In search of somewhere peaceful, with an appropriate backdrop of books, I decided to visit my mother. Between her builder and her wifi, it was a disaster‘Write a diary, ” everybody said at the start of lockdown. “Everything will change. The way you feel will completely change. Make like Samuel Pepys and the plague. Leave a little something for the historians.” Everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Nothing. [Solid Theresa May emphasis.] Has. Changed. My putatively shielding mother still has her builder round every day. My ceiling has still fallen in. We still don’t know where the leak is coming from, successive plumbers scratching their heads, nothing for a week followed by more water. The conversations get smaller and smaller, but the physical realities of the world don’t change. Water will always find its own level – in this case, the floor (absent a ceiling).Rules, though – they’ve changed. In England, they were relaxed last Monday for those shielding, giving most of them more freedom to see friends and family. So when I had an Extremely Important Zoom to do, instead of using my son’s room, with a poster of Dark Phoenix and an unmade bed where the intellectual books should be, I went to my mother’s. She has a great bookshelf. My sister painted it, to commission, to look like the sculpture of a bookshelf she made for me when I went to university. All the shelves in that sculpture contained a different, insane thing – a miniature sheep, a tin bucket, an impossibly small matchstick – which, looking back, I can only take to be an elaborate diss: “You ain’t never gonna read any books, you doughnut.” I didn’t notice that at the time. All the shelves in my mother’s real-life version have books in them, which even though they are a bit special-interest (it’s basically a compendium of 80s conspiracy theories about nuclear waste) certainly wouldn’t disgrace a person. Continue reading...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/12/i-went-to-my-mums-house-to-make-a-very-important-zoom-call-big-mistake