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| The hopeful future - a peep-hole through the florescence dimension |
In my 'business as usual' scenario, at this time of year I'm usually far further south. Usually, I escape from my spartan routine and Berlin's grey monotony. Usually, I slow-train it through Brenner Pass to Italy, to perform, to refresh friendships, and enjoy their earlier spring's heyday. It's truly rejuvenating.
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| Customarily, all the world's a stage (angels aren't real so this has to be an actor) where one's cup may runneth over |
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| Mates hanging out, following a mindful gap |
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| Peak season |
Depending on if it's March, April or May, Italy's soft, warming spring air drifts and succours, heavenly with fragrance and beauty - magnificent earthy magnolia, coronets of ethereal blossom, heady creamy jasmine, or glorious intoxicating wisteria. Public and private gardens; bar, cafe and restaurant trellises; avenues and fields; all abound with colour and fragrance. There, the long, dim, dreary winter of Germany's capital becomes a distant memory.
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| Forget 2020's dark bleak reality, circa new moon, barely budding... |
But usual... is different this year. Despite repeat invitations, I'm definitely not in Italy, and stuck in Berlin I observe that on the heels of a record-breakingly mild, rainy winter, the far north is tentatively enjoying a somewhat untimely blooming of its own. Violets and early blossom vividly illustrate that March is this year's April, and that's not the only show. For just as in the rest of our home planet, the far north's feverish with Covid-19. Suddenly, viral is the new normal.
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| Looking back - a sidelined view of the same-old, same-old |
Our previously open international borders are closing, our countries are going into lockdown, and our air quality's improving with flight routes cancelled, taxis stalled, and commuter traffic diminished by more people working from home. Even if I could've afforded it, no matter how much I'd wanted to, I couldn't have escaped south to Italy now. Let alone to answer another invitation to go really, really far south to Aotearoa New Zealand to pass the
inverno in a winter home-stay in semi-rural 'paradise' with my aging Mum.
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| Nobody gets past here! |
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| (Almost) Nothing (and no-one) to see here |
All over our world, everyone's finally finding out what my routine normal - and anyone else with a chronic health condition's routine normal - reality is like. In March 2020, everyday reality = staying the fuck at home. No longer great, escape has gone nanoscopic.
Marie Kondo's got nothing on this version of organisational minimalism. Suddenly, planning escape = a mere excursion out of the house to the supermarket(s), hunting for whatever your staple food, drink and toiletry items are. In Paris these days you need a pass to head outside to do your messages. In peak-virus Wuhan you couldn't even do that - the authorities went shopping for you. If you're lucky enough to have a garden or a balcony, all you can do to escape your own four walls is jog on the spot or stroll back and forth out there. Forget tiny houses, think tiny reality.
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| You could run a marathon out here if that Dracaena wasn't in the way |
For that matter, just think about how lucky enough you may be to have a home right now. No matter how enclosing your walls may feel - at least you've got walls. Not just a flimsy tent on a city embankment, or a waterproof cover to sleep under and a supermarket trolley for your things, or a railway bridge and a blanket and a backpack, or a bit of a dry overhang, or a bombed-out cellar, or an overcrowded refugee camp, or a room shared with 5 other people. Yes, here reading this, safely stuck at home for a (hopefully) relatively short period of time, indeed, you're one of the lucky ones.
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| Looking the other way? OR Looking at things another way |
If you're well-off enough and well enough to risk it and go out grocery shopping, when you reach your local store you may find more minimalism, your dietary choices dramatically reduced by wealthy food-hoarding pros who got there earlier than you. One afternoon last week I visited three different supermarkets before my hunting expedition could be deemed near enough to success. Although one item from my wish-list was still missing - rolled oats - which took yet another pursuit on yet another day to another, larger supermarket, yet further afield, and even then I could still only track down
großblatt (large-flake) ones instead of my regular
klein. Who knew there were so many ravening porridge fans? Ultimately, after each paltry pantry victory, I carried my measly collection of trophies home and restocked fridge, cupboards and jars.
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| Ignoring all the coronas I went out to the shops... |
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| ...only to find that of some things there was only one variety... |
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| ...and this was all the bounty I got |
So the triumphal hunting feast shall be cancelled. Not just because nobody can visit me now. For yes, I admit it, after 5-6 years of preparing for proverbial rainy days - nothing to do with spring showers, and everything to do with shopping and getting everything done on less-fatigued, non-pain days - I'm CovidPro level at the mundane rigours of this provisioning business. (Thanks for that, ME/CFS.) Physical distancing/distant socialising and some improvements in health aside, shaking my self-care about in solitude and managing that victory well is more of a long-term
modus operandi.
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| Showing some spine |
Even in the face of things these days, I'm glad I live alone, just grateful to receive and scrape by on below-poverty-line welfare. Glad to be child-free, not having to home-school antsy progeny or try to find non-existent, shut-down childcare facilities for them because I still have to work; glad to be absolved of my former precariat worker life with the ever-present existential stressors of having no financial umbrella to cover cancelled gigs; glad I don't have to expend energy consoling a partner or flatmate whose job may be freshly gone when my own compassion cup hath already run dry.
(OK, so there's still a lack of financial umbrella and state health insurance, and I do confess to commiserating with family and friends, and I'm extremely indebted to the miracle of the internet a.k.a. the lifeline.)
This week, in more-or-less lockdown I happily eat my lentil burgers alone. Because despite a run on lentils out there (just like those rolled oats), my own jars of lentils here at home, although they'd not runneth over, were hitherto fully stocked.
Dealing with singular demands on a daily basis. Welcome to my world. We're all in it together now.
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| A proverbial feast... |
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| ...not altogether alone |
HOWEVER, if intimate groups of (mainly youthful) fuckwits continue congregating (witnessed on my hunting trips); if devil-may-care human sheep keep flocking en masse to the beach (we all saw the pictures on TV and online); and if sneaky friends carry on meeting elbow-to-elbow (instead of exchanging brief elbow-bumps) on park benches, we'd all better get used to this diminished state of affairs in isolation. Not to mention a diminished population absent some of the precious ones we love.
Either that, or justice shall dictate that all those non-distant socializing moronas will die and the annual Darwin Awards (which, to cite their webpage "salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring
those who accidentally remove themselves from it in a spectacular
manner!") will be inundated with non-noteworthy nominations. If only there were a just and vengeful God, I'd say a prayer now: Dear God, PLEASE selectively smite these aforementioned fuckwits down now in order that this plague not drag interminably on!
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| Hanging out with all your friends at the park may lead to you or someone you love being hoisted by your own petard |
Meanwhile, as a neighbourhood mind-map expert who walks my commutes most of the time, at least I know which less populated detours to take on my way to the shops, or anywhere, really. Walking alone is 2020's version of minimal travel. For variety, at intervals one gets to simultaneously swerve or spring nimbly aside from one's good fellow humans to stay those two goodly safe metres apart. It's a hip and footwork move a bit like in Zumba, but on the footpath instead of at your shut-down gym. In Berlin reality, walking's actually far more relaxing now that the e-scooter clutter's been removed from the sidewalks, along with their super-speedster illegal footpath riders. Three cheers for the corona virus! Hip-hip-oh wait...
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| Looks cheer-full, but this is no time to pull any punches |
It is, however, finally time for another admission. With one obvious, poorly-lit, and bleak exception, all of these photographs were shot circa full moon in April 2019. In more or less the same procedure as every year, the blossom - in all it's crowning glory - is in real-time yet several more days and nights away. Last year, Lottumstraße never looked and smelt so good.
Circa this April's full moon in two weeks from today's new moon, I'm hoping to then wrangle a solo-stroll via it to that aforementioned larger branch of one of my regular organic supermarkets. Though if things with Covid-19 get really serious here due to carelessness, and under a hard curfew we subsequently lose the freedom to einkaufen futher than 300-500 metres from home, I may well be out of luck.
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| Airborne | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Good to know it'll be still be here in 2021.
I'd like to hope you, all our loved ones, and I will still be here then too.
