Bumbling through eighteen months of All This

 

I’m going to be doing this all wrong. Let’s start with the amazing: it’s 18 months since we opened the Confined Kitchen. Tomorrow’s Confined Cocktails should have a bit of a celebratory air – or at least a relieved, well done us for finding a support network air. And I do mean that. It’s such a long time to have kept any community going; we exist rather more these days on twitter than on this blog, but that’s not a problem. We have an anchor here, and so long as we need one another, we know where we are. Last Saturday’s #ConfinedCocktails spontaneous Cluedo was a much-needed perk up for me, after a shitty week, and hopefully it can keep doing the same job for you when you need it.

 

Yay us!

But I want to fumble my way into talking about trauma. It’s partly because last weekend’s 9/11 commemorations booted me into thinking about this, because that was such a shared moment of trauma across many nations. I remember being scared, excited, worried… but I didn’t know anyone in New York at the time*, and the initial impact wore off, and I got on with life. Except now I can’t really look at footage from that day, whereas at the time I watched almost nothing but. Weird, second-hand, abrupt, referred trauma of some kind. Maybe.

[*I did, actually. Didn’t know it but a friend was changing planes at Newark and got marooned for a fortnight on a friend’s sofa. And a future colleague too. A world before mobile phones, when you didn’t know where everyone was all the time, and what was worrying them. Imagine that.]

 And now I think maybe we’ve all had an opposite experience this past eighteen months, assuming we’ve not directly been affected by serious illness or its care; I think that’s still trauma. Quiet, silent, low-energy, scary, an abrupt change to assumptions about how we live, and an ongoing sense of danger and dread. Or, if lockdown improved your life for the better, the flipside of discovering much of the world is determined to reverse those changes and return to a normal that didn’t work for you.

 

Tide goes in, tide goes out, everything changes and nothing changes

 

I know we know this, sort of. Maybe we don’t call it trauma but “difficult times”. And as ever, easier to advise others to take care than to take it yourself. But I think this trauma, however mild, is still working its way out for all of us.

For example: I’ve just spent a week on holiday! Woop! In London! Erm? It took me for absolute ever to book anything and then I went eight miles up the road, *for the second time this year*. It worked nicely, I had a good time.

I went to the theatre. I had Pimms! It was nice.

Yes, it's the faraway City of London. I did at least cross the river a couple of times

But I love to travel, and I love going all over the UK even if the current international travel situation is a bit of a pain and I still haven’t been able to face it. I hate being on public transport and eating in restaurants feels terrible, so I got a self-catering place.

 

It's a notch up from most of my hotel picnics past - Brindisa asparagus and fresh bread...

Whereas I have willingly put myself into a theatre with between thirty (Jermyn Street preview) and 1500 (Barbican, Anything Goes, mid-run, no mask enforcement). I can hear in other people’s reaction to this that that is outside their risk budget, or still seems like a crazy action, all trauma responses firing.

It’s illogical, and messy, and worlds away from the universality of lockdown. I don’t want that back, but as various people have said here, it was an easier time. The right thing was simple, and we were still in the moment of crisis, not suffering in the aftershocks. Now it’s messy, and complicated, and the most unexpected things send us off in the deep end.

Could be worse. We could be Noel Coward on tour, from an excellent exhibition I saw this week. Obviously I don't *know* what's in a Benzedrex inhaler but I'm thinking it may signify you need a little help with jollification

I don’t have a big message here, except maybe to take care of yourselves, to know that we’re all working through this traumatic experience. To hope that it *is* aftershocks now, and not in-the-middle-of-it shocks before another hard winter. To be determined that this isn’t “Here’s to the NEXT 18 months”, but that it is a positive appreciation of you lot, your cocktail enabling, your Saturday sharing, and your willingness to talk about how this is a complicated time with weird edges.

 Now. It's been 18 months. Where did I put the prosecco? 

Cheers all.