The New Normal (part the third - and last)

My return journey on the 19th was a very different experience - the Costa at Chester station where I might usually sit and have a coffee while waiting for the London train had roped off the seating area and was selling off the cakes half price. The seats around me on the train were reserved, according to the dot matrices above them, but empty. By the time we pulled into Euston my train carriage had been winnowed down to just one person - me.

6.30pm should have been rush hour on the tube, but I not only got a seat but had plenty of space.
Collectively, it was sinking in I think.

Tooting, where I got off and went for groceries, was busy, and the supermarket largely stripped, although there was some tinned fish. My brother had given me a big bag of pasta (he buys extra when things are cheap or reduced) which I've been rationing by measuring out two teacupsful each meal, something I should probably have been doing anyway for the sake of my waistline, and two boxes of paracetamol.

Friday I made a loaf of bread that reminded me strongly of the descriptions of dwarf bread in Pratchett - half comestible, half blunt instrument - but was edible with soup. I worked from home and discussed with my manager possibly popping into the office one day on the following week - she was doing Monday, I thought perhaps Wednesday. Schools were being closed, but not shops. I went to the library in Morden after I'd closed up, and found they would be closing for 41 days from that evening, and all my books had already been renewed until that point.  I popped in the supermarket, but apart from a little tinned fish the shelves were pretty bare - lots of mackerel in teriyaki dressing, I noticed though. I'm not quite sure what a teriyaki dressing is but somehow if doesn't sound like it goes with mackerel, so I also gave it a pass.

On Saturday local shops provided pasta sauce and milk and veg - and also some bread and biscuits from a very nice Polish shop I had never been in before and had no idea was so big or so bountiful.

We took the dog for a walk in the afternoon and instead of meeting at my cousin's (and my using public transport to get there) my aunt drove the short distance to get the dog - my cousin, who thought she might be ill, standing well away and in a mask - and then on to me.

In the park kids were in the playground as usual, and the cafe had closed the indoor seating but you could still queue up for food.

I've seen the lack of social distancing on that weekend severely criticised since, but if anyone said 'stand six feet away' before last Sunday I must have missed it too - people were being allowed to crowd into supermarkets, and pubs and clothes shops were open. Hairdressers were open. Waterstones was coming under fire for being open. The decorators shop at the bottom of my block of flats had traded for their usual hours Saturday morning.

On Sunday I made a tealoaf with my last egg, and on Monday my manager went into an office where they were told to sit well away from each other, and basically scolded that they shouldn't be there, which she passed on to me. Monday evening the government announced that non-essential shops and businesses were to close for three weeks, and also what would be done to ensure people wouldn't starve, and there was a furore in the press and on twitter that the tubes had been cut but people were still having to go to work, and so tubes were still busy.

And that, finally, takes us to the new normal. My new normal anyway. Up an hour later than usual at 8.30am, fire up laptop at 9, lunchtime walk along the Wandle river or towards Mitcham Common across the cricket green, Watching webinars about how to use Teams and other remote working bits and bobs, daily emails to confirm yes, I am here, and no, I'm not ill. Cancelling and rebooking meetings. Talking people through how to videocall. Getting things changed on the website. Perhaps the long walk to the supermarket (I'm staying off buses as per TfL advice) or the shorter walk to the more reliable corner shops that I hope I don't forget to patronise when all this is over. They've been brilliant.

Workwise I have been put on a list for our community hub if they run out of frontline staff, but unless that happens I expect to stay off public transport and out of Central London completely.  I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm conditioned to crowds, just as I'm conditioned to not having enough time to see all the exhibitions I want to see, or having to balance the demands (in a nice way) of socialising with friends and extended family, and (up until January) studying for my MA.

Now there's so much time it's absurd - I've gained two hours a day not commuting, plus all the time I used to spend at galleries or museums or the British Library reading rooms, plus the more or less fortnightly drinks with my dad, the half hour piano lesson on Tuesday, with it's 20 minute trip each way (or, if I walked back, 40 minute). Without colleagues to chat to, and in this time of transition, work days are slower too. I can load the washing machine or do the washing up. I can make a sandwich and eat it rather than queue up to buy one, or carry food in. Because I am home and my heating is on in the afternoons (the sun comes in in the morning) my clothes dry faster, and anyway I can wear the same pair of jeans four days in a row - I don't exert myself enough that they need washing daily.

So I'm adapting. I'm starting to wonder why we have such big offices and long commutes when it's clear many of us could do half the week from home. I've started waving to the postman, who I'd only ever seen once (in the sorting office) before. I've discovered that lovely Polish shop I kept seeing from the bus and thinking I should go in, and never did. I've rung up people in other one-person households I'm not great at keeping in touch with, and they've seemed pleased and talked and talked.

I've wondered why we drag people halfway across London to work meetings that could be done via conference call (yes they will be harder for me to minute at first, but I expect to adapt). I've taken the bin off the small cafe table in my kitchen and cleaned it down so I can eat there instead of at my desk or on my lap. I've enjoyed the walks through slightly wilder greenery than manicured parks, and the hawthorn blossom and celandine. I've seen a heron, robins, any amount of ducks and geese.

I've practised the piano more (still not daily), upped my duolingo use and rationed my news and social media consumption. I want to be up to date but I've decided I don't need to be dragged into speculating about 'if things were different'. At the end of the day it's a virus, it's no one peoples or person's fault. Not even those people whose politics I actively disagree with.

I still feel a little bit like a slacker, and have to keep reminding myself that I'm doing what we're all meant to do - stay in, offer to help but sit tight if not needed. It will get busier.

Tooting Market

At the weekend I went, amongst other places, to Tooting Market, which is currently under threat – possibly – by HS2.

I know Tooting Market of old, but it’s at a transition point at the moment. There are the old veg and fruit and fabric stalls and the egg and chip places, and there are the organic beers and sit down restaurant and micro distillery for gin (Graveney Gin).

The gin was what we were there for, because I had been talking about it over a year and hadn’t tried it, and my brother decided a year was long enough.

Very nice it is too. Lovely and refreshing, with pink grapefruit and the unobtrusive sweetness of a Mediterranean tonic. A completely new drink to me. Normally I drink gin which is bitter, and slimline tonic, which is also bitter, because I like bitter things. So it’s very much not gin as I drink it.

I would like a little bottle to experiment with though, and will try to get one. Micro distillery means micro amounts, of course, so they were out of everything but the gift packs. I may have to pre-order online.

Still it’s a civilised spot, and I’ve a vague natal interest in the area. I tend to think of and describe myself as being from Tooting because although I was in fact born in Balham, and although we moved right out when I was 3, we started drifting back in over half my life ago. My Dad is still just down the road and, only slightly across the boundary of the Wandle river, so am I.

The river Graveney, after which the gin may or may not be named (There is also a Tooting Graveney on completely the other side of Tooting from the river, and both are likely named for the Gravenel family who held the land in the 12^th and 13^th centuries) is the most circumspect of London rivers until it floods – hidden and channelled but rising and falling by metres in heavy rainfall and fenced off for safety’s sake where it does come up for air. In fact it’s only a tiny stretch that qualifies as the Graveney at all. Before that point it’s the Norbury Brook and almost immediately after Tooting it flows into the Wandle and joins the meander through Wandsworth to the Thames. Should it ever become a character in the Rivers of London canon it will be the smaller, shyer twin, co-dependent, suffering a severe identity crisis, and occasionally bursting out in furious temper when pushed too far.

Back in the real world the market, as I say, seems to be at a transition point. If they don’t knock it down I suspect the rents will go up and in ten years it will be where Merton Abbey Mills and Borough market went, almost all artisan, and shortly after that the kitsch shops and chains will move in, the oddities will be priced out, and that will be the end. 

I don’t know if that’s a complaint on my part or not. I don’t particularly avoid chains, especially those that are good at what they do and provide me with free wifi, and I do feel that there is an organic quality to what happens to property of this kind in London. An ebb and a flow. And while there’s also the occasional destructive flood which leaves nothing of interest behind, something new and interesting always pops up somewhere else, like flotsam, and.. and I’m not going to hammer that metaphor any harder home. 

What I mean is these transition points, where you have something interesting and mixed and fleeting, can’t last. It’s not in their nature. All you can do it make the most of it while it is there.

Which means cocktails, next time, or possibly organic cider. 

Tooting in the '80s, 

before the traffic island was moved.