Outside, beyond the kitchen window, sun shines across a broad valley. Trees wave, shadows occasionally flit across ploughed fields not yet sprouted and in the meadow, oblivious sheep safely graze. Tinny music drifts from the speakers of the cheap laptop I write on; it is softly playing random selections from my music collection while I’m emailing friends and family. Lauridsen’s, ‘Sure on this Shining Night’, has begun to play, driving immediate thoughts away, all replaced by gentle, melodic memories flooding into my mind, bringing distant friends and music from Summer Choir School in Portugal two years ago.
Spontaneous laughter in a refectory full of happy, chattering choristers, filling themselves with food before afternoon rehearsal starts.
We sang Sure on this Shining Night as if we were a heavenly choir in the Last Days, descending to Har Megiddo. How portentous. Little did we know it would be our last choral summer school for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, there is a book I like to read from time to time, reminding me of happier pre-covid times. I shall have to replace it soon, it’s almost worn out. It is called, ‘Summers of Light, Hearts of Gold’, a whimsical memoire of choir school.
I miss those people and times very much and I’m one of the luckier ones. I don’t live in a city; a high rise flat or maisonette, with or without balcony. Out here in the countryside, the nightmare of Covid only intrudes when I yearn to join friends or my community.
No doubt about it, people are suffering and dying; medical friends have told me of their working lives, but I’ve still begun to question the wisdom and sanity of measures being taken to try to protect people from Covid. Why are people still catching the disease when we’re all doing our best to prevent the spread – locked into our own homes. Is it spreading because people are not observing lockdown? Breaking curfew? In mainstream media, there seem to be more voices calling for stronger measures of protection; better face-masks, further social distancing, one way systems in shops and supermarkets, limiting the numbers of people in one place. I read about a suggestion to close supermarkets because they enable the spread of the disease – but how, when we’re all taking the right steps to prevent it? All those people who tested positive for Covid have recovered and should have a natural immunity, we just don’t know for how long. Those people who have not had Covid yet are being offered, in most cases, a vaccine. How long will the vaccine, we are being told we need, protect us against Covid19? Covid20; Covid21, 22, 23 and all the other variants it will undoubtedly mutate into over the next few years, all needing tighter control measures while a virtual world is imposed on the Global population? Covid, whatever it turns out to be, is still here. In the future, will we have to have four injections a year? Or more? Even after vaccination we can be assymptomatic spreaders, so we’ll still have to stay locked in our homes, wearing PPE when necessity forces us out.
We follow advice and guidance from health and science experts, from our governments – to stop the spread. We are told to avoid going outside unless in great need. We are told to social distance – not physically distance, two metres apart – SOCIALLY distance. We are told to use a computer, live on the internet – a virtual world. We are told to use online banking; to shop for all our needs through our computers, to accept cookies and allow internet service providers to harvest every detail of our personal and intimate lives in order for them to build a personal profile they can sell to other companies. To make wealthy men even wealthier.
Could there be another, vindictively cruel way, to torment a social species than to force it into isolation with laws demanding antisocial behaviours? Where does preservation end and persecution begin?
I want a real life. I need to be able to smell clean fresh air, rich in oxygen exhaled by plants and trees, with the scents of countryside life in it; I want to imbine the beauty of nature in places devoid of human interference. I need to travel, to satisfy personal, animistic, energetic needs that a virtual life on the internet will never, ever be able to fulfil – the need to interact with other life forms in their every nuance. I need to be able to sing with like-minded souls. Yes, I do sing here at home. My fluency on the piano has improved a lot through being isolated from the life and friends I knew. And yet, I would not have chosen this way to develop the skill. I would have preferred a choice. Occasionally, a study is published in a newspaper or magazine, examining the ways in which choirs can sing together; virtual choirs by video conferencing. Or socially distanced, when we’re not allowed to travel, in a mask with three layers – Really? Do me a favour…
I like to think that all branches of medical science will develop new techniques to study different treatments for every disease and a better understanding of the human condition as a result of research into coronaviruses and use this knowledge to benefit the human species, not pharmaceutical companies and profits.
I want to live, not exist. Therefore I live in hope, because it is better than living in despair.