Monday
As billionaire ghost-American Mark Zuckerberg emerges from his – dunno, really … pod? Mansion pod? Pod mansion? – to remark upon his billionaire manbaby rival Elon Musk’s continuing failure to set a date for their cage fight, I suddenly and entirely coincidentally recall (courtesy of an otherwise altogether dismal attempt at a Latin GCSE) the impressively named Roman statesman and general of the third century, BC Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, who so scrupulously avoided direct confrontation with the altogether superior Hannibal that he was nicknamed “Cunctator”. It means “the delayer” but I dread to think how it might translate if the slipshod typists of, say, Twitter, got hold of it.
Tuesday
A few hot days are coming up, but I am willing to accept this in the middle – no, wait! Towards the end! – of an otherwise perfect summer. Cool, damp, often outright wet and almost entirely free of the hours of beating sun that do so much to ruin the months of June through August for so many of us. It’s been wonderful. Not to mention, of course, a hugely preferable alternative to the droughts, wildfires and assorted other disasters taking place in Europe and around the increasingly parched and flammable globe. It will surely be that this, the Cold Girl Summer of 2023, will be looked back on in the coming decades as the climate crisis takes further hold with the bitter yearning that those who remember the unbroken golden days of 1976 have for those now.
Wednesday
I made the mistake of going out and speaking to people today and one of them, a friend of a friend, said in a discussion about the cost of living crisis in absolutely appalled tones: “Soon, just going out to eat will be a luxury!” One of those sudden gulfs you can find opening up between you and another human being duly yawned between us. How do you become someone who thinks eating out is not a luxury? CAN you become one, in fact – or do you have to be born one? Is it purely a matter of income or something else? I think it probably takes at least three generations of unbroken entitlement, but I am keen to hear your estimates.
Thursday
Bloody hell – Wilko’s gone. The 90-year-old family-owned homewares, garden products, sweets, sponges, bleach and fairy lights retailer and just about the nearest thing to a corner shop left on the high street has gone into administration, with the potential loss of 12,000 jobs.
What are we going to do now? Wilko filled the void left when pick ‘n’ mix-based leviathan Woolworths shuffled off this mortal coil. Wilko was great. Its stuff was cheap but not crap – you could feel safe buying a multiplug socket there in a way you can never quite manage in Poundland (rigorously tested though I’m sure they all are, of course. I’m talking perceptions, not facts, ‘kay!). It had a vast assortment of goods, all of them either useful or just the right side of treat-y, stopping well short of mindless extravagance. And best of all – it was there. Just there. There was even one on High Street Kensington, for goodness sake, doubtless giving all its more chi-chi shops nearby the vapours.
Kurt Vonnegut once delivered a peroration about the joys of going out on a local errand because: “I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” I used to fart around in Army and Navy (when my mum was busy feeling coats), Woolworths as a teenager, Hema as a younger adult and Wilko, as I move fully into my homewares and garden products years, most of all. Where will I go now? Where will we all go when everywhere’s gone?
Friday
My post-Wilko melancholy has been banished, banished utterly. For I have fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition. I have seen a real, live bullfinch! No, honestly! Large as life and twice as natural. I had wanted to see one ever since I saw an illustration of this heedlessly beautiful blue and red creation in my Observer’s Book of Birds as a child. To the 10-year-old frustrated birdwatcher roaming round the streets of Catford trying to pretend the porn mags and empties in the hedges were sparrows that lives within me still, my dream’s arrival on the branch right in front of me was an airpunching moment.
Except I couldn’t punch the air because a) I was in a hide (on Sculthorpe Moor Nature Reserve, which has been creeping up the rankings for a while and is now officially my favourite place on earth – especially now Wilko’s gone) and displays of emotion beyond the softest murmur of delight are very much frowned upon in such circumstances and b) I would have scared the bullfinch off.
But of course part of the beauty of birdwatching is how undemonstrative it is. You sit, you concentrate, you scan your patch of woodland or wetland and sometimes – sometimes – comes a reward in the form of a sighting, so fragile and fleeting that there is no real possibility of sharing it. All you can do is hold your breath, widen your eyes and try somehow to take it in deeply enough to remember it for ever. The joy, as you hug it tightly to your chest, becomes more concentrated for its privateness and its privilege. I had a hell of a good time. Even though you must neither fart, nor fart around, in a hide.
