Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: self quarantine

  • cherry tree, wait for me

    Today I would give anything to run outside into this suddenly warm sunshine. I woke to birdsong and discovered I had left my window open all night. This is the first night since October that’s even been possible. I don’t feel the icy breezes snaking round my feet in the chilly living room, I can’t hear the ticking of the heaters. When I stood in front of the glass and gazed out I could feel the sun’s mighty warmth on my face. My eyes sting with tears thinking about it. It’s reached us.

    This winter staining gradually into pink blue yellow spring is now extended indefinitely, perhaps eighteen months, perhaps twelve, perhaps three, as if by a bad council order. Such a long winter under such low grey sunless skies.I miss cafes, I miss walking past people and feeling the foreign-communal energy of their own brisk, or vague preoccupations. The feeling of their thoughts and breathing fringing and wrinkling my air. I just miss them being there. I miss the little coughs and the unconscious throat clearings and sighs and the faint breeze as my neighbour in some plinking humming bistro turns a large page in his sagging newspaper. 

    That’s how we sit, that’s how I spend time with people. Cafes are my communion. I love the delicacy of their shared but parceled space. All along the old wall strip, the dead zone through Berlin that divided families like a terrible quarantine, the decades of no mans land that now is all overgrown with trees and nested with sweet birds, torn down one by one for new apartments as the city swells, one Japanese cherry tree after another will be touched by the sun and burst into its perfect ineffable colour, its blossoms fluttering and the sky a web of blue trapped in its branches. I want to lie there dazedly noticing the comings and workings of ants for whom springtime is an unending toil. I want to hear the punks on their houseboat creaking and clinking at beers in their foldout chairs. I want to feel a fast bicycle zip past me. Lie under the trees and feel their placid embrace, like two hands turned slowly outward to show me something.

  • a meeting at the bins

    Self-quarantine day 10. Me and two other neighbours ran into each other in our pyjamas down by the bins and stood in a broad triangle, laughing helplessly at ourselves as the grey sun struggled to come out overhead. In Berlin we have been indoors since early November. “Does my guitar playing bother you through the floor?” ‘What? No! Does my typing bother you?’ Outside, the Spring trees are pinkening and from our courtyard we can see a square of sky and at night, three faint and distant stars.

  • cemetery days


    I just spent a few precious hours working in a greensward where I could be safely distant from everybody and they could be safely distant from me. Then a woman approached me. She was wearing uniform. It is not permissible to sit in this space, on the grass: you must sit on a bench.

    I gazed at her. “I understand you, but… isn’t it somewhat exceptional circumstances? I have hardly left my house in six days, I need the sun. People need a place to sit that’s not hard surfaces which can retain the virus for hours.”

    She repeated exactly, “Es ist nicht gestattet” I think it was – it’s not authorised. At home, on Twitter, I found two resourceful Italians playing table tennis, from window to window, one right-handed and one left-. They’re just going to keep playing until they lose the ball. I live for this sense of playful joy. As this lady approached me I was just thinking, ‘now: I have peace in my heart.’ It is hard-won. It’s mine. She cannot have it, no, indeed, I will not drop this ball, it is airy, it is light and it bounces.

  • staying at home in the Spring


    It’s wonderful to be cheerful and I will be cheerful. We are alive and are blessed with refrigerator and bath tub, bookshelves and beloveds, hot and cold running comfort in which to be trapped.

    Also, the sky today was wild blue outside. Our little drawing group normally meets. I longed for the bicycle ride across town, the hours of shared and quiet concentration, the chat. The trees are filling out slowly with leaves. It’s occurred to me that Australian friends have no idea what it feels like to have to stay inside for days on end and potentially months… right at the tail end of the winter when we have blue skies literally for the first time in months. My mother is staying home more in Brisbane, a dense and singing garden quarantines her house. Most Berliners and urban Europeans don’t have even a balcony. There are a few open spaces large enough to be safe but they are hard to reach. We can open the window and take sips of still cold air. The pinkening buds will be bursting soon and we’ve been trapped indoors since October.