the brilliantly leaping gazelle

So here we are again.

Well kind of.

Kind of in the sense that we’ve endured a national lockdown before. We know what to expect. The novelty, if one can call it that, the unknown curtailments on all aspects of daily life and the growing sense of disassociation from the lives’ that we lived; the notion that if the past is indeed another country, then quite possibly our old lives’ might suffer the same fate as Mesopatma.

Kind of not, in the sense I’m no longer in sunny Camberwell, but am in beardy Stoke Newington. When the last lockdown was announced, I could’ve stayed here, as I was here on the Friday just before it was announced. We all knew it was coming, so I asked Nosferatu to drive me back, partly because of the space, partly because of the garden. But mainly because that was where LMS was, and for reasons to do with my mental health I knew I’d need the sort of single-minded dedication to fun, general messing about and just being herness that sometimes drove her parents mad, but which I found refreshing.

An example – one of may – leaps to mind. One morning during the last lockdown, Joe and Marge came into the kitchen to discuss the latest death rates from COVID to wash down their cups of tea with. LMS and I, were by contrast, engaged in the more important business of classifying farts. What, for example, did a weasel fart sound like, and when did it become a trumpet fart?

I knew that I was going to miss her terribly, but this new lockdown has just made a frankly appalling state of affairs a mountain sized portion of broccoli ice cream worse.