What the lockdown means to me

 

Every day for the past five or six years I have walked the dog along the path beside the evocatively named Hobson’s Brook, a tiny stream (barely more than that) built to carry fresh water into Cambridge. Today, the path is surrounded by mature trees that, even if they don’t date back to the building of the brook in the 17th century, must be at least 100 or more years old. 

The largest single trees on the walk, which is only half a mile or so long, are over a hundred feet tall. These trees are like the elder statesmen in a parliament, looking down over their younger companions, and no doubt providing an example to the young upstarts of how to live and to behave properly. These trees are the ultimate survivors. 

Today I discovered (by looking at the leaves and consulting a tree guide) that those three or four enormous trees are actually black poplars. On examining one fallen leaf (the tree was so enormous that the lowest branches were unreachable) you could see the heart-shaped leaves with slightly serrated edges.  It wasn’t difficult to identify them, but I must admit I’ve walked past these giant trees hundreds of times, without ever bothering to know more about them. Not only do I know the tree, I can now see if each tree is male or female – black poplars are dioecious, which means each tree is either male or female, but not both. 

These black poplars form part of my everyday existence, even before I could name them. During the lockdown (which is now easing, but which last summer, the summer of 2020, was at its most restrictive), the walk by the Brook was one of the few activities outside the house left to me. You couldn’t travel, or go to offices, or meet other people, but you were still allowed to walk the dog. That discovery of a new name was, for me, something of a revelation. I’m not a tree expert. Beyond oak, sycamore, willow, and the common names, I am lost. And I saw things in a new light.

A piece by Joe Moran in the TLS (June 18, 2020) describes everyday life during the lockdown (“All cities are the same at dawn”). After describing a video posted by a BBC journalist of his car journey through a deserted West End of London, which was startling because of the emptiness of the city (“empty cities are compelling because they bear the traces of our lives as inescapably social beings”), he describes the mundane reality of everyday existence, and lists some 20th-century French writers who deal with, even celebrate, the everyday: Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot, and most of all Georges Perec. Perec recommended logging the minutiae of daily existence: what you could see from a street café, all the food you eat for one year, and other mindless tasks. The point, according to Perec, is that life is a spell that can be broken. To follow Perec's suggestion would be for me like sinking further into quicksand.  Yet, argues Moran, we really don’t want to break that spell. “Crises make us long for a return to normality, where everyday life is mere background noise … the daily grind that Parisians call metro-boulot-dodo (commute – work – sleep) had its compensations after all.” That’s a rather perverse response to what is probably the longest lockdown any of us has experienced. Perhaps my revelation from one black poplar leaf suggests otherwise. For a small moment, the boredom and repetitive seeing without knowledge was interrupted. Now I have engaged with that tree, I’ll never look at it in quite the same way again. Every time I walk past it, that black poplar will drag me out of my reverie.