Blossom

Blossom. The bloom which replenishes as you look on it, so gentle and so fecund, a fairytale of flowers and a cascade of sweet, mild honey scent. It’s everywhere I walk at the moment, a clarion call that spring is here. Canals run clear in Venice. Bees buzz, unpaused, harvesting nectar from bloom to hive. Nature persists, her wonderful order untrammeled. If anything, grateful for the gulp of fresh, non-toxic air all this has brought.

I am talking about the current, global depreciation of the human race. Nature cares, yes: as a Mother whose adult children have long left home, she will never stop loving them. But we’re simply not her problem, now, and we refused to understand when we had the chance that vital transfer of care when the caregiver must become the cared for. We have been abusing her law and order for long enough, and I can’t help but read into this as some sort of divine, Gaia-intervention.

If only we knew how to stop sooner.

I first thought that I could love you when you inhaled so deeply into the shock of white blossom on our dark night together wandering through a ghostly and awesome Battersea park. The way you spoke of nature - your brushings with elephants, the huge bats in Sri Lanka who would give almighty hugs (or, so I imagine), the porous and extensive intelligence of octopuses - appealed you to me so hugely. I suppose because it showed your softness and susceptibleness, your awareness of being an interconnected thing. It made me want that interconnectedness for us.

Strong soft kisses on the jungle gym nets, intertwined as two sheltered monkeys from an Amazonian storm, naturally my mind fizzes with the fact that, although there is nothing more natural than us intertwined, this whole time is unnatural. That heightens everything. To such a deafening extent. It’s like the moment is more precious, but it shouldn’t be, because we know each other just as much, just as little. And should we be kissing, now, like this? Exploring a greater depth of closeness, trying to become one person so no distance need be kept.

Soon we know this has to stop.

I cycle across London. The city is empty, a blank canvas, and I feel like a flying car, brandished in the face of it, scribbling my freewheel across its desolate concrete and remembered bustle. How bright it is, how full of sun. Ringing in my ears are the new isolation measures so I drink in this once-daily taste of freedom to the marrow of my confused bones. At least it tastes less of pollution.

An EU flag, trapped in a high tree in Westminster, reminds me. This crisis, this tragedy, the remedy - solidarity.

In a little Waitrose which seems to be open, staff and shoppers dance around each other, trying to keep distance.

I never realised how important it is to be in touch.

I never realised why live art was such essential soul food.

I never wanted so much to talk to strangers.

I never felt such an irrepressible craving to be outdoors all of the time.

I never thought I would feel such a yearning to be in a sweaty deafening overfull nightclub.

I hope this will stop soon.

Parks are open but they have closed congregational places for play. Again, the import of us together on the childish apparatus behaving not as children not yet a week ago comes crashing down, and I try to ease out from under the weight of its accidental significance. But it’s difficult because intimacy, I also realise now, is our lifeblood.

I think of loved ones stretched across differences and am thankful for our modern measures of being connected. It’s not the same, no one’s saying it is, but it is certainly something.

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A Stitch in Time