News

This boring pandemic. It is SO boring, right. You can't even really complain much about how boring it is because if boredom is your signature pandemic emotion, well. It has a way of snatching boredom out of the jaws of things that should be highly absorbing. People in Melbourne talk about the daily case numbers in the same way they used to talk about sport.

I have been desperately curious about what it's like outside after the curfew, so I planned and executed a whole thing of a complicated blood donation right before blood bank closing time, then wandered home as slowly as I thought I could render plausible. And once my own scaredycat heightened alertness wore off, post-curfew street wandering was boringly indistinguishable from the many winter evenings I've ridden home alone late, past darkened shops and through mostly but not entirely deserted streets. Although those other winters, at least I was usually slightly drunk and going home to sleep after having done something resembling fun. I knew the streets would not be empty between eight and nine o'clock last Thursday night and I knew it would not really be strange and interesting. But I did it anyway, just for something to do.

Doing your whole life in your home should be stranger than it is. Tomorrow morning I'll get up and sort of get dressed and do a workout in my living room at 7:30am, led on Zoom by the trainer who will be in his gym 30m away across the street. It seems to me that this type of experience should stay strange and not become everyday. The end of that session will overlap with feeding Leonard and myself and cats, we'll get cleaned and dressed ready for work and school which we will not go anywhere different to do, and which will also blur into home and into each other; I will have three meetings with three different groups of people and Lenny will have two or three, and in between we'll both go on with work and I'll talk to the animals and to people over the street and bring washing in off the clotheshorse, if I'm momentarily weak I'll listen to part of the daily state government briefing; I'll make & eat & clean up lunch, speak to my doctor on Facetime while Lenny makes a nest on my bed and plays a videogame in there with his headphones on, then put all of this aside and go out for the one allowed hour of outdoor exercise, come home, more cooking, music, child tucked into bed, then hopefully a bit of time given to some sort of recreational activity purely to take the mind somewhere else for a little while. It's a lot of living to do essentially in the one room, for endless x number of days and nights, and the room itself takes on a quality of being this is the limit of the cosmos. Which as soon as you (I) say it, it's obviously melodrama. But there it is. As in this flawlessly executed piece of genius.

2020: an isolation odyssey from lydia cambron on Vimeo.

What happens when everything is extremely, extremely boring, of course, is it goes right through the immense cloud of boredom and comes out the other side into a new kind of interesting (setting aside that it's massively boring having to actually endure it). Most trivially, stupid tiny things take on larger significance. Several days ago I found a piece of thick dark blue thread, like a bit picked off the frayed end of a strip of woollen cloth, brazenly lying on the very clean white surface of the bathroom bench and I could not in any way account for its origin or how it came to be there. A bit more worthy of being called interesting is the way that personal histories and memories become assets, territories ripe for exploration and exploitation. Groping round in my own memories, well, that's not a new activity, indeed it is called 'work' and it goes on. But I have had some thrilling conversations, in recent weeks, with people who have reached into their own depths of memory, in the absence of discussion-worthy news, to find something to say, and have produced Wordsworthian shards of experience, brought out into the light for the first time maybe since they were first created. The beautiful thing about being present to hear a woman in her eighties talk about being a child in 1945 standing at Queenscliff and seeing a hospital ship sailing into the bay, was watching the surprise come into her face and the years somehow fall away as the memory gathered itself up and took form with her words describing it. 'That was me when I was a little girl' she said, not with reference to a picture or anything discernible to anyone but herself. What a scene! Right now I feel like I could spend the rest of my life coaxing these verbal slide nights out of people. It's such a thrill. I know you can't live in the past, but why can't you? Why can't you live in the past, present and future?

What is 'news' that's worth telling someone about anyway? In a minute I'll put this computer away and go on with Persuasion, enthralling me again as Pride and Prejudice and Emma have already done this year, and not only because I feel like I can really see for the first time the stark limitations of the threadbare provincial settings of these novels. In those worlds, a newsworthy event is a very precious and rare commodity, and character takes its place most of the time. I have no news fit to print, but I have clean white linen on my bed and the skin on my legs hurts because two days ago I shaved them badly with a blunt razor. Like a classic single woman I have carried a large bottle of moisturiser to bed with me, it resides under the pillow upon which I am currently not resting my head. Goodnight.