn leaves and rain. We are leading ‘a small life’, the car has not moved in a week. I feel okay about it. It is a time of opportunity, for old paradigms based on the wealth of freedom of the past to give way to a more frugal, less energy intensive time. Who knows? It may give the natural world a much-needed break.”
The whole “travel as of right” was exemplified by my son when at primary school telling me, by way of suggestive complaint, “Dad, when I ask around my class, I’m the only one who hasn’t gone overseas yet.”
We are living our own form of war, with luck never to be repeated in our life time, where those on the frontline assume the risks for us all. It reminds me of Churchill’s description of the fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain in 1940: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few”.
I often wondered at those black and white, but mostly grey, photos of people going about their daily lives in the London blitz. How could they do it? Women and children picking their way along a street through the spillage from utterly devastated tenement homes, just like theirs, picked out by a high explosive dropped at night from an aircraft flying from another country.
Just like the virus, nothing personal in intent but thoroughly personal in execution. How did they cope? By habituation, I guess. The first time would have been terrifying. After months it was different. They and their government, having done all they could to mitigate the personal risk, live with the uncertainty. And then the bombing stops. And then what? How could anybody not be affected?
So here we are at the dinner table, my son on his computer on one side, me on mine typing this and it is raining and cool outside. Fittingly we are doing climate. Did you know Tully gets 7900 millimetres of rain a year and Lake Eyre 125? Yesterday it was revisiting stuff from quite literally 50 years ago, adverbs and verbs. Fantastic stuff, rediscovery.
All this would have been hidden away from me at school. Completely and utterly inaccessible behind the monotonal single word or, if lucky, single sentence response of the 12-year-old to the question “What did you do at school today?” Restricted to the same list that I probably used at the same age.
And then there is the trampoline. With 50 years between us I can attest to the benefit of 400 a day. That is 400 bounces. Not to mention the laughs from play fighting nor the triumphs of nailing a forward flip. Fitter, stronger, happier.
This will be a time, like war, around which memories pivot. In a few weeks we will be in a different phase, never to be revisited, even if we have another lockdown. We will never have a situation of such all consuming global uncertainty where we were completely naive to the potential.
I encouraged keeping a COVID diary. I was the only one who took it up and, true to form, I did just the one entry – April 3, 2020. ‘It is the change of season, autumn leaves and rain. We are leading ‘a small life’, the car has not moved in a week. I feel okay about it. It is a time of opportunity, for old paradigms based on the wealth of freedom of the past to give way to a more frugal, less energy intensive time. Who knows? It may give the natural world a much-needed break.”