Lockdown in Paris : Day Seven
Monday 23rd March
9h : Wake to up to my alarm and am struck for the first time by a dangerous thought. Oh what difference does it make? Hearing this, an alarm bell rings in my mind. This thought used to occur to me daily when I was a full-time freelancer and getting up at a decent hour was a daily battle I often lost. (Always lost.) I just love sleeping. I love it. For me, going to sleep never gets old. In fact, upon laying my head down I regularly say, “I love you, Bed” and never am I ever more sincere. People talk about a bad night’s sleep, of hours of tedious wakefulness, and I nod sympathetically, utterly uncomprehending. When I go to bed, I sleep for as long as I possibly can and then I wake up. The hours in between are a contented Nothing. Wherever I am when sleeping, I clearly like it there very, very much.
9h40 : Oh god I burnt the brioche. The last brioche. I was here waxing lyrical about sleep and how much I love it and I incinerated the last brioche roll. Why, lord, WHY?! I scraped off the burnt layer(s) into the sink and then spilled my tea all over myself and I’m getting increasingly worried about Today.
9h48 : Anyway. Sleep. The problem is that a human being can have too much of it and then things get weird. Having spent years personally researching this subject, I now know the warning signs of spending too much time “In the arms of Murphy,” as my mother would say. I think you’ll agree that Murphy (Morpheus) does have very comfy arms. So in the interests of research, here are my dangerous sleep symptoms:
Staying up watching YouTube clips until 1.30am, and then sleeping until after ten.
Waking up as knackered as if I’ve barely slept at all.
Waking up looking like I’ve aged five years and gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson and defo lost.
Looking like I’ve not seen the sun in a couple of years.
A particular type of dream, in which I am incapable of opening my eyes, moving my limbs, or responding to a shadowy figure in the dream who is trying to wake me. I have a theory that the person trying to wake me up is, in fact, me. Or at least my subconscious, which is bored beyond dream-making and using the only tools at its disposal to pry me from sleep. Cleverly, this method does actually work, because now when I have one of those dreams I know I’ve gone too far, realise what’s happening, and wake myself up. Neat hey? Nevermind the fact that I wake up feeling very much like the dream version of me who can barely form a sentence or lift an arm.
Waking up and thinking, Oh what difference does it make?
So, bringing this long and meandering sleep story full circle, when I woke up this morning and checked off numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 on the above list, I knew I’d slipped back into the Bad Sleeping Place. I imagine this might be happening around the world at the minute, since what difference does it make, when your hours lie empty before you and one day is much the same as the next? Why not spend a few extra hours sleeping at times when you probably shouldn’t? Well in my case, the Bad Sleeping Place makes me feel - wait for it - BAD. That’s it. I feel like crap. In the bad sleep place everything is a chore, everything is a Job, nothing seems interesting or fun or technicolour, everything looks grey and dull. I feel grey and dull. So tonight I will do that hardest of all things and try and break the pattern, and go to bed at a reasonable hour, and wake up before 9am, and put the colour back into the day. No, Murphy! NO. Get back. Be gone with your beautiful arms!!!
10h42 : My friend Kate-who-lives-in-the-woods sent me a link to Reach Out and I’ll Be There on Spotify and instructed me to dance “like a loon” to it “on every available surface of your flat” at 10.30am, and to take a photo at some point so she could share it with fellow dance party folk. From the above you might think I did not much feel like dancing, and you’d be right, but I did it, and a bit of colour came back into the day. If you can bring a bit of colour to anyone’s day, give it a go.
11h10 : It’s a blue-sky day today and all the more lovely because it’s cold. I wrapped up and went to sit on the balcony with a new book (Surfacing, Margaret Atwood) and I was three pages in when I suddenly found I had stopped reading and looked up, (like a dog, to be honest). My concentration just suddenly went, Hang on. Yes. What’s that? And do you know what it was? Fresh air. On a day to day basis I don’t notice the un-fresh air in Paris, though we all know the pollution is pretty awful. You don’t really notice it though - just the fug sometimes, you see it hanging over the rue de Rivoli in August or as a haze, like you’re looking through a misty camera lens. You know it when they make the Metro free, to try and encourage people to stop driving, to give us a bit of air that isn’t orange. But most of the time you don’t really notice pollution. What you do notice, when you get the chance, is fresh air. When I get out of the car after the trip home from Manchester airport I stand on my parents’ drive with my head back and I smell the air, every time. That’s when I notice pollution - when it’s not there. Suddenly I can smell trees and night and grass. And today, for the first time since I’ve lived here, I smelled fresh air in the middle of Paris. I put down my book and I stood up and I breathed and breathed and then I came here, to tell you about it.
12h46 : I went for a walk in the woods-where-Kate-lives. She held her phone up and walked me through birches and chestnuts and pines in the sun, and showed me how you tap a silver birch for its magical sap, which can only be harvested around the last two weeks of March and is full of magical tree goodness. It was a good walk.
13h21 : A bit more miraculous work came in. I absolutely cannot feel my feet but can’t bring myself to close the window as it’s so lovely and blue outside. Another first - a completely blue sky without a single plane trail in it. Never seen that before.
13h44 : The bin has to go out today. It’s the rotting chicken all over again. Will she make it down the flights of stairs to the bins? Will she go even further, to hunt for eggs? Will she throw caution to the wind and walk around the block? Tune in later to get closure on this nail-biter of a cliffhanger.
14h03 : It was a short cliffhanger - I’m going outside. It feels weird. I have shoes on. That’s weird. Feels weird to feel weird about it.
14h50 : Went to the shop and when I got there (once I’d seen the empty eggs aisle and managed not to fall to my knees with my fists raised to the sky) I had absolutely no idea what I needed, if anything. Decided my treats would be San Pellegrino and orange juice (pure hedonism) so I got those. Obviously had to get a bottle of rosé. Wanted biscuits. Can’t buy biscuits because within five minutes they’re just crumbs down the front of my jumper. There’s really barely no point buying them, their existence in my life is so fleeting. I got more milk. Lots of milk actually, because I’ve decided that in this second working week of lockdown I will have porridge for breakfast. This is a really odd thing to have decided because I really really hate porridge. Maybe subconsciously I feel I’m not suffering enough. Maybe I thought that gruel was the extra note of misery I was missing, and so I cheerfully added it in. Maybe this whole bloody thing just wasn’t Oliver Twist enough so I kicked it up a gear into “I know, while we’re in solitary confinement let’s ALSO pretend we’re in a Victorian orphanage!!”
15h21 : I really wish I’d got some biscuits.
16h48 : Watched Ghostbusters II because the internet was on such good form that it would’ve been madness not to. Ignoring two articles I have to write. Just can’t quite bring myself to sit down and write them today, even though I know that “disinterest in just about everything that isn’t a moving picture” is a dangerous side-effect of unstructured time. We are old enemies, Unstructured Time and I. Oh yes. He is a wily one. I think to get through this difficult episode, I will watch some more moving pictures until it blows over. This sound logic has never / always failed me in the past.
19h29 : Decided to put my headphones in and do the washing up, which turned into a lengthy one-woman rendition of Hamilton the Musical in which I played all the parts. Audiences wept. Or at least I have little doubt the neighbours did.
20h : The rosé is open. Today - as I think has been made clear - has been pretty much a time-wasting game, but from what I hear from folk on Whatsapp, it seems to be a very common theme for Day 7. Let’s hope for more productive things tomorrow. Let’s hope I can pry myself from the arms of Murphy. I shall! I must. I definitely will! I will definitely try.
