Off out for the daily pre-work walk round the block. Around the side of the house, through the cut by the electricity substation, and out onto the suburban main-drive mini-shopping parade, which in normal times would present a bustling late-rush-hour scene. These days the trio of wannabee convenience shoppers muffled into their greatcoats against the biting wind, shuffling from foot-to-foot while waiting to gain admittance into the social-distance-compliant Spar store, passes for a multitude. Taking a left would mean bobbing and weaving my way apologetically past them in an effort to keep the prescribed two-metre distance along the frosty narrow pavement, so I take the opposite direction- which is deserted, and no wonder: the charity shop, betting shop, and trendy suburban bistro are all mothballed for the duration, and the cheery El Salvadorian bloke who runs the Pound Shop doesn’t start laying out his econo-wares (mop-buckets, hula-hoops, and today, if he’s got any nous about him, a wide selection of primary-coloured children’s sledges) until 9:45AM.
I continue on an uninterrupted beeline as far as the just-awakening Funky Monkey café (take-away only: order at the right-hand door; collect at the left), and make the sharp right into the recreation ground. Behind the (for now) still open gates of the cheerfully-painted children’s play area, a pair of pre-schoolers are clambering onto the swings. Their mother, stationed the other side of the fence guarding the pushchair, looks up from her mobile phone conversation to shout a rebuke into the otherwise empty enclosure: ‘Leave it- I paid good money for that!’. Simultaneously, a minute, pugnacious and exceptionally ugly black-and-tan mongrel that I now notice is attached by a tight lead to the woman’s non-phone-wielding arm takes an ankle-length lunge at my passing frame. She yanks it back: ‘Get back and behave!’. Hastening on by, I essay a neighbourly smile. The woman glares back straight in my face. The quickfire redirection of her impatient, fearless ire, from offspring to canine to man-stranger, has taken approximately six seconds, tops.
Out of the far end of the recreation ground, down past the prettily incongruous terrace of former millworkers’ cottages, quickening the step to avoid eye-contact with the gaggle of catatonically-bored-looking adolescent boys shuffling their be-trainered feet up against the back wall of the closed-down betting shop. Taking a left down the main A6 drag, opposite the deserted sixth-form college, where, through fluoro-lit windows I catch the eyes of the female member of a middle-aged couple who have evidently determined that the bleak arse-end of the third pandemic lockdown in this interminable year is the optimum time to plough the old life-savings into an Italian eaterie, becoming bedecked even as we speak in the contemporary English provincial style: white-wooden shelves decoratively adorned with bottles of artisan-produced olive-oil; a tin retro-poster advertising Coca-Cola; a green-white-and-red bordered menu offering a range of Pizzas, Pastas and Salads at prices to suit the discerning budget. The soon-to-be proprietors of the fledgling business look normal enough from where I am standing gawping in at them, but are presumably either exceptionally entrepreneurial or certifiably insane. Probably a bit of both. They’re about as Italian as I am, that much I will say.
Back home, into the Zoom room, charging up the laptop. It’s a Wednesday, and (as is my custom at this midweek interval) I have succeeded in keeping the calendar entirely free of scheduled telephone or video-based human-to-human interactions. Perusing awhile the miraculously-empty Microsoft timeline, I experience a deep sense of relief, quickly followed (not for the first time) by a nagging inkling, that essentially what the sense of relief is attempting to convey to me is that I made the wrong career choice fifteen-years-ago-whatever, and would have been better off escaping from the flange desk in some direction that could have guaranteed more lengthy spells of glorious but productive solitude, and preferably with gasps of open air on tap. Presently, a familiar, flickering movie-reel flickers behind the eye-lids, featuring me in the starring role, cheerfully absorbed in a succession of alternative vocations: postman; lighthouse keeper; nature-reserve ranger (not anywhere with lions, obviously; maybe a lightly-fractious herd of deer); proprietor of a baker’s shop serving a pre-industrial English village.
But the computer has charged up fully now, and the bleep of the morning’s first email snaps me back to reality. It’s from someone highish up at the Council, the latest in a mix-up about the process for the joint commissioning of a mentoring contract for teenage care-leavers. A mix-up entirely of the Town Hall’s own making, which, assisted by my unflappable manager, I’m resisting getting either implicated in, or (heaven forfend) involved in the inevitably messy sorting-out-of. A courteous but robust, and possibly very slightly passive-aggressive email is called for here. That’s fine, I’m good at those. Sighing to myself, I begin to type away, the words flowing in an effortless stream. An early-morning feeling of challenge, competence and agency- not unlike, I would imagine, the internal sensation-mix occasionable by the practiced dawntime kneading of a Cotswolds-village-worth of white tin loaves, circa 1746.
‘Come eleven o’clock’, I tell myself, ‘You can get out again bonny lad, have another scamper round the block’. Crowd-scenes permitting, I might take a left at the Spar shop next time round, check out if the Post Office has opened up again. See what sort of trade the butcher looks like he’s doing. Spice it up a bit, you know.
