Influences on the language

Recent events have introduced new usages, or blown the dust off some old ones.  Six months ago, the expression ‘clapping for carers’ would have elicited blank incomprehension.  Now it is a weekly national institution.  ‘Social distancing’ would have sounded distinctly sinister, and reminiscent of apartheid. Now it just means staying out of coughing distance of other people.  Until recently, ‘furlough’ was a word I had only seen once, back in the early 1960s, in my brother’s apprenticeship indentures, and in that context it meant the yearly holiday allowance.  (And come to that, I don’t think I’ve seen ‘indenture’ since then either.)   And then there’s ‘lockdown’, of course, which sounds like a hideous transatlantic neologism.

Apart from that, our concentration has been on the garden - yet again.  Our neighbouring nursery is keeping the cash flow trickling in by allowing customers to book and pay for supplies on the phone, and then go and collect at a specified time.  We loaded up the Egg with bags of compost, muck and gravel and schlepped it all home.  Good job we have a sack barrow to ease the strain on elderly backs.  We’ve got a few dozen more bedding plants in, and shall continue while the weather stays good.  The warm days have really boosted the potatoes, which are past the tops of their growing sacks.  The runner beans are planted out: it’s a bit early for them, but they were growing so vigorously in their pots that we’d little choice.  The tomatoes can wait a few days yet.  We’re going to grow them in decorative containers this year since we have them available, and we'll be growing them on the terrace, where we spend a fair bit of time in the summer.

As I write, we ought to have been soaking in fjord scenery while enjoying a prolonged and excessive breakfast in the lido on the Queen Victoria... That trip is rescheduled for July next year, and given that it’s cold and showery over there today, that may turn out to be a better option.  Of course, whether cruising can continue as in the past is a wide open question.

I have to say that I’m not missing the hobby much.  In my final years, the pattern was of short days after last minute changes of plea, chronic prosecution failures and the consequences of Grayling’s ill-advised and chaotic privatisation, now mercifully reversed, of the probation service.  That’s before we come to the shabby working environment - but since that’s all behind me, I needn’t dwell on that. [Oh go on then: one of the lavatories had a notice on the wall enjoining us to leave it as we’d expect to find it.  I resisted the temptation to add a postscript: ‘oh, you mean you want me to strip and repaint the flaky walls, fix the dripping tap, replace the broken lavatory seat that I reported a year ago and rake out and replace the filthy grouting?’]  But there were good times too, and I don’t need to go to court to keep in touch with my lovely colleagues.

It’s a shame that my stopping sitting coincides with the suspension of art group, German conversation etc.  The weekly ride out to Fortnums hardly compensates.  Still, thank goodness it’s happening during an unusually pleasant spring: it would be misery in the winter.