The world is coming back and a recent plateau of tranquility has been replaced with a dolly zoom of existential dread, with me in a supporting role as Roy Scheider in ‘Jaws.’ The civility and sensibility of the past three months is eroding and with that a return to the ambient noise I’d loved to live without. Neighbours’ power tools and housebuilding projects that have been on hold for months all roared back into life at once, transforming a human-diminished landscape into a daily symphony of power tools and radio, replacing the previous noise of nesting gulls and jackdaws with the motorised reminders that people were returning to dominate.

I’ve had a fortunate lockdown as we’ve both been healthy and I’ve continued to teach full time from home and so I’m writing from a position of privilege where I’ve been able to work and do meetings from my attic drawing table, my happiest place and where I choose to be most of the time anyway. I published my book and hand delivered it around town and became a home distribution mailing centre instead of speaking at the literary festival. I lost a dear friend in New York to the virus, a blindingly bright light switched off that I still have yet to properly process. Many of my friends work in hospitality all over the world, many own small businesses and some have been made redundant or lost their businesses. The economic landscape will not be the same when the machinery grinds back into operation but there’s been a kindness in the air, a levelling sense that we were are all in it together and it is the loss of that element that I’m grieving, like the melting of snow after a blizzard. Fowey has been a lovely place to be the past few months, with people looking out for each other and the local shops going out of their way to provide the essentials and try new ways to do things, not to mention a spate of magnificent weather that tricked us all, like it always does, into thinking it would stay that way forever. I have left town about 5 times since March, Melch has not left at all. I celebrated my birthday at the end of May with a comic but wonderfully socially distanced grouping on the Town Quay. Across the river, Polruan has ceased to be a three-dimensional landscape element and instead has flattened into the theatrical backdrop of my days sitting at my desk in the window at the top of the house looking out into the silence over the empty river. 

            I’m not an economist nor am I a super-forecaster or even a good guesser, but have been spending hours staring out the window, listening to the radio and consulting news and social media far more than is probably healthy in order to try to put my finger on why I keep seeing Mayor Larry Vaughn and Chief Brody and that woman who owns the motel out of the corner of my eye no matter where I turn. I keep looking for Quint but can never find him. I think it’s probably because I feel the ‘s-s-sh-shark’ girl with the red bandanna who is painting on the beach yelling futilely as she sees the shark going into the pond while the boys are in the water. I’ve been up here in my attic window watching the river fill up with boats and seeing more and more people walking up and down the Esplanade and wondering where it’s all going to go and what people are expecting to have happen.  I want town to thrive and all the businesses who have been struggling to spring back into life but am terrified in a way that I haven’t been for months, and that is because I fear the stupidity and entitlement of people in general. Call it the Bournemouth Effect. None of us have been anywhere in months. Taking a masked bus ride to Richards’ in Par to buy vegetables and frozen prawns was the highlight of June for me and it would never in a million years occur to me to book a holiday anywhere at the moment or to go into a crowded place for fear of getting sick or causing an issue. Not all of the pubs in town are opening on the 4^th of July. Some are waiting a few weeks and some are taking a wait and see approach. The biggest problem I have is that the thing I love most about the local pubs in Fowey is the thing that is not going to be there, which is socialising. The alcohol, while not incidental, exactly, isn’t really the main reason I go. I can drink at home. It’s to get out of the house and see friends or unwind after a long day working. The last thing I want to do this Saturday or any time soon is be near strangers and have another anxiety channel to tune into at 3 am when sleep is elusive. I am worried for all of my friends in town who are working on the front line in various capacities and I hope that the visitors who will be descending show respect and understand that, no matter how beautiful this place is, it’s not their pasty filled playset to do with as they please. 

Runway View at Terminal 5

A trio in the lobby near me captured my attention. An older guy with a Bob Hoskins accent who could have been Tom Jones’ second cousin was talking to a gaunt hollow cheeked lad who looked like the smart one on the rubbish truck who didn’t get a chance to go to uni because of life circumstances but who was still determined to get more out of life. There was a woman with her back to me who had not yet spoken. Her hair was enormous and she was moving her head back and forth quite a bit, like a silent maraca. The older guy (bad dark hair dye…why do men continue to do this? Will someone have a word? Will they listen?) was holding court, talking about how he was doing well with his waste removal business but he wanted more. Any mention of the waste removal industry sends my imagination soaring skyward so I began to scoot somewhat closer so I could earwig more efficiently. The Young One said ‘you mean, something more creative?’ and Hair Dye nodded emphatically, checking his phone. The three were clearly all flung together for some kind of work-related thing but it wasn’t clear what it was. I have always lived in terror of having to participate in forced conversations like this (also conga lines) and wanted to understand the mechanics of how it happens and why people submit. A late-era husky voiced Joni Mitchell was singing Both Sides Now through the lobby speaker system, which made me feel wistful and think of Emma Thompson fixing the bed in Love Actually after the penny dropped. This distracted me momentarily. Hair Dye made a reference to the fact that he drove a Bentley, an unnecessary statement like ‘I am sitting on a chair.’ The Young One seemed to take this at face value and Maraca Head continued to shake her mane. I waited for context. Hair Dye went on about he talked to everyone he met even though they may only want to be friendly with him because of the Bentley. Everyone was a potential contact. It was like a creepy cockney Glengarry Glen Ross with no Jack Lemmon for relief. Or even Alec Baldwin with a set of steak knives. Or David Mamet with an axe. Then as I was continuing to try to figure out what was going on a girl came walking through the lobby wearing a black t-shirt with giant white letters referencing a property investment company on the front. ‘How Can I Help You?’ was in equally large white letters on the back. She was ringing a small silver dinner bell that evidently signalled the end to the conversation. I realised at that moment that there were other similar small groups conversing around the lobby. At the sound of the bell they all got up together and walked out of the lobby like Eloi and I was suddenly completely alone, wondering what kind of predatory nonsense I had been witnessing. Maraca Head had never spoken.

Prior to ensconcing in the hotel lobby I had been waffling and wavering in a sterile Thistle room at Heathrow Terminal 5, unsure of whether to venture forth to town on the Piccadilly line to escape the rain-spattered car-park-view grimness before me or whether to stay and glory in the horror of being at a hotel airport from the comfort of the lobby until the glamourous Runway View Restaurant and Lounge was opened for dinner and cocktails. The strange small voice that impels me out into the world in general was difficult to dismiss. What would I do when I got off the Piccadilly line at Leicester Square? I would go to Foyles and brave the danger of books I might purchase and then how would I fit them in my suitcase as I was about to fly to Houston with a bag that was already at the breaking point. After Foyles I’d go to Chinatown and eat soup dumplings and get sleepy and then have to come all the way back out to Heathrow and feel bad about myself. The internal waffle finally convinced me to stay put and get some work done, particularly as I would be back in London after Houston on Monday, so I could theoretically eat dumplings then if it was absolutely necessary. Plus I read that there were both dumplings and books in Houston, but it was really all about the dumplings.

I had a wander around the hotel, which was vast and arranged across two floors with endless Shining hallways spoking off into diminishing perspective beige and brown tunnels of despair. It had perverse ornate mouldings that almost tricked you into thinking that it had been there awhile and then your eye moved from the egg and dart moulding to the low dropped ceiling peppered with Legionnaire’s Disease air conditioning vents and you were suddenly reminded of where you were. In a hangar-like conference room called The Aviation Suite I stumbled across an enormous jumble sale of duty-free stuff that was only available to employees of Heathrow Airport. Hordes (I’m talking hundreds and hundreds) of ID-lanyard-wearing employees milled around endless displays of face serums, rolling suitcases, neck pillows, perfume, chocolate and all of the other guff I look at but do not buy in duty free. I was busting to go in just to look at everything…but the security guard informed me that it was not possible because I was not an employee of Heathrow. For a moment I contemplated hanging my Falmouth Mussel Card from a lanyard just to attempt to go in. Part of me also wanted to make up a story about how I was just hired and didn’t have my ID yet or chat up some hapless lanyarded soul in a hi-vis vest and prostitute myself into the sale just to score some Lancome under-eye circle serum, but reconsidered. So I began my lobby residency with a glass of Malbec and a packet of Strong Cheese and Onion crisps in a rather comfy sofa conversation pit at the far corner of the lobby feeling sorry for everyone who worked here or was attending the Property Speed Dating event and having my mind boggled by the strange decorative touches like the clear lucite icicle walls hanging in front of the windows and the glass urns holding cream coloured LED candles (not turned on) nestled in beds of red glass chips dotted around the room…were they supposed to make people feel better and more at ease or to create a vague terror at what horrors might later be reflected in their glass? As I contemplated my growing unease, each of the speed dating property people returned and sat alone dotted through the lobby on their laptops doing property research and cold calling agents whilst reading from a script that was branded by the dinner bell property company. 

All of these people seemed hopeful to make a change in their lives and there I was getting angrier and angrier at whoever this character was running the pyramid scheme. The idea that pyramid schemes still thrived and preyed on people in the 21^stcentury boggled my mind, but I guess everything is a pyramid scheme when you think about it, all preying on our human need to try to make a better life and hopefully put one over on the man and usually getting screwed in the process. There was a cruelty to everything I was witnessing here and the benign blandness of these surroundings made it worse. I don’t know of any period in my lifetime where things felt so fundamentally bleak and slippery, where there was no reassuring sense that someone, somewhere, was going to put a stop to all of it. Even as a child, with Nixon in the White House and Vietnam and Watergate and Anita Bryant, I had a sense that there were people out there who would eventually make it all okay and that some moral order existed where idiots would be vanquished. National Lampoon. MAD. The Ramones. I fear our collective attention spans and the sheer noise of constant information is drowning out the voices of reason out there and that somewhere we’ve kind of stopped really caring and are just mocking everything and assuming nothing can or will change. The delectable panic cloud of the coronavirus hanging over everything keeps serving as a vague beacon of hope, my little internal Tony voice saying ‘now everyone will see how hideous the idiots we’ve elected are, Mrs. Torrance, because they’re going to screw everything up and now they will be forced to go.’ Then Tony hides in my stomach again next to the anxious butterflies and I’m left without an answer.   

I am grateful to live in Cornwall, with all of its petty inconveniences and lack of sushi and Vietnamese food. Living in Cornwall is essentially like living in the 1970s with high speed internet. I am connected to a fantasy future world just over the Tamar, like I’m Rod Taylor sitting in his time travelling machine (my phone) and marvelling at the modern world and wishing we had Uber while at the same time not wanting to venture there much at all and when I do have to go knowing that it’s just for a little while. Limited options, nature close at hand, the ability to wear absolutely hideous and comfortable clothing all the time because who the hell actually cares has become an addictive lifestyle and I am now having terrors that something will happen that will force me to learn to do property deals from con men and make chit chat with charity shop Tom Joneses in hotel lobbies because we’ve all collectively chosen to become Eloi and allow the Morlocks to take over. 

So our vicar has decided to leave the Anglican church and start up his own church in the same town. Considering the size of the churchgoing public here it seems surprising that there are enough people to break off and start another one but he’s gone and done it and now it’s hit the top three in town chatter. It’s like the franchisee of a McDonalds becoming disgruntled and opening a Burger King down the street. Do we really need that much fast food?

The vicar has been the vicar since we moved here and I’ve never thought too much about him and his beliefs as he is someone I see around town and make jokes with about cats and their evil. The only time I step foot in the church is for funerals (don’t get me started) or the occasional retreat with my notebook to sit alone in the cavernous musty-smelling space and let the history wash over me and remind me that this, whatever the ‘this’ of the moment might be, too shall pass. My engagement with and respect for religion since birth has been minimal and because my parents were on the old side when they had me they didn’t have the oomph to attempt to instill anything in me except the iron clad rule to (in my father’s words) not be an asshole. Not being an asshole is, I suppose, otherwise known as The Golden Rule and the best part of it is that you don’t have to haul yourself at a designated time to some building to prove your worth. Don’t be a jerk to other people and treat them the way you’d want to be treated as much as you can and there you go, it should all take care of itself. You’d think. This rule pre-dates most organised religions because it’s just such an obvious way to approach life but it has been co-opted and twisted so many times by organised religion that it’s been lost in the complex game-show rules constructed to justify various beliefs. And one of the key elements of the Golden Rule is empathy. 

Having worked for and with tabloid newspapers for much of my professional career, empathy was something I wrestled with on a daily basis and it wasn’t always easy to balance the need to tell a story with the idea that someone might get hurt in the process. Maybe that’s why I don’t do it anymore, maybe I just had enough internal wrangling and moral ambiguity for one lifetime. Maybe that’s why I chose to be an educator and to live in a little town in Cornwall where I get to spend more time in nature and work on my personal projects, far from the distracting noise and alone with my thoughts a little bit more.

Because it’s a port and because, despite its size, our town has been an international trading centre for over a millennium, there’s a strange kind of acceptance woven into the place because it’s no stranger to, well, strangers. And pirates. Lots of pirates. It does not have that terrifying Little Whinging/Sandford provincialism for the most part and people are allowed to be themselves here, for better or worse. Mostly better. The river, with all its fickleness, seems to act as a reminder that we’re all just here for a little while but it’s going to keep doing what it does while we live and die around it and it floods the Quay from time to time.

When I was doing the food at the sailing club I used to cook the monthly breakfast for the religious men of the vicar’s flock. This had nothing to do with me personally as a cook and everything to do with the venue and because cooking breakfast is actually quite pleasant because people aren’t as picky at 8 in the morning, I was okay doing it, mostly because there was always leftover bacon afterward. Except for the part where, after this men’s group had eaten, I had to listen to their talks as I was tidying up the kitchen (over the top symbolism not lost here) Sometimes they’d have a guest speaker, some religious man or a visiting vicar brought in to talk about scripture or current events or perhaps one of the locals would get up to say something. I would stand just out of sight in the kitchen, sharpening knives as they talked about women’s roles and how the bible wanted things done and one alarming day, there was a talk that included praise for Donald Trump. Had I dressed in a Handmaid’s Tale costume while giving them eggs, I’m not sure they’d have noticed anything was awry. I did always try to wear the worst inflammatory metal t-shirts I could find in the closet on those days, just to feel a little better, though stopped short of ever wearing my I Heart Satan shirt. The age of this group skewed older but there were some disturbingly young ones in there too and I felt so sad for them that they were being indoctrinated in this way and that their lives were being constricted and I had to wonder if they even realised how limiting it all was. The reason I’m thinking about the breakfasts now during this waning period of VicarGate is that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with one of the organisers one morning as the event was wrapping up. There are a lot of older people in town, I had said, and because of the hills and various infirmities, it was difficult for many of them to get up and out and socialise and many were isolated. Wouldn’t it be nice if they (the church people) could organise a Sunday roast so that people could get out more and stay part of the community? It was a brief chat but what I remember the most about it (beside the fact that this idea never came to fruition) was how that organiser had looked straight through me when I was talking, with a slight look of indulgence. I was not one of them and I was a woman, and an American one at that. But there was something else that I couldn’t put my finger on until all this new church stuff started up and it clicked. Exclusion. I was suggesting that we include people and that was not registering.

So we have this beautiful old church that is the very heart of the town. That it is the heart of town has less to do with religion and more to do with history and architecture and beauty and tradition for most people. People have a relationship with the building transcending their relationships with their gods, whatever they may be. For as long as we’ve lived here, I’ve never felt completely comfortable in there as much as I love the physicality of the place (even my solitary sojourns with my notebook are tinged with the feeling that I might be chucked out at any moment) and that is because the whole place has been infested with a controlling interpretation of faith that finds ways to exclude rather than include and, biblical scholar that I am not, that seems to be somewhat counter to the whole game. In my perfect world, that church would be used for more community events, for film screenings and live music. It’s just a building, after all, albeit an ancient and beautiful one, and buildings are built to be used. By people. All sorts of people. Who are made to feel welcome and part of a community. Flies, honey, vinegar etc.

So now a new, more orthodox church is being ‘planted’ by the vicar down the road in a physical location that has long been a refuge for merchant seamen of many different faiths who come into port. This physical location, is, ironically, sponsored by the Anglican church which he is leaving. The vicar is hoping he can grow his new flock there. The fact that this building is behind a locked gate requiring a code to get in has not been lost on many people but, because I’m such an empath, I hope he finds some happiness there and that this whole thing moves off the mental front pages of the town, because we all have better things to do for each other. For the greater good.