A New Normal

We live in a world of routine, our routines:

For the past three weeks I have written this blog on a Sunday morning and it has felt that even nature has been following suit. I awoke to an overcast sky but now the sun is streaming through the windows and once again I hear the sound of birdsong.

When I began to write I had a vague idea of the connections I wanted to share with you but have found myself veering in another direction completely. I think we have all being doing that a little.

I found myself thinking of family and friends and memories that perhaps I haven’t for some time. I think it is because we are missing tiny pieces.

Remembering helps us to connect to normality and we need that now.

I finally felt brave enough and posted a video online of my performance poetry and have been overwhelmed by the response and in doing so it made me think of another memory, as the poem I posted is really about love and time. Time is something we all have so much of now and yet time still seems to pass more quickly than expected, it is time that connects us.

A memory came flooding back of my Mother, who once told me when she was in her late seventies, that when looking in the mirror “she couldn’t see herself” something which I think is so sorrowful yet so beautifully poetic.

My Mother was talking about time, how nature cruelly ages our bodies yet leaves us internally as before. That inside she still felt like a young girl with the same thoughts and feelings.

When I discover a new line or wrinkle it feels so very poignant as I stand at the top of that metaphorical hill and understand how precious time is, time we so often squander when we are young.

Perhaps though, one of the lessons this will teach us all is how we should seize every moment, it is an honour that so many in our world have so recently been denied.

I am also becoming increasingly worried that when it is eventually safe and ‘time’ to hold my Daughters and my Grandchildren, I may require a restraining order to actually let them go.

Something else that is a little disturbing, is how quickly we have all adapted to our ‘new normal’ that is until we step outside our home and comfort zone. When doing so, our current life becomes startlingly real and memories seem (at least for me) to flood, of our past ‘normal’ world.

As someone who is used to rushing around and constantly running out of time, dashing here and there this little verb is a favourite of mine:

“I’m just popping to my friends” “Do you fancy popping in for coffee?” (I know that sounds like a euphemism in a romantic comedy) and my absolute go to phrase “I’m just popping to the shops.”

Except, we can’t.

We cannot just 'pop’ anywhere, to a friends for coffee and especially to the shops. I live in a village, a much bigger village than it once was but a village of sorts. In which there is a very handy ‘Tesco Extra Garage’ that so many of us use to ‘pop’ in. The usual reason I nip in, is that I am right in the middle of making a cake and have run out of icing sugar.

It is normally late, I have visited at various times and as late as 11.45pm, just in time to grab the last bag of icing sugar before they shut so I can finish that birthday cake for the next day.

This week I needed to buy milk, it was the afternoon and I didn’t need lots of shopping, I like everyone have been trying to limit my supermarket visits. So I thought I would just pop to the shop but…

I haven’t that privilege anymore, we haven’t and it is a privilege, one that we have taken for granted.

Now that our blindfolds have been forcibly taken off perhaps we will all be a little kinder to those less fortunate than ourselves, having experienced just a tiny taste of how it feels to not have something that we see as so basic.

Instead, I stood in a now familiar queue and my five minute jaunt became forty minutes, observing new rules and regulations.

While I stood there, memories returned:

Amongst the sadness this week there have been so many positives the biggest in our little island being our new national treasure ‘Captain Tom Moore’ who set himself the goal of walking a 100 lengths of his back garden before his 100th Birthday and by doing so, hoped to raise £1000 for the NHS.

Not in his wildest dreams do I imagine he would have expected to raised over 25 million and still counting. His amazing feat making now a memory for us all and I can only imagine how proud his family must be feeling!

Hold on to those positives and those memories that I hope will help to shape our world, when it finally begins to heal.

Stay home and stay safe,

Joy xxx