Coronavirus Chronicle VIII

Capability Brown at Fulham Reach, July 2020.

This year it will be on Thursday 13th November. It’s when, in the old days, I used to go out at lunchtime in the City and drink Beaujolais Nouveau until I was sick. This exceptional year it was yesterday; the first day Londoners could go out on the lash in pubs and restaurants since March.

Although I seldom drink in pubs I was keen to take advantage of my new freedom. Bertie and I went down to Fulham Reach. We’d seen Sam’s Riverside setting up a new outdoor terrace on Friday and other outlets making preparations as we walked to Richmond. Only for the second time we saw the Richmond barrage being raised, an exciting spectacle if you like seeing Victorian engineering in action.

Richmond Lock, July 2020.

Now I prefer knitted ties with a square-cut end, but I did have an Hermes phase. I chose my face mask because it reminds me of those ties of yesteryear. My grandfather kept his bloodstained uniform in a drawer in his dressing room when he was repatriated from the Somme, severely wounded, in 1916. As a child I was disappointed that the blood looked more rusty than gory. Will we keep our face masks to show our grandchildren? No, it is facile to compare the Great War with a transient epidemic.

In the event it was a windy, overcast evening yesterday and while people were congregating to drink a posse of five policemen didn’t have anything to do, except march around, much too close together, in high vis waistcoats.

Frank Banfield Park, July 2020.

In Frank Banfield Park the lawn has seeded itself with wild barley; more resilient than grass against drought. It’s also called flea dart grass because children think the seeds are fleas and make darts from the ears. You learn something every day and I learnt that from Robert.

I haven’t memorised it but you might enjoy this sonnet, mentioned here yesterday.

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
(Sonnet 94, Shakespeare)
There’s a lot going on in that sonnet; submit your answers using one side only of the exam paper and writing legibly. Meanwhile, I will be going downtown in a couple of days for to see Sadiq. He cuts my hair.

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