Two things

I’ve come down to the farm for ten days of rest and recuperation; a month of The Covid Talks and guess what? I’ve caught covid, or something like it. I feel rubbish. Continual ache in the back of my neck, a headache, nausea and an air of despair - if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck. So here I am, in the blissful quiet of the farm where I was due to be anyway. I’d booked it in for B’s reading week and an estate meeting brought me down on Wednesday; it didn’t seem worth going back for a few days and then covid struck and I’m grateful the Gods of my diary planned it this way. Nothing in the book but working on my actual book and riding Tommy and kissing Kenny and Percy and walking in the woods.

It’s needed. Especially as this has been doing the rounds - What should you prepare for a 72-hour emergency situation? - have you seen it, people of the UK? Sent out by our very own government? I’m sure I’ve written a novel that begins along the same lines…

Shocking, isn’t it? And why 72 hours? And where do they expect people to evacuate to? And if you do have somewhere to go, how are you going to carry all that and will you really bring board games? It feels like a joke, yet I’m hearing it everywhere, in many disparate parts of my life, conversations with friends and family whose lives and politics stretch the entire gamut of difference; that if something is going to go down it’s likely to be a hack of the banks, the internet, power or water, so I’ve decided to take the better safe than sorry approach while contextualising it in history. The line between panic and don’t panic is thin. My children and I have a secret word known only to us in case we are impersonated. We have an emergency plan should we be apart at a moment of global crisis. And here at the farm we have water and fuel and a history of communal living. If one can ever be ready for the end of the world as we know it, I’m getting ready. And at the same time, it may just be this year’s freak-out, this generation’s version of nuclear attack, the moment in time we will look back on and say, oh boy, they sure got us wound up over nothing. Two things can be true at the same time.

And being true at the same time, I’m also writing a new novel as if the world as we know it will carry on unchanged, and spending hours and hours creating words and story isn’t rearranging deck chairs. I’m deep in the seventh draft, I’m editing and swinging wildly between exaltation and the blues. It is the best thing I’ve ever written and simultaneously pitted with the same old mistakes. I hope I’m failing better this time. I’m pushing myself, I’m taking risks, I care; these things matter even if in another reality there are idiots f*****g around with the lives of millions, men playing games with a blue dot which doesn't belong to them. Two things can have equal meaning.

J told me recently of friends of his in Ukraine who get dressed up and go out to the opera while bombs are falling. And in Gaza, children grow gardens and live stream recipes for cooking with one pot. And comedy nights still happen in New York and I write books conscious that even in the best, most normal of times, getting a deal for literary fiction is tough, and in these times, in the world which may be round the corner, we may not be buying books at all. Such is the crazy human spirit. Real and unreal. Flesh and the angels. Now and forever. Two things. I was interviewed by gabrielle sedita this week and she asked me what I had taken from the many kinds of living I’ve done, and it’s this: the awareness of multiple realities happening at the same time, the coexistence of truths, and the choice, at any one time, of where to stand. There’s comfort in it.

Eleanor