Gwynnedd Somerville
Over the last few weeks I have spent many hours locked down in my garden. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to do those tasks I usually avoid: clearing paths of aluminium weed, thinning banks of Renga Renga, digging out invasive anemone japonica. This rather ruthless gardening has been modulated by planting bulbs and weeding around the delicate autumn crocuses which have just started to appear. I often find myself starting one task and ending up doing another, responding to whatever takes my eye. As a result the vegetable garden remains luxuriant with weeds.
Working in the garden is a great place to ruminate about life. Recently, I found myself thinking about my maternal forebears, especially the story of my great-grandmother, whose life has always been a mystery to our family. Delving into the records of her life has helped make other family members more robust – a case of history illuminating the path ahead. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about her son, my grandfather Richard Victor McGarrigle. He was a great amateur gardener. He believed in order and routine as a basic principle, and would never have had a weed in his vegetable garden. I learnt gardening at his knee. Now I wonder about what his garden meant to him, and where his meticulous devotion to the daily tasks of looking after his plants sprung from. What were his thoughts while gardening?
On the afternoon of Lockdown Day 16, I woke up from my siesta feeling as though we were all in a kind of suspended animation, with brave grins on our faces. I went outside to trim the hedge, but realised after a few minutes that, inside my skull, something had been at work, and needed my attention. So I went back indoors, and in five minutes had written down the words for a poem (finding the title took me two days). I was glad to snare these words as they came to me, because poems often take me weeks to work out.
What is the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 virus? Compared to most threats we encounter, the virus is small and simple. It doesn’t have sex, possess limbs or gills, or fill its lungs with air on a hill top and shout “It’s great to be alive!”. So is the virus alive, or just an organic robot? We talk of ‘killing’ the virus by washing our hands or using disinfectants, which means most of us think of it as a living creature of some sort. Whether we classify it as the ‘living’ or the ‘undead’, it is still a parasite that steals into our cells and helps itself to our enzymes and cell materials to make thousands of near-perfect copies of itself that go on to infect other cells in our bodies.
The news has been read, the weather forecast follows. Nothing unusual: highs and lows, temperatures, fronts, expectations for the week ahead. A menacing southerly is approaching, snow to low levels, icy roads. A warning for those who have to travel is broadcast: