In all the strangeness of the last few weeks, it has taken me a surprisingly long time to realise that I have, in effect, been set free.
I am furloughed from my job; I am not on the bus to Oxford; I am not obliged to be anywhere, to do anything or to talk to anyone.
Each day stretches before me, pristine and full of potential, waiting to be filled with the overwhelming creativity liberated by this extraordinary, unexpected, unsought gift of time.
Or it would, were I not wracked with guilt at not working, overcome with shame at my apparent absence of purpose, and paralysed by fear that I am wasting my time.
And so I do next to nothing. And the things I do do seem to me crushingly unimportant.
In other words, I have cunningly and brilliantly parlayed my new-found freedom into a whole new set of constraints.
To anyone whose work has continued throughout recent weeks, I can only apologise for airing neuroses of such vanishing insignificance. I think that, in a world constrained, where my desk has become a world, my sense of scale may be somewhat in need of recalibration.
In the Bible, God asks the prophet Zechariah an important question.
“Who dares?” he says; “Who dares despise the day of small things?”
Now it seems to me that I am living in the day of small things and the question, therefore, is for me too.
So, for the record, here are some of the small things I have done.
- I made a tool roll for my bike from the leather of an old bag of my partner Susie’s.
- I sewed blackout lining into the curtains in Silas’s room.
- I planted a tree, which had sprouted from a conker that a squirrel left in a pot of bamboo.
- I rode my bike out to the Thames Barrier.
- I even made a blog to archive my old Pauses for Thought.
I know that none of these things will change the world. But each of them has changed a day and each of them has been a tiny freedom.
Today will be the day of small things again.
I will not despise it.
Here I am, two months on from my relatively breezy start to lockdown, trying to be positive about my capacity to deal well with being furloughed from work. I was, to say the least, over-optimistic.
But the day I rode out to the Thames Barrier, and then up through the Olympic Park and along the River Lea was a good small thing, so here is the velodrome.