More than Writers

Pixabay image in public domain I’ve never been to Eyam, the Derbyshire village whose inhabitants took the astonishing decision to quarantine themselves when the Black Death hit the village between the years 1665-66. The villagers’ astonishing act of self-sacrifice doomed them but saved the plague from spreading further throughout England. By autumn 1666, the worst of the plague was over, but it had exacted a terrible cost. Whole families in Eyam had been wiped out. One woman, Elizabeth Hancock, had to bury her husband and six children all by herself, as people were too scared of the plague to come and help her. Her family’s graves stand in a separate egg-shaped enclosure known as the Riley Graves, kept now by the National Trust and Historic England. I Googled the images, and they are haunting. I can scarcely imagine the terrible grief and sorrow of poor Elizabeth Hancock. I felt the same anguish and desolation when I saw a famine cemetery in County Clare, on the spectacular west co...

Language is a living thing. New words appear and old ones fade away. Words that have always been in the dictionary but lain low will suddenly come upon everyone’s tongue, and their meanings bend and morph. Language is changed, amongst other things, by current events. In December last year, on my own blog, Write On , I listed some of the words that have burst into our vocabulary because of Coronavirus. Revisiting them five months on is revealing. Coronavirus Coronavirus is a generic term for a group of viruses, including the common cold.   What we mean is SARS-CoV-2. Some time during summer 2020 we stopped referring to Coronavirus and called it Covid… see below. Covid-19 Or just Covid. (SARS-CoV-2.) Pandemic An  outbreak  of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (according to Merriam-Webster dictionary). Pandemic with a capital P means the spread of Covid infection. Lockdown ...

I’m writing this on the anniversary of the beginning of the first lockdown. I’m asking myself if there is anything to say about the connection between the pandemic and the activity of writing, from a Christian point of view. And this is a challenge. I don’t think it would be helpful to talk about the effects of lockdown or of the Covid crisis on our individual, personal, writing lives, because there’s no generalization that can be made. Many people have said that they couldn’t write at all — and this has been the case both for people who have been materially affected by Covid and the response to it, and for people who have simply sat it out, thankfully without physical effects. Others, myself included, have found themselves very productive, but it would hardly be considerate to make a big issue out of this; we are just very lucky. So what generalizations can be made? Perhaps we have to start outside the sphere of writing, at the most general level, asking ourselves what generalization ...

  Some of you may know that my paid job is a Hospice Occupational Therapist. One of my specialisms is fatigue management, helping patients to adapt to vastly reduced energy levels. Recently, I’ve been revising what I teach for staff: those recovering from Covid and those of us coping with the ongoing impact on our work and daily lives. When the first lockdown happened, although it was shocking, there was a novelty to it and we all thought, hoped, that it would be over by autumn. Fast forward to Lockdown No. 3 and it’s just sheer slog: so much change to the jobs we loved, staff shortages, our usual stress management strategies outside work unavailable, even Zoom Fatigue*. But it’s not just keyworkers. I’ve noticed many of us are talking and writing about the drudge that daily life has become. For some of us, the pandemic hasn’t given us extra space to write but less energy to put thoughts together cohesively on paper. But I’ve started to wonder if some of those fatigue managem...

I'm writing this on Sunday, on the eve of PM Boris’s announcement about possible lockdown measures. By the time you read this, you will know what is being proposed. During the first lockdown, it wasn’t only Joe Wicks who appeared on our computer screens with lots of useful exercises. Writing courses and prompts rose up everywhere. In theory we had a lot more time to write, but many writers reported the opposite. Maybe they were juggling children not at school or struggling to reorganise and relocate their own (non-writing) working lives and offices into their kitchens. Additionally, we were all distracted by stress, wondering what would happen next, not going to church (except online), shopping for goods which had disappeared off the supermarket shelves, not seeing the people we loved, wondering if we or our family members would become ill, and generally adjusting to the ‘unusual times’. But we’re better at all this now, aren’t we? Oh yes? Oh no? Before March I was in a r...

  For the first time in six months, the house is quiet. The children are at school, husband at work. Even the dog, spared from endless cuddles and fussing, slumbers in peace. The guinea pig has saved foraging for another day and cocoons himself in sweet hay. Only the ferrets (a few months old and new to the household) play their noisy games of hide and seek but they’re outside so that’s OK. It’s strange this new phenomenon and I expect parents all over the country are experiencing the same. Time to brew a coffee, time to write. And I have! Two hours of glorious typing.  But as the country wakes into a new chapter, the first phase of post-COVID, we find ourselves with different challenges, different opportunities, different expectations. There are people who are expecting and preparing for the next wave, people acting as though it never happened, others keeping a low profile and just getting on with it, some very opinionated and well versed in all aspects of the virus, and (sad...

Anyone share my frustration with the media during the COVID ridden last few months? I thought we could have done with more 'we'll meet again' and less daily diet of doom. Given the global emergency, there was some amazing stuff going on. But apart from the antics of the legendary Captain Tom (now Sir Tom) the news circus seemed to revel in subjecting us to a barrage of grief. Of course there were mistakes and we need to be made aware of the facts. But whilst journalists seemed to go out looking for trouble, they tripped blindly over all those amazing acts of kindness springing up from the grass roots. I only realised the scope of these when the BBC popped in a short programme about our hidden heroes of lockdown. More of that please! Much more! Like the brilliant stories of heroism from the VE Day screenings. They continue to inspire even now. Could it be that as christian writers we need to turn things around? People do want to read about the positives. Are we in danger...