Terry Prone: Those who revolt never do it when conditions are at their worst
18/12/2020 Covid-19 Pandemic (Coronavirus), Ireland. Day 268 since start of lockdown. Day 18. Pictured People Christmas shopping and enjoying the atmosphere of Dublin City Center. Photo: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie
A couple ring and offer to drop around for coffee. Lovely long-term friends with whom I have shared joys, sorrows, setbacks and delights over a couple of decades. We form a triangular cats’ cradle, so we do, this couple and me. Links from finger to finger, pulling tighter through the years.
I stand in the only room that has a good phone signal, listening as she shares the activities they plan in the few days before the restrictions are lifted in the run up to Christmas and I realise what I’m hearing is a version of something I remember from my all too brief period studying history in UCD, where the lecturer always talked of the Owsthrians Rewolting. He also, did this particular lecturer, made the point, repeatedy, that whether it was the Owsthrians or the Russian peasantry or our own in 1916, those who revolted never did it when conditions were at their worst. They took to the streets and to violence just when things were getting a little easier. Same thing with Covid-19. Now we can see Christmas easing of restrictions coming closer, we’re already losing the run of ourselves.
I tell my friends to enjoy their mulled wine. Someplace else. And promise to see them in the spring.
Paddy from the West sends a package. This has been a 2020 habit. His packages have contained a mixture. Some were books I lent him earlier, now being returned. Some were new books being lent by him to me. His packages are as unique as he is. They do not have the sharp corners or crisp outlines of an Amazon box. In fact, to be honest, a Paddy package looks like it belongs in a True Crime account from the 1950s and should contain a hacked-off and putrefying portion of a torso.
You instinctively run your hand underneath a Paddy package to test for congealing blood. But they are always tightly clean, bubble-wrap firmly sellotaped. In this case, the bubble wrap surrounds elegant Christmas wrapping which in turn encases four books, shining with newness and promise.
The notion that someone took the time to work out what you like to read is always pleasing. When they find four books you haven’t already read, it’s the cherry in the martini. I fall on the hardback locked door mystery right there and then. Of course I should wait until Christmas Day, but that’s one of the advantages of lockdown: who’s going to tell on me?
The younger writer pal has brow-beaten me into a promise that I will watch Home Alone, despite deliberately avoiding it since it surfaced. In return, she has agreed to watch A Christmas Story, a lovely movie that slow-burned its way to classic status on the other side of the Atlantic but is virtually unknown here. She expresses concerns that if she were to hate it, this might damage our relationship. I laugh that off for about thirty seconds before realizing what a potent point she makes. Of course, if she doesn’t adore it, I will know her for what she truly is. Shallow. Uncultivated. Unobservant. Insensitive.
It’s the same with books. You lend a book to someone, sure that the borrower will not only love it, but spot the same felicities within it that you spotted, and if they don’t, you hate them a little. You hate them a little for a long time and realise they were never up to the friendship in the first place.
Maybe I should ask her not to watch that movie?
Routine pandemic item on Virgin Media. How churches will cope with Christmas services. Important to believers, but not hold-the-front-page stuff, even though they have a Church of Ireland clergywoman named Maria Jannson who is Dean of Waterford, planted in front of her webcam with her Roman collar on her. (Or maybe it’s a clerical collar unless you’re RC - no offense intended.) She offers first opportunity to answer the first to the other clerical participant, who is definitely RC but somewhat confusingly is wearing a hoodie and has no Roman collar. He generously indicates she should lash on, and lash on she does, describing many church services as “unconscionably boring” and pointing out that God is kind of ubiquitous and not “site-specific,” so the faithful don’t need to get obsessive about turning up in church on Christmas Day.
The two Virgin presenters, clearly enchanted by this fearlessly unorthodox personality, push her about managing generally in the pandemic. To which the answer is that it got her out of many meetings that in the normal run of things needlessly shorten her life and that doing them on Zoom instead tended to take the hot air out of at least some of the participating windbags. I cannot quote her accurately because when she is in full spate, you have no choice, as a viewer, but to live in that moment: the Star is Born moment when a superb television performer appears out of nowhere, unafraid to push the doctrinal envelope and combining belief with irreverence. More Maria, please. Immediately.
A client who can, himself, do fair damage to a slab of Heineken, maintains we’re missing the golden opportunity offered by the pandemic to address our nationally problematic relationship with alcohol and its catastrophic and chronic consequences, not just for the health and happiness of individuals and families, but for the economy. He suggests that if you made a total separation of food and drink, taking alcohol completely out of café/restaurant situations, we might learn that human connectedness is not dependent on beer, wine and brandy and at the same time more safely bridge the gap between now and vaccination.
The New Yorker magazine arrives, with a cover showing a girl online, hair smoothly drawn back in a ballerina bun, hoop earrings just so, wearing a frilly white shirt accessorized with bracelets. Seated in front of a computer propped up on a pile of books and showing the face of an other individual, with a paper screen behind her, she is confident, festive, even, with the desk light skewed so her made-up face is illumined. Perfection, down to the waist. Due south of that point, she’s wearing boxer shorts and slippers. Below and around her chair, chaos reigns. Two cardboard cartons, one opened, join the medical gloves, hand sanitiser, empty coffee cups, used face masks, free weights, takeaway box and tote bag on the floor while two cats crouch in the mess. It visually sums up the whole year on both sides of the Atlantic.
The electronic alerts of death speed up, competing on devices, spurred by the new virus variant and closing down of London. Not since early in the year have they come in such clusters. Our equivalent of the medieval church bell tolling. Carrying the same cold certainties. Donne was way ahead of his time.
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