Are we about to go into coronavirus lockdown again? It sometimes feels that we might, but I hope not – the hundred plus lost days from late March to early July now seem like a bad dream. Most of my dreams, good and bad, are forgotten as I wake, but I recorded this one in my diary. Why did I keep a diary, why prolong the misery? Well, I’ve always kept one to make up for my selective memory. Then, it was a unique experience (thus far!), so it felt worth making a personal record of how I experienced it. Writing a diary, however brief it may be on some days, helped to pass the time – it became a way of structuring otherwise unstructured time. As the weeks began to blur into each other it was helpful to have a reminder of what I had been doing, my preoccupations – it is the diary as aide-memoire. Finally, a record of both the trivial and significant events can help to put things into perspective retrospectively, and it has.
I put a photograph, or other image, on my blog each day, 103 in total, in parallel with writing the diary. The photographs were taken during lockdown, though not always on the day they were posted. Most of the pictures are, snaps, aides-memoire, like the diary – even leaving aside the lockdown restrictions on movement, I don’t have the talent to make one good picture every day. There are perhaps a dozen that I’m satisfied with, things a little out of the ordinary that have made the discipline of finding a daily picture worthwhile.
I’ve now put words and pictures together in my Corona Diary. It is an honest record as I see it. Others will have seen things differently. Should anyone read it, they may conclude from it what they will. I draw no conclusions.