Oh, hello.
It’s been a while since I wrote anything for this newsletter. I suppose that’s what happens when you start a project about things you love just a few weeks before your country goes into total lockdown because of a pandemic. I wrote two proper entries in February and early March 2020 and then…nothing. I don’t need to tell you how weird and scary that spring of 2020 was because you remember it. I do feel the need, or at least the urge, to write about some of the things that made it easier. And to pay homage to art that comforts us when we need it most.
When I wrote that cheerful newsletter about Spanish period melodramas, I had no idea that Gran Hotel would become an anchor of comfort for me over the first strange six months of the pandemic, something I turned to when the sheer weirdness and isolation and fear of a world in which we couldn’t see our family and friends or go further than 2km from our own homes got too much for me.
I was lucky to have a stable income and home and a good marriage and no home-schooling to do during that time, so basically I was completely fine, but it was still scary and sad and isolating. And as it became clear, over the course of that spring, that the lockdown was going to go on for way longer than anticipated, I dealt with every wave of rising panic by parking myself on the couch and watching an episode of Gran Hotel while knitting a jumper. I ended up making two and a half jumpers in 2020 - unprecedented for me, someone who usually goes through brief phases of knitting and takes at least a year to finish a project. When I finished the first one I made another in the same pattern because I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to choose a new pattern (I’ll be eternally grateful to the Dublin yarn shop This Is Knit, who went out of their way to send me the yarn for the second jumper amid increasing restrictions on retailers).
I watched the last episode of Gran Hotel at the end of summer 2020. I didn’t know we were facing what would be a truly horrible winter - early 2021 was the low point of the pandemic for me, the point where I feared all our relationships and ability to interact normally would be damaged forever. But I did know that this ridiculous, wonderful show, with its wild twists and turns, its gorgeous costumes, its beautiful cast, its enthusiastic commitment to being relentlessly entertaining, had provided me with something I needed in a tough time.
I had just two proper cathartic cries in 2020. One was in late spring at the end of the Great British Sewing Bee finale, in the montage showing what everyone was doing now. The delightful winner - she was a doctor but I’d forgotten, over the course of the series, that she was a lung specialist - was photographed through a hospital window in full PPE gear. I burst into tears and cried so much that when my husband came into the room and saw my blotchy face he thought something truly awful had happened. The second was at the last scenes of Gran Hotel. It was another montage, showing the happy futures of all the characters, and I sobbed my way through it. Earlier that year I had joked about sending the show runners a thank you card when it was all over. When I finally finished watching the series, I asked a Spanish friend to translate a few lines for me. And then I wrote those lines on a card and sent it to Bambú HQ in Madrid. It was, I thought, the least I could do.
BTW in an act of what I can only describe as cultural vandalism, Gran Hotel has been removed from Netflix!! But luckily all the other Spanish dramas mentioned in my last post are still there, so knock yourselves out. Plus the same team have made an equally preposterous series for Amazon called A Private Affair which I greatly enjoyed despite the fact that much of it made absolutely no sense.
DISTRACTION
In 2018, I joined my local group campaigning for a yes vote in the upcoming referendum to repeal the 8th amendment. I had been at pretty much every pro-choice march and rally in Dublin since the X Case in 1992. They grew bigger and bigger over the years, especially after the awful and preventable death of Savita Halapanavar in 2012. We knew Ireland’s electorate had changed massively since 1983, but it wasn’t until early 2016, after years of activists demanding a referendum to repeal the 8th, that the government finally gave in and announced first a citizen’s assembly to explore the ramifications of a yes vote and recommend subsequent legislation (I will say this for my country - unlike our next door neighbours, we know how to plan for the aftermath of a referendum). In early 2018, it was announced that the referendum would take place at the end of May.
If the worst came to the worst and the country voted to keep it, I needed to know that I’d done everything I could. So in the two months leading up to the vote on May 25th 2018, I hit the streets. Our ever increasing group went from door to door all over north east Dublin urging people to vote yes. For the first month I felt physically sick with nerves every time we went out; I was always afraid I’d get angry and/or start crying (back in 1992 one of my classmates joined extremist anti-abortion group Youth Defence, and every single time I argued with her I became so angry I got tearful). And I was afraid horrible people would yell at me. I love ranting and friendly arguing but I’m basically a coward who hates confrontation. And yes, there were dickheads at the doors - though by far the worst abuse came from passers by, almost but not always men, when we were leafleting in the street. At the doors, most people were respectful and engaged.
People pleasantly surprised us - older men and women whom we foolishly assumed would be No voters congratulated us for canvassing and told us we had their votes. People inspired us too. Several young women in one of the most demonised council housing estates in Dublin told us they’d registered to vote for the first time purely to vote in the referendum. Elsewhere a young woman talked to me and my canvassing buddy for twenty minutes on her doorstep about her own experience of sexual assault. It turned out she was the girl the X Case rapist assaulted in his taxi after his release from prison. Five years later I still think of her sometimes, of how brave she was.
At first we went out every week; in the fortnight before the referendum, we were out every day. As well as canvassing, I handed out leaflets and spent days in the Together For Yes HQ packing iconic REPEAL jumpers for delivery to people all over the world who supported our cause. It was the most emotionally and physically exhausting thing I have ever done in my life. I was drained by all the canvassing, but I could never relax. I would wake in the night having panic attacks about the prospect a “No” result. The thought that my country would actively choose to keep the 8th, after all its horrific consequences since 1983, was unbearable.
At the time, the second series of The Handmaid’s Tale was airing on TV. I’d watched the first series, but I soon realised I couldn’t stomach the second. I had no desire to watch what felt like torture porn about women’s subjugation when I was spending much of my time literally begging people to vote for my own bodily autonomy. Instead, my husband and I watched all of the preposterous Gotham, a delightfully OTT and deceptively clever reworking of the Batman origin story. It was camp, it was silly, all the actors were having a whale of a time - it had nothing to do with extremely stressful reality, and I loved it.
I also read my way through Joan Aiken’s historical novels for adults - which, coincidentally, have just been reissued in paperback as I was writing this! As a kid I adored her books, especially The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but I didn’t even know she’d written books for grown ups until her daughter Lizza ensured they came back into (digital) print a few years ago. They are imbued with that unique Joan Aiken-ness - funny and slightly wild and strange, with beautifully distinctive linguistic twists – while also being extremely entertaining. She also wrote a couple of fantastic Jane Austen sequels. I read all of them in my back garden during that sunny April and May; they contained exactly the right combination of intelligentce and frivolity that I needed to distract myself from the fear and exhaustion I felt at all times. .
ESCAPE
I love reading in other languages. By other languages I mean French and German, because they’re the only languages besides English that I can read, though watching all those spanish period melodramas did convince me I could understand Spanish (and when I finally returned to Spain in September 2022, it turned out that wasn’t a totally deranged delusion because I actually had picked up quite a lot from the inhabitants of Velvet and the Gran Hotel!). Anyway, I wrote about why reading in other languages is so satisfying here. It’s something I did more and more of during the lockdowns, and I still love the way it makes my brain think in another language.
I always have a book in both French and German on the go - which sounds more intellectual than it actually is, given that my current German reading is a historical crime novel about a telephone operator in 1922 Baden-Baden who overhears a murder being planned. It’s very entertaining! My French book is Clémentine Beauvais’s Les Facétieuses, a completely delightful metafiction set in a slightly alternate reality in which fairygodmothers were real and vanished after the Revolution. Back in summer 2020 I read and loved her book Age Tendre, and for a while I was in the north of France insread of trapped in a small Dublin back garden.
PERSPECTIVE
Throughout the pandemic, I never consciously sought out art that reflected the weird, fearful state in which we were living. As this post should have made clear, in tough times I want art to soothe me. But at some stage in late summer 2020 I realised that I’d been reading lots of books about occupied France. The first was in French - a memoir called Résistante by Jacqueline Fleury-Marié (who is still alive!! It is genuinely disconcerting to read a memoir of spying on Nazis that says things like “if only we’d had a mobile phone we’d have been able to take photos”). Then I read Anne Sebba’s Parisiennes, about women during the occupation. And then I read Agnes Poirier’s Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940 - 1950, a deliciously evocative and gossipy book.
OBVIOUSLY I am not saying that living through a pandemic is like living under Nazi occupation, because I’m not (that much of) a total fool. But to my surprise, I realised I suddenly understood something of the sheer sense of disbelief and strangeness felt at various points in history when your normal life is utterly transformed, the speed with which you get used to the previously unimaginable. And yes, it did give me a healthy sense of perspective. Living in a comfortable house with enough food and heat was not comparable to living under brtual occupation with massive fuel and food shortages and, most of all, the threat of being rounded up and tortured and murdered by Nazis. Things could be, I knew, and are for a lot of people in today’s world, a LOT worse.
WISDOM
In 2014 I had a health scare. I was so upset at my first meeting with the consultant that he told me to come back in a week and he could go through everything when I was more calm. That week was one of the worst times of my life. I could only read two things: Tove Janson’s Moomin books and the collected letters of the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Sometimes what you need from art is just a sane, funny, strange but sensible voice. That’s what I heard in those books. They felt wise. And sometimes, when your mind and your heart are both racing, that’s the most comforting thing of all.