Changes and chances

Today should have seen us off to Scotland, for a week walking in the Trossachs, a week pursuing some research for a biography I'm working on, a visit to old friends and a 70th birthday party. Needless to say, none of those will be happening in the present situation. Hopefully the visits and the walking can take place when life returns to whatever will pass as the new "normal" but the biography project will have to go on ice for the time being. This is particularly frustrating as it had a long gestation phase but has made significant progress over the last couple of months; most of that progress however has been based on historical records and others' accounts and memories. I really need to "walk the walk" and get a feel for my subject's original environment and experiences.

Looking at the positives, however - the Hay Festival this year is not as we have always known it but is freely available to everyone virtually. Do look at the programme if you haven't seen it. Starting today, I've booked for a dozen events to which I certainly wouldn't have had access in other circumstances. I'm really looking forward to hearing Mererid Hopwood and Ali Smith - favourite authors of mine - and I've also booked for a couple of sessions quite outside my usual sphere. A good opportunity to open up other horizons without feeling you've spent unwisely if they turn out to be ones you'd rather leave orbiting elsewhere!

Celebration or commemoration?

My father, Roland Garrett, in 1941

The period around the Second World War is one that interests me a lot and I've written a fair amount about it in both poetry and prose over the years. The war had only ended a short time before I was born and it was still having a massive residual effect on people's lives, both negatively and positively, throughout my childhood. So I'm perfectly happy that today, the 75th anniversary of VE Day, should be acknowledged and marked by present generations. But I see commemoration as a far more appropriate approach than celebration. .

Yes, our parents or our grandparents may have been celebrating that six years of hardship, separation, trauma and loss had come to an end, but more importantly they were looking forward to what they could now make of the world and their lives in it. Much of what we're seeing today, in the media and in the (socially-distanced!) street celebrations, seems backward looking, nostalgic, sentimental. We're dealing with our own crises at the moment and - with the evidence they've thrown up of so much inequality, mismanagement of services over a long period of time and so many other social injustices - we need to be looking forward, as our predecessors were in 1945, at what we can make of our world when they're all over. In no small part so that we can give the still-surviving veterans something much more tangible than the fleeting attention and praise they're getting today.

"April is the cruellest month ..."

What a strange month April was - in more ways than just having the unusually great weather! Our first full calendar month of lockdown and all that that entailed. Since writers so often bemoan their lack of time, you'd think we'd all be grateful for an abundance of it, but that's certainly not how it's felt. Dealing with all the additional on line activities the situation has generated seems to have kept me very busy, to say nothing of the NaPoWriMo challenge (thankfully now at an end, with several embryonic poems worth pursuing if not many completed). But the virtual workshops I have managed to make have at least kept me in touch with the wider writing community and a couple of acceptances of submissions for publication have cheered things along too.

What has really kept me sane in recent weeks though has been the availability of local walks  - within minutes of leaving the front door I can be on riverside or hillside, well away from the human world and very close to the natural. We are incredibly lucky to have all this on our doorstep and lucky that we can, in however limited a way, get out into it. My heart goes out to those in much less happy circumstances, in less conducive environments or confined completely to quarters for shielding, to say nothing of those personally affected by Covid-19. I realise every time I'm able to step outside how fortunate I am.

Light at the end of the tunnel?
A perspective on the Wye.