It is a time of changing seasons…the summer is drawing to a blustery, wet end.
And everything has changed overnight with the passing of the Queen and the silent passing of the crown to her son, King Charles III. How strange it is to type: King Charles III.
I have an odd sense of discombobulation. I don’t have a better word for it. Everything is disconnected, out of order. Muddled.
That is partly as a result of our national news, but it’s broader, and also more personal than that.
700 and something days ago in March 2020 I started, almost accidentally, a ‘self-isolation diary’ in a series of tweets. It felt like end of days then. I cried with anxiety at bedtime some nights as we were told by the government we were not allowed out of our homes, and food was rationed. Seems a long time ago now, but that tweet thread continued, and little by little the log of my life began to approach something more like ‘normal’ (whatever that is), in increments, sometimes with a step back, sometimes with a bound forwards. Somehow my documenting the progress was powering it forwards. Or so I felt, because whenever I thought it was time to stop, it seemed rash to stop now. Superstitious idiocy.
When after 2 ½ years or so I embarked on a month long trip to the USA, I decided it really was time to draw the mega-thread to a close. It had to end at some point, and so it ended when I landed back at Bristol airport on 1 September 2022. I couldn’t really call it a lockdown diary any more.
A month long road trip with no work was a break from the norm in itself. But things have been decidedly weird since the ending of the thread.
After I killed the thread off I wasn’t sure what to tweet. So I didn’t really (A blessed relief for some I’m sure). I pondered whether I might blog more as a result, but didn’t – until now, and I don’t even know what this blog post IS. In the interregnum there was a missing suitcase full of all my possessions, the never ending swirling of the washing machine and rumble of the tumble dryer tumbling (yikes to the energy bill)…the rain battering the house until a pool appeared in the hall…and the covid back in the house (a parting gift from the yanks, probably donated to us on the plane). Last time around it was just me, and it was me who was the mad woman in the attic, being fed and watered periodically until I was clean. This time it’s the rest of them and I have been nursemaid, snack maker, washerwoman, and barrister simultaneously. In truth they’ve not needed much nursing, as they have mainly slept and drunk water, but after a month of travel and days of jet lag we had longed for the routine and structure that comes with the first week back to school and work. Instead, the household has been in a strange sort of timeless dream-state where at any one time half of us are awake and half asleep and mealtimes have fallen away…the ambulance crew and 4am trip to A&E was the lowlight and resulted in very bleary eyed counsel at the start of my first trial later that day…(thank goodness it was a remote trial – and that six witnesses dissolved into one – and yes, everyone is now fine). Somewhere amidst it all one PM left and another slotted in…blah blah…The news was all crisis this and disaster that…As it always is. And then, just as we have begun to haul ourselves, blinking, back towards real life…the Queen.
Today I tolled the tenor half muffled to mark the death of the Queen. And nothing seems normal. It rained.
A tiny part of my subconscious keeps whispering that if only I hadn’t stopped the damned tweet thread this rift in reality might not have happened. That is utterly silly of course, however much the two things feel connected in my personal bubble. But soon we will get used to a different face on our bank notes, to His Majesty’s Judges and King’s Counsel, detention at His Majesty’s pleasure (not personally, one hopes). We will get used to the King’s Bench Division and His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service and perhaps to watching the King’s Speech on Christmas Day (though to keep up tradition we will probably make forgetting to watch it because we are still eating lunch into an annual event). And no doubt the news will carry on being as terrible as it always is these days. In the reign of King Charles III.