Monday 30 March 2020

Just keep swimming.

Today I am scared and sad. A week of home and nothing else and suddenly it all feels quite a lot. I am still getting up, having coffee, watercolour painting, reading, writing, cooking. But I can't even hug my sister because she's quarantined in another part of the house (the old playroom, not the East Wing of our mansion). I haven't hugged her since I left for South East Asia two months ago and I can see her through the window doing yoga in the garden and it's making me want to cry.

I miss a lot of people. I miss my boyfriend. I miss my friends who I haven't seen for months. I am craving sitting in one of their beds with a cup of tea, catching up on each other's lives. I think the entire nation is dreaming of going to the pub with their mates. Little did I think I'd miss bumping into anyone in the local towns.

I am avoiding the news but I know what it's saying. Doom, gloom, death, doom and gloom. Can you imagine if we reported deaths for the other illnesses that kill in high numbers the same way we are reporting this? Perhaps it is a way of getting the public to take these measures seriously. Perhaps. It just makes me feel scared and sad.

And I am lucky. I am safe in my lovely home with my loving family. We can go for walks in the beautiful fields just outside our door. My mum takes great pride in the garden and it brings a lot of joy.

I am, on most days, doing pretty well and staying pretty positive. I just wanted to share how I felt on this gloomy Monday, because I think nearly all of us are feeling the same. And it's okay, to feel scared and sad, because God knows this time is so uncertain.

I keep thinking of that bit in Finding Nemo when Dory is swimming into the depths of the ocean and she's scared so she sings a little song, "just keep swimming, just keep swimming". It's actually quite helpful. "Just keep swimming". We'll get past this dark and scary bit eventually.

Wednesday 25 March 2020

How lucky I have been.

Travelling is probably the greatest example of, or the greatest way to experience, time as non-linear. I spent just under two months exploring three countries in South East Asia. There were many trains, planes, boats, buses. Some overnight, some cutting through the day. I spent about seven weeks continuously going somewhere, and always somewhere I had never been before. Time stretched out, time seemed to skip a beat, time went in a blink and now it feels like a dream.

This is the weirdest part. On Saturday 21st April I woke up on Koh Lanta in southern Thailand and 36 hours and three planes later I arrived at my home in Buckinghamshire, England. And then, all of a sudden, it was like I had never left at all. Asia was a long and lovely dream. It was as if I had pressed pause on my house. I was back again and we started where I had left it.

Perhaps it is all made weirder by self-isolation. I was constantly moving and now I cannot even go to the shops without good reason. Did that all really happen? The pictures keep telling me that it did.

I can close my eyes and I can see everything that I saw. I can open them and it is like I never left. I am going back and forth and back and forth and yet I turn and I look at the sunlight on my bed and the open window and do all those places even exist?

The smells, the loudness, the quietness of the waves on the beach, the people, the tastes, the colours. They were all so different from where I come from. But I saw it. I went and felt it. And now I have this long and lovely dream and time is no longer one straight line. And how lucky I have been.