Exclusive: Bougie London Literary Woman on Her Lockdown Year

Darlings. What times! It has been all I can do not to run into the embrace of each and every one of you, wrap my long limbs around your flesh and swallow you whole. Alas, we must wait a while longer. But, my precious friends, take heart. As the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so does the pandemic hasten to its end, and it is important not to wallow for too long in the mud of our misfortune.

Although we have been cloistered each inside our own cells – anchorites reborn – for a year now, nothing should stop us from opening the shutters and throwing the windows open to allow the fresh wind of gratitude to banish the foul air that solitude can brew. And so, in the hope that it may inspire you all, here follow 12 things for which I have been grateful, one for each of the 12 months we have spent in our new world. Consider this my window opening, and a call to arms for you to do the same. Rejoice! – in the breeze.

So many of my most cherished items have become strangers to me, languishing untouched in my closets. Yet even the knowledge that they are there, awaiting our reunion, has been a tonic. There have been additions, too. Nothing so dispiriting as a tracksuit bottom has ever yet graced my own, but I have permitted myself a suite of luxuriant kaftans in lieu of more out-of-doors attire. I do still take my most cherished pair of Tod’s on a weekly trot, out of pity for their neglected soles and, perhaps, souls.

As my locks grew ever longer in cruel separation from my hairdresser, I have felt more and more affinity with Rapunzel, tower-bound and longing for a rescuing prince. Readers, I found him. Or rather, he found me, mourning society over a hot toddy in the park as he walked his handsome spaniel, Aloysius. I am looking at S (and it must be S, for I promised him anonymity) now, pouring over A Critique of Everyday Life in the lesser armchair and pretending not to wonder what sort of portrait I am painting of him. I shan’t embarrass him too much here, but suffice it to say that I could write whole poems in dedication simply to his hoop earring, winking at me in the firelight.

On any dish, sweet or savoury. Or – whisper it - even alone, a defiant shock of white on deep blue porcelain, bright with anticipation of my plunging spoon.

Now, I must beg those with more conservative romantic sensibilities to look away. For I confess that I have fallen head over heels not once but twice this year, through the purchase of a Pashley bicycle. Ours is a love triangle straight out of Jules et Jim; my two-wheeled partner whisks me off on heart-stopping adventures, S oils her wheels when they begin to whine, and then later rubs my shoulders aching from a day spent bent over her handlebars. As yet, she has no name. I have always thought it terribly impolite to name any creature animal, vegetable or mineral, without taking the proper time to become acquainted.

I don’t watch it, bar my annual revisit to Jeremy Irons’s 1981 Brideshead, because I find it clouds the intellectual faculties, but I am grateful that such diversions exist for those who need them.

Telling oneself the story of one’s own life is a deep comfort, like being read to by one’s au pair as a child abed. I am grateful for my diary not only as a place to mark the passing days, but as a text to revisit on lonely nights. I have few greater joys in life than being unexpectedly pierced by my own crystalline prose – a pain, yes, but such a pleasurable one.

I must extend my most profound gratitude to my adored friend Xenobe, who was good enough to let me borrow her cottage in Cornwall when I had to quarantine on my return from three sumptuous and desperately needed weeks in Ischia. It would have been a lonesome stay, had I not had the lake for company; the warm kiss of her water seeping from my ear hours after a swim, the ensuing clarity of sound, the louder quiet. Indeed, not being able to swim so regularly has been among the greatest tragedies of the pandemic. Since my return to London my distress at being kept from the Ladies Pond has been so acute that I must confess that I have only just stopped short of purchasing a catering size bag of ice and fashioning my wheelie bin into a personal plunge pool.

For my most recent birthday, I took a Gail’s galette de rois to the top of the Heath and screamed into the dusk, much to my catharsis but alas also to the vocal chagrin of an elderly couple and several nearby birds. 

Only the Fates can know what would have happened to me this past year had I not had somewhere to pour out my creative energies, so powerfully do their torrents sometimes course. On occasion, in the twilight hours, I have felt a gaping sorrow open up within me for people who are not working on a novel, for those wretched many who are forever confined to the waiting room of life. So directionless they must feel. I cannot say too much on my book’s subject – the best gifts are surprises, after all – but I can divulge that it involves a plucky young heroine, a vast inheritance, and the agonising complications that arise therefrom.

O, the enchantment of a carpeted stone!

My skills speedily outgrew the sewing of masks and so I graduated to the repurposing of a set of silk bedsheets I found in an armoire into a full-body shroud. This impossibly soft and antiviral garment proved just the ticket for my trips to the local Turkish greengrocer, and made me rather well known, and dare I say well-liked, in the locale.

Due to a long family history of gout, I have been fortunate enough to receive the inoculation already. Late at night, I was continually visited by visions of those unknowing milkmaids whose resistance to cowpox began our journey to pandemic vaccination two centuries ago, their doughy, simple faces appearing to me in benediction, as if to bless my pilgrimage out from the country of the sick and into the sunlit highlands of immunity. Regrettably there were more supplicants in the queue behind me on the day I was called to receive it, as the dear sweet nurse who administered to me was so sad to have to turn down my offer of a short programme of plain song chants as thanks for her trouble.

@bougielitwoman