Lockdown in Paris : Day Twenty-Five
Friday 10th April
8h25 : Earlier and earlier! I do enjoy the sunny peace of the mornings but it’s weird how clueless I am as to what to do with them. I just sit in my chair drinking a cup of tea feeling bizarrely awkward. What do people do, when there’s nothing to get ready for? My brain isn’t awake enough to read, I’m not ready for breakfast, I’m offended by the idea of sound or moving pictures, and so here I am, just sitting here, looking confused.
09h45 : Today is my nephew’s birthday. He is two. He is the most sparkly thing I know. He likes “didors”, and so I have ordered a personalised dinosaur placemat and coaster set and now that I type that outloud, I’m wondering what possible use a two year old has for a coaster. I don’t even own a coaster, how have I elected to buy one for a 24-month-old? Gah.
10h20 : It’s also Good Friday. Not a good day for JC. In fact I think it would be fair to say it was the worst day of his life. In years gone by we’d be gearing up for a day of “Fasting and Abstinence” and that 12-hour Mass I told you about. The light at the end of the tunnel was always fish and chips and bread and butter which was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best meal of the year. I must admit that fasting and abstinence was a somewhat flexible affair in the O’Dea household. By the time we all got up, dad was already trying to bend the rules with regards to what us four kids could eat – which started out as NOTHING BUT WATER, and edged further and further into I SUPPOSE SO, YES I THINK THAT WOULD BE ALRIGHT. Bless him he couldn’t even hold the line past breakfast. He would invent rules that definitely hadn’t existed twenty-four hours prior – rules like, “Hot cross buns don’t count because they’ve got crosses on them,” or “Porridge is alright because it’s no fun anyway so it’s not cheating.” I don’t know if this bargaining approach washed with Jesus. I can only imagine not. “Mr. O,” He would say, sitting on our kitchen countertop with his radiant arms folded, “I got betrayed, flayed, crucified and stabbed so you lot could have eternal life. I think your kids can go until 6pm without baked goods.” At this juncture my dad would just look at him and bob his head towards the pathetic line-up of his four offspring, and JC would roll his eyes and waft a hand towards the bread bin. This is our brand of Catholicism, in a nutshell.
11h33 : Today is hair wash day and I cannot wait. Sitting on the balcony brushing it through (a process much like combing through soaking wet hair, at this stage) I decided to trim it. With tiny pen-knife scissors. I think I must have looked a little mad, snipping inexact chunks off the ends of my chip-fat hair and dropping them into a nearby plant pot. Like I’d finally lost it. But I do enjoy that sound, the kind of chhhrrtt you get cutting through a hunk of hair. I haven’t looked in a mirror yet. I’m sure it’s fine. It certainly can’t get any worse.
11h49 : By the miracle of modern technology I was able to watch my unborn niece kicking, and that’s surely going to be the coolest thing that happens for a long while.
12h40 : I’ve come a long way since Day One you know, because the internet has been down since last night right until a couple of minutes ago and as you can see I did not even mention it. Did I fret and fuss? I did not. Did I break out into a cold sweat? Nope. I turned not a hair. I’ve grown.
13h36 : Have spent a couple of hours in Tudor England, eaten half a pizza and put some vintage table linens in to soak after weeks of putting it off for reasons I can’t fathom. They’re lovely large hemp napkins with red stripes ,and soaking them and drying them and ironing them and photographing them will give me lots to do. Which I expect is why I refused to start.
15h : So there’s this guy on the courtyard – same floor as me – and he uses mouthwash an average of four times a day. I know this because I have never heard a human hock and spit as violently as this man does, I’m amazed he has any throat left to pour mouthwash into. The stuff should be squirting out of a dozen holes in his gullet, shooting sprays of green menthol every which way, like in a cartoon. He does it first thing, usually when I’m on the balcony, shattering the peace of the morning with guttural efforts that reverberate around the whole courtyard. Birds take wing. I have to stop reading. A couple of hours later, he does it again, then again in the mid-afternoon. This is how intimate you get with people you wouldn’t even know if you passed them in the street. You may not know their faces but you’ve heard them clipping their toenails. Tink. Pause. Tink. Pause. Tink.
16h49 : Hair is washed. I think it looked better before I washed it. Other people have arch enemies in human form, but mine is inconveniently attached to my head. I also think I may have gone a bit overboard with the plant-pot cuttings – the front sections are alarmingly short. But then the whole thing’s a god-awful mess anyway so I shan’t lose any sleep over it.
17h10 : Got really bored so had a gin and tonic. Texted Laur to tell her she had to stop working and have a gin and tonic with me or she would go to Hell. (I like to go in strong.) She apologised to Jesus via the medium of text (I’m sure he’s kept up) and said that if she didn’t work today she’d have to do it on Monday instead and I said, “That’s alright, he’ll be up and about by then,” which I thought was a really good joke so I laughed heartily to myself on the balcony. This is what passes for entertainment around here.
18h : I just have to announce that I can now do 5 push-ups from my actual toes and not my knees. Every single time I think – I can’t, I really can’t - but it turns out I can. Just five though, six may as well be a hundred. Five is as far as I’ll ever get. This is my only exercise, but for me it’s an astonishing achievement. When I started with the whole Classpass thing before the End of the World I literally couldn’t understand the physics of a push-up. To me, there was no earthly way of getting back up again once you were down. It wasn’t a case of “giving up” or not trying hard enough. Had you held a gun to my head and told me I could do a single solitary push-up or die I would have known - without even trying - that trying would be the last thing I would do on this earth. So to be honest the day I did one push-up I was euphoric. Euphoric. I sat back on my heels and marvelled. So five is a ruddy miracle. I don’t want to push it.
19h18 : Video called my sister to see my sparkly nephew on his birthday and he was extra sparkly. He was just about to tuck into his “didor” cake. It was almost unbearable how much I just wanted to clamber into the screen and out the other side.
19h57 : The teams are picked, the quiz is on, and I fully anticipate them to figure out soon that whichever team I’m on loses. It’s only a matter of time.
20h02: I think we should just keep nightly 8pm clapping even when this is all over. What with the world being in the state it is, we could all use a nightly boost, pandemic or no. “Yeah!!! Tuesday! Well done everyone, you did it! Keep it up!” etc. I’m for it.
