By now, I have pretty much ground to a halt. There is another set of prints to finish, but the weather has been cold and damp and out in the plastic conservatory where I work the ink on the last set is still not dry, ten days after printing. There is no room for another set. The most useful thing I can do about paintings is work out where I’m going to put the stack that has been sat out there all summer, somewhere dry where they won’t warp or mold before the spring.
Working from home goes on, and is busy; stuttering rapid-fire barrages of emails and video calls burred with distortion, issues without context. The kids go to school and we try and act as though it’s normal, that every little sniff and sneeze don’t make us remember all over again that them doing so has expanded our circle of contacts from ten people to three thousand. The experience of one of their friends, who spent two weeks on a ventilator and two months in the hospital, and now faces life-changing damage to his heart – at seventeen – makes a mockery of all the brisk, don’t-make-a-fuss statistics.
In my head, just white noise, inertia; stale, recycled ideas that I can scrape up no enthusiasm for. For a day or two I wondered vaguely if I might write here about the work of Abraham Maslow – but then I listened to a podcast that did a better job than I ever could [link here], so that was that. I’m trying – and have been for months – to help somehow, deliver groceries, cook meals, walk dogs; but everywhere I ask I get no answer.