By Eddie Holmes-Milner.
20 views.
As the spring weather climbs towards summer, the English emerge from hibernation in pale droves, lathered in SPF 30 and their hopes for a tan. Some are fortunate enough to have a private basking zone, or ‘garden’, where they can make the transition from pallid to crispy, away from prying eyes. Others congregate in green spaces to lay themselves at the altar of Ra, the sun deity, to take part in the only remaining form of organised religious ritual in a quarantined world. Ra decides whether they will get up for a warm jog or keep their heads withdrawn within their homes-cum-hermitages and bake, instead. Prostrate upon the turf, be it muddy or astro, the English unclothe piece by piece. Only the threat of sweat on an H&M t-shirt, caused by the temperature skyrocketing to 22 degrees Celsius, allows them to justify their newfound nakedness. Once out of sight of police officers, private and public bathers alike read from the gospel according to Sally Rooney or Hilary Mantel. But as the service reaches its climax, the divine presence vanishes behind a cloud, bringing the rapture to an abrupt end. And the eyes of them both are opened, and they know that they are naked; and they lie on the cold ground in early April, with a high chance of rain in about thirty minutes and a rosiness induced either by shame or minor sunburn.
As a nation desperate to lie on the ground together at the height of a global pandemic, it is unsurprising that we are unable to stay indoors during a sunny lockdown. The expression ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’, immortalised in Noël Coward’s song, captures the Englishman’s refusal to take a siesta abroad when the heat of the sun is at its height, rendering us crazed mongrels in cargo shorts wandering into foreign temperatures. Like a child deprived of sweets at home, the English gorge when at a friend’s.
We are reminded in the press that our puppylike enthusiasm for sun on English soil now threatens our efforts to contain the coronavirus and protect those most at risk. Those without a garden or having to look after young children are most threatened by the closure of parks in order to maintain social distancing rules. We are, as a nation, to repress the joy we receive from this shining novelty.
The difficulty of discerning the day of the week has led quarantine to be described as a perpetual Sunday. The freedom of a weekend is diminished by an austere reality, Monday, hanging over us. For those at university, quarantine is an endless Spring term, spent almost exclusively indoors with the hope of a verdant Summer term to come. We may now know that Summer term will not come in the form we expected it to and for many, this makes our indefinite previous term’s all the more difficult to withstand. But until we can meet again, home students and international students, those vulnerable and those less at risk, as one, we must allow our busy lives to pause and to support those who most need our cooperation.
I look forward to a time, not far off, when we may fear no more the heat o’ the sun, but bask in it together. Well, until the English cloud hovers into view.
Edited by Marnie Ashbridge
The Quarantine Times 