Author: admin

Not being keen on cowboy adventures or thrillers about outwitting the SS, as I child I read a lot of sci-fi, because that was the other option on the bookshelves at home. It was mostly the shiny-metal high concept science fiction of the fifties and early sixties: robots, space stations and time travel. Comic books in disguise, made more serious and respectable by the lack of pictures.

In memory, most of it is blurred into one amorphous mass, the heroes and their trusty spaceships; the strange new worlds and alien creatures; new-frontier colonialism stuff with paper-thin characterisation that would pass an afternoon and occasionally as an aside explain what a Lagrange Point is or suchlike.

Isaac Asimov, early adopter of the genre’s boom in post-war America, beloved of the techbros then and now, considered by others problematic in person and on the page, featured heavily in the collection, and I must have read a lot of his work at various points. What I remember is an obscure short story: 2340 AD – a cheery little number commissioned by one of the many magazines he wrote for, about the last pet-owner on Earth, compelled to euthanise the final few non-human animals left alive, in the pursuit of perfect balance and social harmony.

It’s a nonsense, of course – we’ll be toast before we have managed to chop down half of the biodiversity tree we don’t even realise we’re sitting on, let alone get down to a single tortoise and a few rodents. But it rings true in the relentless force that societies are willing to exert to in search of conformity, even when it is a disadvantage to the whole, not just the one. The committee will meet, and listen to what it likes and misremember what it doesn’t, make a desert, and call it peace.

Moving house, like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, happened in two ways: gradually, and then suddenly.

Months of clearing and cleaning, trawling through listings and u-turning on unfamiliar roads, offering eye-watering amounts of money for houses of dubious charm and utility and then being rejected eventually gave way to the dim purgatory of conveyancing. People earning more in an hour than I do in a week endlessly requesting paperwork already sent, chivvying calls from Estate Agents, buyers fretting deadlines. After a small ice-age of it, with failure a constant possibility, we had six days to sift and pack fifteen years worth of stuff, frantically sign up removals and cattery, scrape and scrub until our hands were raw, make so many trips to the dump they knew us by name.

The last frenetic two days moving in resembled nothing more that some harrowing incident in a packaging factory, and twenty miles worth of climbing stairs; and now we live somewhere we have never been before, among strangers. A month in and the smartly-painted old house has revealed a rotten window-frame , plumbing with faulty valves and the demise of the washing machine.

I still can’t get the muscle memory to turn off the right lights in the kitchen, or reliably not stumble on the random steps and stairs. The cats roam their unfamiliar territory, fascinated by the fireplaces and odd corners; fighting on the stairs at night. My eldest has gone to university hundreds of miles away, a crash course in adulting after eighteen months of confinement and shrunken opportunities. The other goes pragmatically to a new school, and we go on working at home, although thankfully no longer rammed elbow to elbow at the same table. In the shed at the bottom of the garden, in a tangle of bikes and camping chairs and tools sit boxes of all my paints and brushes, waiting for the Spring.

Having nowhere to go but the internet for so long has had some strange effects on the telly people. Some have taken it better than others, a full spectrum from reclusive to ham-handed reaction videos to frankly loosing their minds; but short on human company as we have been, we’ll take it if it’s all that’s on offer (there might be an Only Fans joke to be made at this point. Just not by me). Content has been produced, experiences have been observed if not shared, expectations have been both lowered and confounded. Transformations have been wrought.

Alton Brown, veteran of American food tv, and his wife Elizabeth, a designer, started posting videos on Youtube over the first US quarantine, possibly out of sheer boredom, but it has stuck, and they still post hour-plus shows most Tuesday nights. The contrast to his career programs, all authority and slick production, is startling. Unscripted, shot on an iPhone and prone to technical wipeouts, their shows are a joy, although full of things that no doubt have producers, lawyers and food technologists prostrate with horror. Food gets burned, dropped on the floor, fed to their dogs. Ingredients are missing, or rancid in the fridge; they talk at cross purposes, interrupt each other, bicker and play pranks. Liquor, swearing, irascible rants and the occasional immolated iPhone (BBQ night…) have surprised viewers more used to the regular network shows, and regular comments are posted on the harm to his career. But tired, stressed, bored and buffeted by the chaos of the world like the rest of us, they invited the internet in and tried to keep it company; and they are good company, an engaging and likeable pair.

Watching professional culinary training quail in the face of the fridge of doom and rage at dishes piled in the sink helps anyone over their fear of kitchen incompetence. The chat rolls along and thousands of people feel like they have been invited for dinner. QQ, as a Reddit comment had it ‘does not gaf and is hilarious’. That’s the kind of company we all need right now, surely?

A summer holiday batch of art supplies off to the food bank. Meagre pickings this time, with no donations except twenty pounds I made flogging cards at a tiny craft fair. Sketchbooks and pencils, coloured paper and glue sticks; better than nothing, but just barely.

Packing them up, it occurs to me that I haven’t painted anything for more than a year, although I have done a few prints and tried some collage. With good reasons, really; lack of time and space both physically and mentally, lots going on. But it’s uncomfortable to be doing so little while feeling that there is so much to be done; when it’s hard to forget that only time past is certain, and the future very much not.

Against the backdrop of a world run mad, sure – it can’t help – but also with the mundane horrors of entropy, creaking joints and softening eyesight, inattention and apathy. Waking up has become a checklist of mechanical failures and system glitches, nothing too serious (I mean, yet…) but longer all the time. I fantasise about an artistic legitimacy that would somehow come with room to work and a door to close and something to say, but scrabble for purchase on all fronts. Meanwhile there is any amount of cleaning and packing to do, the eldest off to university (miles and miles away), another round on the back-to-school Covid rollercoaster to endure. But we had a few days holiday; slept somewhere else for the first time in eighteen months, sifted pebbles on the beach. Remembered possibilities.