58. Bookcases

...being a look back at a difficult time for all of us, and some thoughts on how it affected creativity

Its hard to believe that its only five or so years ago that we were living in a world where hardly anyone had heard about the Corona virus. The pandemic changed our world in so many ways. It was much more than something that made us all feel vulnerable in a way that we hadn’t felt for a long time. It disrupted all of our lives. Those of us who survived it were all transformed to some degree by the experience. Between January 2020 and March 2022, it is estimated that almost six million people around the world died of covid, 160,000 of them in the UK. Obviously the impact of either of the two world wars was much greater, but I would argue that to people who had no direct experience of a world war - anyone born after the early 1940s, it was a similar watershed moment. We all have pandemic memories and pandemic stories, and we can all compare our lives before the pandemic to our lives after it. It affected our attitude to work, our trust in the government, the quality of young peoples education, our mental health, our connections to links with the local community, and many more aspects of our lives. 

I was one of those people who went to work throughout the whole period. Teaching in a special needs school, we were obliged to keep a service available for children with an Educational Health Care Plan. If parents wanted to send them in, we had to accept them. Many parents chose not to, and many staff decided to stay at home due to health reasons or increased anxieties. I didn’t feel that going into work wasn’t so bad. In fact it provided a chance to speak to people outside of the family bubble, and besides, school life was much more relaxed than usual. We had much smaller groups to deal with and there was no real expectation to adhere to any sort of curriculum. It felt more like how teaching might have been in the 1980s, before I started, and before the National Curriculum was brought in, during the dark days of the Thatcher Government.¹

For people who write, the situation brought a unique opportunity. Being forced to stay at home during the lockdown periods, it must have occurred to many, that here was a rare chance to get on and write something. Even in my case, work notwithstanding, it felt as if I had suddenly been granted not only the luxury of the time to write in, but also a ready made subject to write about. We could philosophise about the situation and its impact. We could tell tales of what we had seen, from the large scale political manoeuvrings, and scientific advances, to the everyday stories of people going about the business of daily living. We were right at the centre of an event of global significance. How could anyone who imagined themself to a writer not take the opportunity offered?

Easily.

Perhaps the situation magnified the frustration that I feel about creating art. How can I produce something unique and true to my own experience? What can I find to say that isn’t being said by hundreds of others, or has already been said by thousands of other people before? It felt as though writing about the pandemic was immediately boring and old hat. There would be so many other people at the same game that it would be virtually impossible to be original.

In addition, I quickly discovered that even though I had imagined that solitude would be a great aid to the creative process, when presented with an abundance of it, the lack of contact with like minded individuals can be stifling. Pandemic meetings with fellow poets were all done by zoom or some similar internet technology, as were so many other meetings and family gatherings. This form of contact felt sterile in some way. Business could never be moved down to the pub afterwards for a period of reflection and unwinding. The Read to Write group carried on, largely through the hard work and perseverance of Mick Jenkinson and Tim Fellows, who put in an incredible amount of time and effort. But It didn’t feel anything like as comfortable for me. I would log on to a meeting, join in with some discussion maybe participate in a read around, and then I would turn off the screen and be instantly back at home. It felt deeply unsatisfying. It was at this point that I probably began to feel that poetry is shit. I gradually began to slide into depression, the onset perhaps augmented by the effect of a couple of bouts of actual covid. 

In the early days of the pandemic, when everyone was desperately trying to stockpile toilet paper, dry goods and canned foodstuffs, it had almost been fun. I spent some time writing and recording a satirical song which I put out on YouTube. But that was probably my last, half hearted attempt to become a pop star, other than the final online hurrah of Pocketful O’Nowt, the band that I had been in for almost a decade. Beyond that, I scratched around on Social Media, writing lengthy replies to circular requests for posts about “Ten albums that have been the greatest influence on you”, and lengthy rebuttals of people who posted praise for how Boris Johnson was handling the situation in Churchillian style and tapping in to British qualities of exceptionalism and stoicism in the face of adversity.  It was all too easy not to create anything of substance at all. 

I think that I was almost completely out of the habit of writing when Mick Jenkinson contacted me about “View From a Locked Down Land”, an anthology that he was working on featuring members and guest poets from Read to Write. It is still available to read in its entirety online at the link above. I can remember my response was to put myself in the position of my future self who would have recovered from the depths of ennui and would look at the publication without me in it and would be disappointed that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to contribute. So I contributed two pieces. One being a anti-nationalistic piece about the English Flag, and the one reproduced below, about television interviews during pandemic times, which doesn’t actually mention flags at all, although the Union Jack was becoming an increasingly popular symbol to place behind people broadcasting about the national situation, as were the bookcases. which I built the piece around.

Mick, thanks for getting in touch and getting me to contribute something - It saved me developing the dreaded “Daddy, what did You Do in the War?” face.

Bookcases

We can trust in an expert who’s in his own home  
With his skype or his zoom or his camera phone
In front of a bookcase, that’s filled up with lines
Of journals and volumes, all with perfect spines
If he’s got stuff like that then he’s clever indeed
And he’ll never get bored when he’s all that to read
And he looks so calm and we feel so distressed
So we’ll do what he tells us to do for the best

And the government minister he’s at home too
And we have to give credence to his point of view
As he’s sat at a desk with a lamp and a globe
He’s a man of the world with a mind that can probe
All the issues we have and he’ll deal with them well
And that bookshelf behind him, we can almost smell
The leather-bound volumes of Hansard on there
So, we’re safe to entrust him with our welfare

But here’s a man standing outside in the street
In casual clothes, with trainers on his feet
He’s questioned and filmed from 2 metres away
But there’s no real import to what he has to say
There’s no fancy desk nor a bookcase on view
So his words can’t be seen to have any value
His opinion means little when all’s said and done
He’s a vox pop, amusement, only for fun

1. After the education act of 1988, teachers were increasingly no longer trusted to operate under their own initiative, but to follow prescriptive ‘guidance’ requiring mountains of paperwork and fabricated justification for every decision made. It was the same for many other professions as well. Maybe regulation has improved some aspects of our lives, but professionals in Education, health, local government and many other occupations lost a lot of autonomy. The pandemic brought much of that autonomy back - albeit on a temporary basis.