In the midst of what, for convenience, I’ll call the ‘second lockdown’ I have rejected Zoom. My head recognises its benefits, but my heart has rebelled.  As has been pointed out, this is partly because I spent September and October going to the theatre and a number of galleries and museums:  I have had other options. So my rejection is from a position of luxury. With a degree of choice, I prefer to wait for ‘in person’ events to be restored.

And I am physically back at work which, despite the restrictions and protocols, means  there are still occasions when we are convulsed with laughter, at a bizarre flight of fancy which has been created from some innocuous incident and stretched, as each of us has twisted the narrative surreally to extend it .. like spun sugar, increasingly precarious, denying the laws of gravity, escaping any bounds of reason. Ephemeral moments which melt ‘into air, into thin air’  if we try to recount them:  ‘It was so funny… you had to be there’. This is what colleagues do. This is what I remember when I think of my previous employment as well: the collaboration, the connexion, the loss of individuality as something is created together

I never consider myself to be a particularly sociable person – in fact the opposite. But I suppose I am no different from everyone else: I need solitude and I need social connexions. I have to navigate between the two to avoid foundering on the rocks of loneliness or being sucked into a whirlpool of over-crowdedness. [I’m reading the Master and Commander series at long last: forgive the bizarre marine metaphor]. It’s the quality of course, rather than the quantity, which matters most. It always does. 

A few weeks ago I read Galileo’s Error by Philip Goss. I’ve confessed to losing my faith in earlier blogs, and this of course leaves one with considerable questions about ‘what is the point of it all’ and also, at an even more basic level ‘what is it all?’ Galileo’s Error addresses that second question, in ways that I found convincing and enchanting. It’s one of those books which explores extremely complex, fundamental questions and explains them in such a way that – while reading it – I feel I can understand completely. You, dear reader, are saved quotations from it because I’ve already thrust it on someone else to read – and already I am considering buying a second copy because I miss it. The book helped me to feel connected with my world in a way which is deeply comforting. It also resonates with Philip Pullman’s world, and his exploration of the Land of the Dead, and the greatest love story of all, which isn’t Will and Lyra but Lee and Hester. And as we all know, just because one of these books is about this physical world and the other is something made up in someone’s mind, that doesn’t make one less meaningful than the other.

My perhaps-indulgent rejection of Zoom is because the connexion it offers is incomplete;  it lacks a shared atmosphere. Literally. I want to dwell in the same space. Music sounds different – listening is profoundly different – when the instruments themselves generate the soundwaves that enter our ears. As I’ve written before, nothing prepared me for the impact of seeing a sublime work of art in reality. And of theatre – well, you know already:  I am moved to tears by Ralph Fiennes pouring a glass of water. In very simple terms, although Zoom is live, it doesn’t feel like it is:  the medium is too close to all that consumable content of TV and films and recordings and radio. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of these, I am no cultural snob.  I’m binge-watching The Crown with the rest of us and I’m very worried about the Bake-Off final. But they are recorded. The people have moved on. Nothing I can do can change them. Whilst at the gallery, the concert hall, the theatre, I am convinced that my contribution is essential and that my experience is infinitely enhanced by being part of the collective experience happening, being created, at that moment. To and fro, give and take, the spun-sugar edifice rises implausibly upwards. Vivid memories flood my mind:  bubbling laughter in the Royal Academy’s Antony Gormley exhibition as we clambered through his installation Drawing in Space;  sitting riveted at the opera, in deep communion with a little old woman I was next to, met just a few minutes before, sharing an intense, attentive stillness; a performance of The Winter’s Tale, Simon Russell Beale, ‘I have drunk and seen the spider’ and someone – a young person I think, one of a school party – gasped. And their shock and excitement at that line infected the entire audience. Electric and instant and real and present.

It’s so difficult, and dangerous, to share the same atmosphere at the moment. All the battle-rich vocabulary makes us see each other as threats and we fear that we will cause harm. But humans have lived through plagues before and we have still managed to reconnect after. So yes, I will wait.

Give me your hands, if we be friends
And Robin will restore amends.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, epilogue.