‘Stopping the diary/’ wrote Philip Larkin, ‘Was a stun to memory,/ Was a blank starting.’ I never really understood those lines until Covid. The pandemic has turned my diary into an acre of white space, like the gymnasium wall at school just begging for some adolescent graffiti. ‘PARTY,’ I want to scribble. ‘SMALL FLAT, 100 PEOPLE, 8 P.M. BRING A BOTTLE.’ The damping down of all social activity this year has made the question ‘What did you do over the weekend?’ crassly offensive, or even something more sinister. Am I being asked this by a member of the new Stasi trying to catch me out? Before the pandemic I used to pretend to have an interesting life. Now I admit to a boring one: ‘Nothing,’ I reply.
Time and again, I have heard sentences that start: ‘2020 has been the worst year since…’. The line is often completed with a historical fact which allows the speaker to show off. The more obscure, the better. ‘The worst year since the Norway debacle’, or ‘the worst since a biliary tract injury made Eden take his eye off Suez’. I have even heard myself saying versions of it: ‘2020 has been the worst year since Germany found a gap in the Maginot Line at the Ardennes.’ Fearing this sounded too highbrow, I have now changed tack. ‘The worst since 1975, when no Cliff Richard single made the charts.’ But all these comparisons ignore the simple reality that the important events of our lives occur in private space. For me, 2020 is the worst year since 2018, when my father died.
I lost a friend this month. The cycle lane in Kensington kept me safe mornings and evenings, but the council seem to have panicked after a complaint from Nigel Havers, and they tore it out.
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