Covid-19 – Mick Canning

April 10th 2022:

A few days ago I dug out all the pastel paintings I have hanging around and put them to one side, the intention being to chuck them all out. As part of managing to get my creative side working properly again, I feel I need to clear out the majority of my old work. I think it is simply preventing me from getting going again – as well as taking up space we don’t really have spare. I’ve always been a little reluctant to just destroy a painting I think I might be able to sell at some point, but that’s something that doesn’t matter to me in the same way any longer.

It’s much the same with writing. Nice if someone buys it and nice, of course, if someone reads it and likes it and, hopefully, gets something from it. But not important in the same way as it used to be. I’ve never wanted to be famous, or sell millions of books (much the same thing, of course), and perhaps this is part of that. If the poetry I’m currently writing is any good, I would like someone to publish it, and if a small audience appreciated it and thought it worthwhile, well, I’d be tickled pink. But it’s not that important.

If I paint again, or carve wood, it will be entirely for me. If someone likes a painting, then perhaps I’ll simply give it to them. I appreciate this isn’t a philosophy that most creatives could adopt, but it’s what I feel I should like to do at the moment.

Wall painting in Amberley Church, Sussex. It dates from around 1300AD, was whitewashed over around 1550, and restored in 1967.

April 11th 2022:

We’re off to Amberley for a couple of days. We should have been walking the South Downs Way at the moment, but Covid has left us too tired for that, so we cancelled our various bookings. But to give ourselves a short break, we kept the Amberley one and booked an extra night.

Yesterday I contemplated completely coming off the internet for a matter of all of about half a second. I find it a huge distraction and much of it incredibly annoying, but like most folk I’m in too deep to extricate myself. We’ve arranged our lives around it over the past twenty years especially, and in my own case I keep in touch with many people that way, I have my blog, which I don’t think I’m ready to give up yet, rely upon it for booking trains and finding train and bus timetables, use it for family research, writing research, and to find and order books and music. None of these would be insurmountable problems, but cumulatively it would just be too much hassle to do without.

But even when I’m using my laptop for writing, I get too easily distracted by the internet and I feel a little like those people who walk through lovely scenery staring down at their mobile phones.

April 15th 2022:

Sunny and clear this morning and the forecast is that the day will be warm and bright. Having had quite a busy day yesterday, I felt quite run down in the evening and this morning feel very tired despite having slept well. It is four weeks until we go to Coll and I hope I’ve got some energy back by then.

It is sunny and, dare I say it, warm all day and despite this being Easter Bank Holiday weekend, the forecast is that it will continue this way.

Strange powers are at work.

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Here we are in week whatever it is of Lockdown, and I have to say I’m finding it ever so difficult to dream up a new blog post. It’s not that I’m having any difficulty writing, as I’m making good progress with one of my novels. I timetable my day so I write in the morning and don’t allow myself to look at the internet until after lunch. I go out and walk each day, I’m eating well. And I don’t mind the idea of Lockdown as such, since I’m quite a solitary person at the best of times; fond of my own company and never at my best with groups of people.

When it comes to writing a new post, though, I just seem to dry up. I think one reason for this is the major change to everyone’s lifestyles that this crisis has demanded. Not so much the changes to mine, strangely enough, but those of other people. I look at some of the posts I have partly written and think they seem somehow too trite for today. Some others are about journeys or visits to places I love, and I don’t seem to have the heart to finish them. Perhaps it’s all a bit too raw, too painful. I rarely write political pieces, and have even less enthusiasm at the moment than usual. Again, the politics are either too trite, or just incredibly infuriating. And there are more than enough bloggers covering the infuriating stuff, even if I wanted to.

Write a parody? I do, occasionally. But a parody of the Coronavirus Crisis seems tasteless, and both our inept government and the unpleasant fool in the White House are already parodies of themselves. I could do a humorous one later, I suppose. I might go and see what Bob is up to…

But I don’t feel I’ve anything original to offer at the moment, and I’m generally a subscriber to the school of thought that states if you have nothing to say, then it’s best not to say it.

So I thought today I’d pick a random photograph I haven’t posted before and put that up, and just go with a stream of consciousness, and see where it led me.

It turns out it led me here.