200 and 30 days more, we arrive at October 1, 2021. The pandemic looks like it’s swallowing each and every one of us in its covid jaws, saving the double-jabbed from hospitalisation and death. Most are knocked sideways for months and I have yowled at my just-turned-sixteen year old that she will get her first dose this Saturday. I cannot delay this thesis even further.
Since I last notched, two more close family members passed on, one shockingly from a blood clot which is a terribly unexpected event.. Especially hideous when the victim is a teetotaller, non-smoker and a dedicated paediatrician, who elected to leave Manchester for rural Sri Lanka and a very good Christian. I am an aetheist who goes around believing we are bio-chemical blobs moving around in clothes, but then! The second passer-on, my cousin here in Richmond is a great loss. Having a like-minded first cousin on a sharing-Uber route close by is a real treat. Now, when she is a clever conversationalist, lover of jazz and like me believes in reason and rational explanations for the universe, it sucks! To top it all, she is one of the few who can easily share a bottle of wine, dines, but also gets down on the pub dance floor and shakes a leg. Sigh! Susie, you will be missed and how!
So ditch the notion of 200 days, I am well behind. But this ailing thesis is also the saving grace; the object that gives me utter satisfaction in distress, the sandbox to which I return happily to spend hours plotting, sharpening pencils, transcribing mechanically when I need to process grief and loss! In exchange for receiving random meaningless stimuli, shared and regurgitated by a universe of agitated humans revolving, gathering fuel in vacant lots in this pandemic ( Preludes, T.S. Eliot), I descend into war-torn Jaffna. I listen to the oral histories: aural, powerful, restoring. It is a retreat and workshop; a gift of diverse voices where there is silence, company in isolation and transport where travel halts on its quarantine tracks. I work and revive, ‘knawing’ as a friend and I call ‘gnawing/ knowledge’ = knawing’.
Thankfully I have presented a chapter re-written twice, which I finally feel good about and has been approved by my supervisor Jonathan Spencer as being 90% in final shape. Now, I hope he wasn’t being kind! More will follow on writing and what helps and the process of getting through life’s tough year of 2021 and ‘keeping on, keeping on’. Thank God, he didn’t pass on too!
01 Oct Chapter 2
I feel rather comforted by the mild howling of the wind in the chimney, the drumming of raindrops on the roof and the swaying of the cherry tree outside my ‘sofa workspace’ downstairs as I began the day with the proverbial cuppa and my audiobook in the background. A nice gentle masculine voice intoning Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow calmly, and not speaking of breakfast or ‘we’ in any form. The offspring are with the ex (along with my best Le Creuset pans, yes!) and am gonna get a lot done today and tomorrow before they return.
