Turning the key on lockdown

 

It was the laugh that did it.

Hard, explosive, lacking in mirth, more of a shriek. Heavily influenced by an intake of drink, the sort of laugh you hear in pubs. But we were in a pub and wasn't that strange? After all these months.

 

Not exactly "in" the pub, in a courtyard outside, the low sun beaming straight into my eyes making it hard to read the menu. The Old Spot, deep in rural Gloucestershire, I know not where, (my daughter had driven us) is a gastropub and we were five: daughter, spouse, their son, VR and your humble servant.

Five! How long had VR and I been simply two, rattling round our four-bedroom house, ordering food via computer, reading, being silent towards each other, losing our temper, talking obsessively to neighbours whose names we still didn't know on brief excursions to pick up the paper.

 

And now this scorching sense of community. The best sort, of the family if not of the whole family. Seventy miles away, just audible on the phone against the treble roar of another pub, came the voice of elder daughter, celebrating her own birthday – at an incredibly advanced age which, a few years ago, would have had her close to retirement. Hard to believe.

 

A daughter who'd grown up and beyond. I scanned the menu and ordered pork belly because it came with spring onions. VR, recognising a long established vow, chose battered cod "with chips, there must be chips". Beer there was, inevitably, with a large glass of sauv. blanc for VR. Pop for grandson Zach. Daughter and spouse, silhouettes against the sun, chatting amiably. Noise and animation at other tables. Yet another of those laughs.

 

After months of isolation the times, as Hamlet had opined, were out of joint. Correction! The times had been out of joint, now they were re-jointed, fused, coalesced, to bring about this vibrant assembly.

The talk between and around us was probably without meaning but it was suffused with happiness. And at 85 I was not too old to absorb this, straining to capture the tiniest sliver of what I was experiencing.

The event had started more quietly. Mid-afternoon we drove over to the tiny disconnected village of Brand Green to lie back on generous couches and soak up the details of a living room we hadn’t seen since Spring the previous year. Walls newly painted, mantelpiece decorated for the season, Reggae the murderous cat killing a small mammal at the edge of the lawn. The conversation was slow, even ponderous, as if there was too much to take in.

Beer was served. I realised this would dull the longed-for moment of the first pub pint, still an hour or two away. But this was more important, a partial unification of the family, it deserved a celebration. We agonised about the villa in France, would we make it this year? And if we did, we would do this and do that…. Wouldn’t we? Say yes.

Then it was time to leave.

PS: More than 300 words but this was a rare occasion.