Lockdown in Paris : Day Thirty-Seven
Wednesday, 22nd April
9h10 : Yesterday, I read. For the day entire, I read or I worked, folded up into an origami human shape on my balcony. Not only did I finish Cider House, I read a whole other book - Curtain Call by someone-or-other - which amounted to about a chapter-and-a-half of John Irving so by 9pm I found I’d read the whole thing. I thought of it as a palette cleanser, whatever one of those is - I don’t think I’ve eaten at enough Michelin Star restaurants to know. I’m not sure I’ve eaten in any, now I come to think of it.
9h40 : Today’s horoscope, “Your home may be on your mind, for today’s Taurus new moon will energise your domestic sector.” THERE HAS LITERALLY BEEN NOTHING ELSE ON MY MIND FOR FIVE WEEKS, SUSAN, WELL PLAYED.
10h15 : I’m back on the balcony, and here I will stay for much of the day. Another blue-sky day with blazing sun, and a lovely cool breeze - the dream spring day basically, into which I can venture no further than this encaged m2 of grey zinc on the roof. I think my balcony has become the single most miraculous thing to me in lockdown, especially with this weather being as relentlessly idyllic as it is. What a year to be confined to our houses - Mother Nature has put on her very best frock and is free to twirl and twirl to her heart’s content, unharried by us plague of humans. No wonder she’s in a good mood this spring.
11h : I’ve moved on to ancient history and am reading Margaret Beard’s SPQR which I’ve had on my shelf for ages and even began once, but I stopped for some reason and it’s been shooting me resentful looks ever since. Last night, we set off again into Rome. I think the reason I pulled this particular yellow spine off the shelf was that another book that’s eyed me resentfully for years has also been lifted down - it’s Amo, Amas, Amat...And All That by Harry Mount, which looks like - she says, flicking through the pages - a lightheartedly informative book about the Latin language. Kind of like Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but for really insufferable people. I’ve been meaning to read it for ages, and since I don’t seem to be learning French in a hurry the logical thing is to dive into a language that no-one has spoken for about 1500 years.
Sidenote
I learned Latin at university, because choosing your future academic trajectory is a matter of great significance so I (no doubt) stuck a pin in the Humanities section of a prospectus and thought sounds about right. I don’t remember much of choosing Nottingham either (I never visited it: I probably stuck a pin in a map of the UK), nor of choosing my subject which, in the end, was Art History & Classical Civilisation; two subjects perfectly twinned in their pointlessness. I’ve been thinking recently - because what else is there to do but stare into the void of my directionless life - that I wish I had realised that what I was probably aiming for in all this was History. It’s amazing what remains obscured to you, right up to the point that you realise it, 20 years later on a balcony, at which point it seems very obvious. I can look back now and see that I was just stumbling around History, crashing about, climbing in a window, sneaking in the back - always leaning towards subjects that were, essentially, History, without realising that that’s what I wanted to learn. I don’t know, these notions sort of come to you, when you’re sitting in a 14m2 flat on your own for six weeks and wondering what on earth has happened to your life up to this point. I could be wrong, of course.
Anyway. My roundabout point in all this is that as part of the Classics bit of my studies I decided to take Latin, because more than anything else I’ve always wanted to be absolutely insufferable. For about two years I learned Latin and thus did I attain my goal of reaching Peak Insufferableness. This wasn’t a vague state of being - it was a fixed moment in time. It was a literal zenith, reached when I was “revising” for an exam in a local pub with my Fellow-Classics-Bod-Adele, and we played Scrabble in Latin over a bottle of wine. My zenith was Latin Scrabble. I remember thinking, “This is it. This is what obnoxious smuggery feels like. It’s all downhill from here.” And it was of course, I couldn’t name you five Latin verbs. So all in all I’d say that that unpaid student loan should go unpaid, really.
11h30 : Well after that little ramble, I’m going back to Mary Beard to see what’s going down in Ancient Rome. AND ANOTHER THING RIGHT, (sorry but you caught me on a day of academic reflection), I learned all this stuff about the ancient world and do I remember any of it? Do I hell. All that happens when I think of certain ancient things, is that my brain shouts some completely contextless, pointless nugget of information, in a panic of embarrassment. I was someone who, once upon a time, quite reasonably wandered about with books about Cicero (SPEECHES!) and Tacitus (History?!) Homer (And his armour clattered about him!) and Livy (History of Rome!) in my bag; I studied the plays of Aristophanes (FROGS my brain screams, then falls deathly silent), and even had opinions about Virgil’s Aeneid. But it doesn’t matter now, does it, because that little nugget of pointless (and probably incorrect) information is all I’m getting. I might think, “Steph, think about it, what comes to you when you hear the name Cicero?” And I get nothing. My brain goes “Cicero. Right. Cicero. Yeah he was a big one. He like - wrote some stuff. I think he talked. I think he gave speeches.” “Great, my brain replies, that’s just - great. Let’s try and be a bit more specific shall we? When was Cicero?” And my brain goes. “Oh well, when, now that’s a good...hmm...when you say, I think I’d have to go with, I don’t know...1962?” I mean it’s just depressing how much of a waste of time it all seems now. I no longer have even Pub-Quiz-level knowledge of things I sat exams on, for goodness’ sake. It’s outrageous! Who do I have to write to about this? I owe thousands and thousands of pounds for knowledge I don’t even have in my brain! What a joke. It’s not just youth that’s wasted on the young, it’s education. What I would give to spend three years studying and writing essays now! A lot. I don’t have anything, but a lot.
12h35 : Did some work, then had a conversation with a wasp. He had weird long legs that followed behind him in a way I found quite disconcerting but when I asked him why he had such long legs he didn’t respond, or at least I did not comprehend his reply. He seemed quite interested in the long-dead skinny bamboo-type stuff that screens the balcony and I told him there was really nothing of interest for him there, what are you after? But he just buzzed about for a bit and then drifted off. Ah someone’s clipping their nails. I can hear the tink-tink-tink. Lovely.
14h05 : My mysterious wandering parcel is marked as “out for delivery”, an adventure it has been on since Thursday. It must be having a marvellous time.
15h34 : When the sun slides behind the rooftops and puts the balcony in shade, it’s time to go in, put on real clothes and transition into the Late Afternoon portion of the day. It takes me the length of Billie Holiday’s I’ll be Seeing You to achieve this, and before the opening bars of Strange Fruit I’m back on the balcony and the books have been put away (I started another to keep Mary Beard company, Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, which so far is scarily good). Time to do a bit more work with a cup of coffee, sitting on a folded yoga mat instead of my deconstructable deckchair, to further demarcate this new phase of the day.
16h : Billie has got a lot of bloody nerve singing April in Paris at me while I make coffee. “Holiday tables under the chestnut trees.” SURE. “April in Paris. Don’t leave your houses. Buy just essentials, don’t see other humans, April in Paris, deadly flu virus, no one can ever, go outttttt.”
17h40 : Bit of work done, and I worked on the first poem in the mystery poetry book. I have promised Yorkshire-Laura that I will work on trying to comprehend one poem a day, the better to understand the unsolved mystery of its delivery. She sold me on it by describing how when she lived near Moscow she would read Russian poetry in her kitchen while having a cigarette. I was completely in awe of the perfect scene this conjured up - it’s hands-down the coolest image that has ever, ever entered my brain. Told her today I was going to find someone who would draw it for me, so I could have it on a wall. Anyway I have kept my promise in far, far less cool circumstances. The first poem refers to an ice cube, despair, the blade of a knife, the drowning of the Petit Prince and the flowing of blood, so if nothing else we can say it’s very, very French.
19h15 : I’m not convinced that one tiny glass of wine isn’t worse than no wine at all.
20h30 : Had a good old chat with my oldest friend Ro, during which - talking about my day and revelations about my wayward education - she asked if I’d ever had one of those careers guidance meetings at our high school. I said not, she said “I did. It was with Mr. Wilson, I think they dragged him out of retirement to sit in a cupboard and tell us what jobs we should have. He was wearing that brown suit he always wore.” Suddenly, I could see the brown suit of a man I hadn’t thought about in over twenty years, clear as day. “You had to answer all these questions and he tapped your answers into the computer and then he’d tell you what you should be. At the end of mine he said - I’ll never forget it - he said I should be -” it takes her a second to get it out. “A cabinet maker.” I stop cooking and lean against the wall. After a long moment I say, “What the hell’s a cabinet maker?” “I don’t know!” She honks back. We pull ourselves together. “And what did he say?” I’m stirring the pasta again. “I don’t think he said anything. I think there was just a stunned silence.”
20h45 : Latin o’clock. Amo Amas Amat etc. But where’s the wine?
20h51 : Other entries for strange careers meeting results have now come in from Yorkshire-Laur (Trout Farm Manager) and Estelle (either landscape gardener OR someone who ‘designs objects for handicapped people’). Scottish-Sarah ought to have been a florist, apparently.
