FebulousFebruary 2025: Lost and Found

Covid Pondering

The Samaritans shop still has its Christmas window display in February and I wish someone could go in and change it.

I have never been in a Weatherspoon’s pub in my life, but I see the curling up posters on our local’s window. I can appreciate that the cost of their full English breakfast is a bargain.  Do people go in pubs for breakfast?  I never noticed before, but you notice the emptiness.

Nearby there is a Georgian square with a fish-pond full of huge golden fish.  The trees in the square are bedecked with lovely twinkling lights but they stopped working a few weeks ago which is a shame.  I hope someone is feeding the fish.

There are incredible bargains to be had in Poundland and Greggs vegan donuts are really good. When the high street is closed, you make do.

Two of my neighbours get up really early in the morning, I don’t know either of their names’, but I wonder if they notice that I get up before dawn too.  I don’t know why I wonder this.  I make up stories about it in my head.

I find video calls a clumsy and unsatisfactory way to communicate.  I cannot navigate the spaces between spontaneity and pause. Sometimes I barely recognise even my closest people because I need their smell and the closeness of their eyes. Keeping ‘in touch’ is becoming a distance promise.

I have seen a goose tongue. The goose on the pond, let me know I was in his manor with a loud call and its fat pink tongue waggled at me. The snowdrops have started to peep out of the grass by the pond.  When stimulation is limited, you notice more.

I had to go to the bank and take my own pen because they don’t share now. Masked up, queue outside, freezing cold.  I don’t really want to go anywhere anymore.  COVID Stockholm Syndrome.

Lel Meleyal (Age 61) Scarborough