Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

THE THING ABOUT LOCK-DOWN

The thing about lock-down is how polite everybody is when you go for a walk around the neighbourhood. Either you step off the pavement or they step off the pavement to keep up social distancing and then you wave or smile at one other as if you were friends, not total strangers.

The thing about lock-down is how you sometimes talk even to these total strangers, if only a few words. “Nice dog,” you say, whether it’s a greyhound or a boxer or an Afghan hound that is being taken on a lead by a pooch-fancier. Yes, I’ve seen all of these and many other breeds on my lock-down walks and I’ve passed such compliments even though I’ve never been a dog-owner.

The thing about lock-down is seeing people do mildly eccentric things. I walk up a cul-de-sac and find three people seated at a folding table on one side of the road and four people seated at a folding-table on the other side of the road, both parties drinking in the early evening light and chatting to one another across the road – having a party while preserving their bubbles. I walk between them, up the middle of the road, because they are blocking both pavements. As I pass, I say I am their travelling entertainment and crack a number of obvious jokes. One is emboldened to do such things when there is the sense that we are, as the cliché says, “all in it together”. They seem to appreciate the banter.

The thing about lock-down is sometimes choosing to take walks in the dead of night, at 4 or 5 a.m., so that there is no chance of bumping into any other human being. Then familiar houses and streets take on a new complexion – not sinister but romantic somehow, like the lights in the city across the harbour. How few houses have any lights on. How many have security lights that flash on as you pass. I am sustained by the moon and the stars on clear nights. I am sustained by the jazz that comes through my ear-phones from Spotify. Jean-Luc Ponty sawing away on his jazz violin – in the darkness of the streets that could be unfamiliar, I could be in a back alley of Paris.

The thing about lock-down is stopping at the top of a hill on a pre-dawn walk and seeing the first faint herald of the sun while listening on ear-plugs to the Last Post as relayed by Radio New Zealand. It is Anzac Day, and people have come out to their front lawns in pyjamas to honout the fact.

The thing about lock-down is seeing buses going past on schedule with nobody aboard but the driver. Why do they bother?

The thing about lock-down is standing in a supermarket queue, trying hard to keep one-and-a-half metres away from other customers fore and aft, and wondering how efficacious the routine is anyway.

The thing about lock-down is hearing more birds in the neighbourhood, more tuis singing in the trees, more owls hooting. There are so few cars to block them out or chase them away. The primary school over our back fence has been empty for weeks. On Skype of course, a friend tells me that this shows how good the shut-down is in helping the natural ecology, clearing the polluted skies, making the waterways run clean. Think of all the birds you can now hear, he says. Yes, but I’d still like to be able to hear the kids playing and laughing in the school next door.

The thing about lock-down is knowing that your own position is a reasonably comfortable one. You can work on-line. So can the three members of your family who live with you. But you are uneasily aware of those thousands of toilers who work with real physical things and cannot work from home and whose lives are now being wrecked.

The thing about lock-down is bonding even more closely with your family, but knowing this just cannot go on forever. You crave to go out somewhere more interesting than yet another walk around the neighbourhood.

The thing about lock-down is you hope it will end.