At the weekend I washed the bedlinen.
In other, less exciting news we left the European Union and the nation prepared for yet another lockdown.
But as for me, I washed the bedlinen.
It was only when I took the sheet and duvet cover out of the machine, though, that I realised that, worn soft and supple by use and familiarity, they had been washed once too often.
There was a hole in the sheet and the top seam of the duvet cover had given way from being pulled up to our chins more times than its thread-count could bear.
So it was that at the weekend I also mended the bedlinen.
I tore up an old pillowcase, and put my cack-handed sewing machine technique to work patching and reinforcing.
The response in our house was underwhelming.
My partner, Susie, described the whole thing as ‘a little bit postwar’, and there is, I suppose, something in that, in the make-do-and-mend, the ad hoc fixing up.
Because, after all, the linen was hardly perfect again. It was ok, but it was also exactly as Susie said – a bit postwar: serviceable but decidedly battered and bruised.
In the Bible we read a lot about healing and it’s tempting to wish, when we are battered and bruised, that it would always be quick: only say the word, and we shall be healed.
But sometimes, God knows, it takes a long time to get better.
So we also read in the Bible that when we are hurt, God performs running repairs. She binds up our injuries, our wounds, our broken hearts.
Just now, like soft, old sheets, I reckon that many of our hearts, the hearts of those we love, the hearts of our brothers and sisters in America, have been stretched and worn very thin indeed, and they will not heal swiftly.
Even so, we can perform repairs.
When we are careful of one another, when we attend to one another’s needs; when we look out for one other, as Joe Biden said last night, decently and respectfully: this, I think, is how we bind each other up, little by little, each tear, each graze, each rent; patching and reinforcing, so healing can begin. Now my bedlinen, patched and darned, is not really better; but it is somehow whole again, and tonight it’ll still be on my bed. And as for me? I shall go to sleep.
This Pause came the morning after the shock of the Trump-incited attack on the US Capitol, and was broadcast about half an hour after Joe Biden’s Electoral College win was finally certified in the Senate.
Now I look at the mend blown up in the photograph I realise I may need to go over it again.