Alice Mason Artist

I was in the physically-distanced queue for the post office today, sending some paintings to the States, (luckily people are still buying my work,) when I realised someone was standing right next to me. Surprised, I turned around to see the old lady who lives next door. I was surprised, not least because I thought she would be stringent about ‘the rules’ about 2 metres, and I was actually delighted to see an old Tory lady deliberately breaking the ‘rules’ of the new abnormal. She said she had to get back home to pay the gardener and didn’t have time to wait in the queue and asked if I would pick up a copy of the Telegraph for her. I said that of course I would. I sensed that I was the first person she had stood close to for a long time and that just my proximity was fulfilling a basic human need. When I dropped the newspaper off to her, I realised how starved she was of conversation and I duly stood there and let her go off on a tirade of how much she hated the lockdown, how exhausted she was because of simply doing nothing, how sad, lonely and unhappy she was. I told her she was always welcome to come and have a coffee in the garden with us, and commiserated with her. Normally she attends all kinds of groups and clubs and talks. Now all she has is the Telegraph.

I find that I will do anything for anyone at the moment. I will leave bags of organic veg outside my vulnerable friends’ door. Kindness actually gives us endorphins, and so to give is a kindness to ourselves as well. What is so strange is that my friends, one of whom is battling cancer, are struggling on their own, and their friends are unable to see them, to support them in their darkest hour. It is so utterly counter-intuitive. I want to hug them, to show I care, to touch and talk with them.

I will go on walks with anyone who wants my company. Yesterday I crashed my daughter’s ‘distanced’ picnic in the park just to hang out with two young people for a while. We laughed as instead of hugs, I did a sort of hybrid ‘namaste’ bow.

I miss…. everything. Just everything without guilt or constant fear of judgement, or self consciousness about how to behave. I realise how sociable I really am, when I had thought I was some sort of semi-hermit. I miss the joy of big groups of friends laughing and chatting. I have a sense that there is a tipping point coming.

The past few days I have walked with my sister and picked elderflower to make elderflower champagne and drank turmeric sun tea. I hugged a tree grown from a pine cone from the Garden of Gethsemane in Battle church yard. I went to see my Mum and she simply said, ‘It’s so lovely just to talk isn’t it?’ as we sat on her garden swing chair and she regaled me with stories about the neighbours.

With so much more time on our hands, and now the opportunity to see others, with ‘social distancing’ in place, I took my mother to see my Dad’s gravestone in Northiam, a village a few miles beyond Rye. My Mum has bravely navigated this strange dystopian scene with her usual strength and independence, although she admits to being bored a lot, as she can’t go to her archeology or poetry groups, but she still works on her pottery. At 80, she is an incredible woman, and has lived an amazing life. She has been a viticulturist, a vintner, a shepherdess, a small-holder, a fruit tree planter, a tree warden, a woodswoman, a teacher, a mother of four, renovator of French houses (with my Dad,) a jazz and classical pianist, a singer, (madrigals, choirs, opera) and is now a mad potter. She speaks several languages, reads Zola in French and makes strange cakes with zero fat in them, and always containing ginger, which I actually love, and writes poetry. She always asks if she can read me her latest poem, which I always indulge her in, as they are funny, sweet and pretty clever. She has a great sense of fun, could swim the channel, has a beautiful speaking voice and is hilariously funny, and she makes me laugh so much, and she never minds if I laugh at her poems, because she knows they are a little odd. She loves to reminisce about her first kiss and her first loves.

When my beautiful Dad was alive, they were inseparable, and had a wonderful relationship, but she lost him when they were only 55, and she went a bit off the rails afterwards. She channeled everything into learning jazz piano. Already an accomplished pianist, she was determined to master jazz, and joined a jazz workshop and immediately fell in love with the main leader of the workshop, a charismatic and strange man, who was a brilliant sax player and who took a lot of drugs. Mum started hanging out with some strange dudes and even built a jacuzzi in her basement, because she fancied all the jazz dudes and we teased her that she wanted to entice them all into the jacuzzi. She built it and then promptly sold the house. She and my Dad moved house so many times, and even moved countries three times, I have lost count how many moves, but it’s no wonder I have always been so nomadic.

We got to the graveyard and it was a really beautiful and hot day. The air was so still and the greens of the trees intense. As I sat on the grass and wiped the dust from the granite of the stone, my Mum said ‘Ooh what’s that wonderful smell of flowers?’ and I said I didn’t notice, I couldn’t smell anything. The graveyard is tiny and there weren’t any flowers or even shrubs nearby. The heat of the day made it feel very languid and we wandered into the nearby field and along the path in the middle of a vast farmer’s field with some kind of crop growing. The field must have been about a quarter of a mile wide and I wanted to walk to the edge of the woods, but she said her knees weren’t up to the job, so we turned back. At which point she said she could smell the flowers again. I said I couldn’t smell anything. She said ‘It must be your perfume.’ I said I wasn’t wearing any, so I said, ‘Mum, I think it’s Dad. They say that when spirits visit you, there is a smell of flowers, and I can’t smell the flowers, so it’s Dad saying hello to you.’ Mum said she loved that thought. He loved her so much. He still does.