FREE AS A BIRD

Grayson Perry has been on TV with his ‘art class’ for all of us in lockdown. It’s a bit chummy for my liking, but one night there was a Kashmiri painter who said he’d endured lockdown for several years under the Indian army before escaping to the UK. That’s when he began painting fantasy landscapes of intricate beauty.

Escapism? Absolutely he said, his face glowing as he described the feeling of freedom that painting gave him, his soul flying like a bird. We don’t face anything like that brutality but even so that’s what writing this novel does for me when I get it right. I’m in another place, on a beach with a family in the Ireland of my imagination, while forgetting that right now I can’t even see my children or go swimming in the sea.

I’m lucky to have that escape because lockdown is not far from lockup and it is getting to people. This week I’ve heard from friends who never normally complain that they are deep down anxious and sad. One texted that just listening to Kier Starmer talk sense on the BBC news had made her blub. Another admitted she wants to hold on to her husband to stop him going to work at the hospital every day, but of course she doesn’t. Others who are fit and well - myself included - have been lying on the floor, felled by back pain. My sister was under the table during our six-way siblings’ zoom call this week. She looked quite cheerful there as we talked about our parents, their letters, their experiences in The War. Our uncle missing in action; our father wounded; our mother nursing soldiers injured in the Burma campaign. This week our last surviving aunt, usually so chippy, was weeping on VE Day about all the lovely young men who never came home. We have a new respect for them and their stories which we used to find so boring. War or lockdown, we all have our own dramas, our own ways of shaping life into something with a beginning, middle and end - or even into something beautiful which sets us free. Will my children will want to read my novel? It doesn’t matter. I’m writing it anyway.