COVID Lockdown Reflections by Ustinov College

REFLECTIONS

REFLECTIONS March 2021

Lynda Marshall

Leisa Rea

Debby Monks

Yoshiko Teraoka

Noriko Matsubara

Teodora Nikolova

Ustinov GCR

Holly Standen

Margaret Jennings

Miria

Contents

Words Escape Me Buffering

p.4-5 Ustinov College Graduate Common Room (GCR)

p.6-8 Leisa Rea

The Tuning Fork Phenomenon North Sea by Night

p.9-11 Yoshiko Teraoka

p.12-13 Miria Miria

The Before Times p.14-16 Teodora Nikolova I’ll See You on the Other Side

p.17 Holly Standen

Unexpected Item in the Bagging Areal Beating the Bounds p.19

p.18 Debbie Monk

Lynda Marshall

Duthchas Walk Research + Biodiverse Focus = Awe Findings p.20-21 Margaret Jennings Lockdown p.22-25

Noriko Matsubara

Words Escape Me Ustinov College Graduate Common Room (GCR)

Lonely Scary Isolated Alone

Longing Bored Unmotivated

This year has been without doubt the most challenging for all of us, while trying to continue our studies (mostly online) and have a balance on the screen time. We found ourselves involved in new ways to meet new people, socialize and even study!

Buffering Leisa Rea

They tell me my sentence is coming to an end. That with good behaviour, I might be out by Summer. That the towns and cities will open up again. Friends will be able to hug. Shops, un-shutter. They say this is good news. I’ve made good use of my time Inside. Held myself together better than most. Managed to make my daily walks around the same yard, something of a treat. Metime. Rather than Them-Time. I’ve been a regular at the prison library too. Devouring podcasts on Art, and Crime. Reading newspapers. Logging onto the shared computer. Waiting, as it buffers forever, refusing to move on. Still, it will end, they say. All this. I remember with fondness, the beginnings of Lockdown 1, with its glorious sunshine. It was also a fact that I’d lost my job and earnings and that people were afraid of a Virus which threatened to wipe out humanity. But, I clung onto the feel good factor which often accompanies hot weather and began to fancy myself as someone who might grow their own food. Live off the land. Thrive. That if the house suddenly collapsed, would be able to chop down a tree and fashion a reasonable shelter. Especially if it stayed this warm. I’m nostalgic now, for Lockdown 1. For the way we all fumbled about like survivalists, as though it were a childhood game. Back when couples still talked nicely to each other. Went for long walks. Took it in turns to cook delicious meals

with essential ingredients. Or their own spuds. A war time feel (those of us who’d never seen war), imagined. Of course, home schooling was its own kind of hell. But we muddled through, didn’t we, in the ignorance that it couldn’t last long. By Lockdown 2, the NHS had begged us to stop banging pan lids and start following The Rules. Some of us weren’t and still, the death toll was rising. In turn, neighbourly warmth was waning. Divisions and splinters were appearing from Region to Region, from Generation to Generation, from Ethnic Group to Ethnic Group. Blame spread. Suspicion festered. I hissed at joggers coming at me too fast, too close. I felt my anger rise in supermarkets as unmasked teens dawdled by the crisps. I cursed loudly as Newsreaders told me how hundreds of people were attending raves in terraced houses across the North of England. Regularly. When Lockdown 3 was announced, I was exhausted and emotionally moribund. I knew it was coming because Our Prime Minister had said ‘Have a nice Christmas with your Families, but don’t mix with your Families, by which I mean, you have 5 whole days to travel and see them, although, I’d rather you didn’t but I refuse to be the one who says that’. And everybody took from that message, whichever message it was that they really wanted to hear. Some of us isolated and some of us didn’t and still, the death toll was rising.

As we edge closer to the end of Lockdown 3, I am a pacing tiger. And a suburban house is no place for a wild animal. I might easily score the wallpaper with a claw, upturn the sofa with my tail, or eat the children. I carry the scent of Anger. I avoid others for much of the day. Leaving rooms they enter, staying for too long in the garden shed, chain smoking.

This is a dangerous point in the journey for any prisoner. There is talk that Freedom is on the horizon. I know that soon, the cages will be gone, but I am afraid. What if I blow my parole and attack a guard? What if the distance I’ve put between me and you, is permanent? What if, standing by the doorway of my open cell, I am too afraid to cross its threshold. What if I stay here. Buffering. What then.

The Tuning Fork Phenomenon Yoshiko Teraoka

Get up, eat, work, exercise, start all over again. It was not that my world had turned upside down but that in the seeming stagnation of life under lockdown, the conditions of existence were laid bare through their gradual reverberation. All around, poetry abound with anxious rhythms scattered through the suburban streets of London. We shuffled left to right, to-and-fro, positive and negative, in fits of nervous footwork, as we teetered between safety and insanity in our pandemic-themed numbers. “If things don’t go right, go left,” a sandwich board told me. If things don’t go right left, then what? Sounds repeated through plexiglass and makeshift screens until they didn’t. We resorted to using the small gaps in-between until our faces were closer than ever and yet, we couldn’t feel any further apart. Words repeated inside the walls of buses and trains. What is ‘Hands, Face, Space’ but another crude budget cut? Words appeared and disappeared, in black and white, in shop displays and home windows. I wore a t-shirt in May that said, “I have an infinite number of reasons to be happy” but the ink faded with each wash. Bodies repeated outside supermarket parking lots and city squares. We bumped signs in Parliament Square in June. The same protest sign used in Oakland, California at a 1969 rally for Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton. The same protest sign made famous by Black Panther Party member and FBI informant Richard Aoki – but we didn’t know that back then. A man with Tourette’s syndrome shouts “coronavirus!” every time someone sneezed or coughed. A man in Korea is troubled by his dog that knows how to

express herself only by walking dizzyingly around in circles. Watching the same Youtube videos on repeat, I learnt that Kong the Maltese was born in a small showcase window and had lived there during a period of socialisation before being adopted by her owner. Happiness, excitement, sadness, fear – she tried to express all of these things by turning round and round. Through the motions, she relives the trauma she experienced years ago in her cage. An animal behaviourist corrects her by setting up obstacles consisting of gridded parameters to make her feel discomfort every time she tries to turn. My motions traced Kong in concentric circles, while fragments of images as filtered through screens sent echoes of a stagnant feeling that we have been here before. How many times must we go round to correct the error of our ways? In the summer, when the world had temporarily “reopened,” I flew across the sea seeking familial comfort. Somewhere between the children yelling and the banana bread baking in the oven, my friend said “I forgot about the pandemic.” He meant nothing by it, but I felt my class. His words travelled outward to his unruly garden, reverberating out on to the bustling traffic lanes and across the canal waters to the homogenous row of council flats. As words turned to sound turned to frequencies, I thought about the tuning fork phenomenon – a fleeting moment in the experience of déjà vu, when one spiritual frequency matches the spiritual frequency of another. Meanwhile, somewhere in the woods, a treehopper vibrates its abdomen like a tuning fork against a stem of a leaf to transmit acoustic signal. The sound travels inside the plant to send a range of frequencies that contain specific information, to which other treehoppers respond through the sensory nerves on their legs. Two treehoppers transmitting the same frequencies will eventually find each other, while other competing treehoppers eavesdrop to send signal jams. I wonder, how do I overcome the distance drawn by the noise to match frequencies with the occupants of these self-contained units?

As the sound of indifference in my friend’s voice withered away, my body ached to return to the safety of monotony. How is it that in pushing myself forward, I landed right back in my room? Somewhere in the unfolding repetitions, left became right and right became left, moving forward meant moving back, and what at first sustained me, now ruined me. When I returned home to Peckham, I thought about my neighbours and how we’ve barely said hello to each other. I receded into the corner of my room and there I lay still, listening to the various registers of noise and vibrations surrounding me. The same protest sign from June sits on the windowsill of my room – a fact that I let sit and hover above my head as I enter and leave the house every day. Get up, eat, work, exercise, start all over again.

Red-eyed Dragon and the Taste of Shaved Ice

North Sea by Night Miria Miria

⼀⽉、北の海の⽇没は早くて砂浜の散歩の復路にはもう、とっぷりと⽇が暮れてしまった。January, the Sun sets early. On the way back from my walk along the long

sandy beach, a dusky black vale has already fallen.

⽩く巨⼤な⾵⾞（ウインドタービン）の姿は暗い海に呑み込まれ、沖をゆく船舶の警告⽤の⾚いランプが、まるで低空を⾛る⻯の⾚い⽬のようだ。 Colossal wind

turbines are swallowed by the shadowy sea, the warning red lights for vessels traveling near the shore are like the red eyes of a dragon flying low in the sky.

肌を刺す冷たい空気の中に無数の⿃たちがいる。ぎっしりとかたまって、寄り合った⿃たちは、⾝動きもせず、じっとしている。Clustered, bunched tight in the freezing

air, numerous sea birds were as if pottery, stationed without any motion.

岸には、街の明かりも灯った。凍える⼿で撮った写真は、⼿が震えてアブストラクトの絵に変わった。私は絵を描いていない。私は今、時という川を漂うあぶくだ。今、私はただただ、時の流れの中で浮遊を繰り返しているばかりだ。規制を余儀なくされ、不安の続く⽇々の中で。描けない、まだ今は。 The city lights lit the shore. My

frozen hands shake, and the photo I took turned into an abstract painting. I have not been painting. I am now a bubble drifting in a river, the river, called time. Drifting, drifting I am lost and drifting in it. The time of anxiety and constraint. I cannot paint, least not just now.

海からは、誰もいなくなった。私は海と⼆⼈っきりだ。私はマスクを外して、思いっきり息を吸い込んだ。冷たい空気が、胸⼀杯に広がっていく。その冷たい北海の海の空気は、遠い昔に⾷べたラムネのかき氷の味だった。Everyone disappeared from the

beach. With the sea was solitary me. I took off the mask and breathed deeply. The icy air spread into my chest. The arctic air of the North Sea was the taste of shaved ice with soda I had a long long time ago.

The Before Times Teodora Nikolova

before anything, i want you to know that i am healthy, before anything, i want you to know that i am safe before anything, i want you to know this too shall pass.

the cobblestones remember our steps from before and carry the memory into the soles of my shoes, invisible footprints in the air, mine six feet from yours.

the bleach smells like the spring from before you have flowers in your hair, flowers on your mask, like a bouquet spilling from your mouth when you talk

holy, clean, the streets smell like rain, the path to the cathedral wrapping around the closed storefronts, tracing the memory of the before times,

overlaying it like a developed film over the present i want you to know that i am healthy, i say, from six feet away.

when i look at you, your eyes reflect the sunlight from above the rim of your mask, beaming it back at me. i want you to know that i am safe, i tell my mother on the phone.

on the other side of the screen, i look at my tutor, not late for class for once, with no excuses to skip. i shift the camera, ashamed of my silly posters; he shows me his cat.

i write my notes in the same notebooks from before, unsanitized, i open the postcards from the places you are rediscovering now that the planes are grounded, spending the cold months here for once.

before anything, i want you to know i am grateful for every morning i get to step outside and see the sun, for every familiar bend in the footpaths that lead me to a spot six feet from you.

i sit in the library and don’t do work, like i wouldn’t have done work before, distracted. like before, anything is impossible when i’m thinking of you.

when my mother calls me, i tell her before anything, i am healthy. before anything, i am safe.

before anything, i promise, i’m not lonely.

I’ll See You on the Other Side Holly Standen

Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area Debbie Monks

Just one more thing to jangle the nerves as I struggle to navigate this new Covid reality. Hot mask, steamed up specs, flustered at the checkout. Now, a year on since the world changed beyond my imagining, toilet rolls might be in plentiful supply, but my stash of self-discipline is running low. I purchase fruit and veg, nourishment for the body, but ‘soul food’ is marked ‘temporarily out of stock’. Days, weeks and then months, held back from contact with each other, and cultural events that enrich our lives, this is a very different, but equally felt hunger. I am surviving on ‘scraps’, the radio and TV keeping the flame alive.

Hurrah, it is Spring! Obvious signs of new growth everywhere. Proof that the world and the seasons are still turning, whatever catastrophic events unfold worldwide. It is enough to know that the natural world persists despite us, despite Covid. A pragmatist would argue that nature is indifferent to our well being, or indeed our survival. 5I am content, and grateful, that the trees are in bud, and ribbons of daffodils are running along the roadsides. Spring, the season of optimism and rebirth will replenish and feed my hungry soul, a joyous and not ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’.

Beating the Bounds Lynda Marshall

Solitude comes with an intense yellow tint and the thick smell of a field of rapeseed will, in future, bring a Proustian memory of this pandemic. A year ago I abandoned the pathways to joggers and confined myself to the margins where I monitored the seasonal shifts around cultivated fields. Choosing the edge of the inside, existing in a liminal space but knowing that life had given me the skills to survive this constraint. I walk the field boundaries every day for a year, monitoring nature in these essential corridors for movement between otherwise isolated habitats and then walk home to my own isolated habitat. Nature marks the passing year. Nature named for me by my father and father's father back through the generations to ancestors who understood their home, who lived and died (possibly of plague) in their small Parish. They Beat the Bounds to hand down an intergenerational memory of the precise geographic boundaries of their lives. I beat my bounds as they get smaller while the virus increases. Yet after I walk home, the World is still wide: science, statistics and politics and the suffering of my fellow beings, these are things I find I can also name. #Shewasonlywalkinghome I think of the future generations and the progress we still have to make. Spring has arrived, the farmer has replanted the rapeseed and I have a new and growing Granddaughter. I still walk home but it's coming time to step back into the wider World.

Duthchas Walk Research + Biodiverse Focus = Awe Findings Margaret Jennings

Thoughts of new rhythms of intense hues and a new normalness day. Opening of time replaced with focus, by different shared pair-of-glasses Where windows bring inside/outside…

Sun with the sky, drifting birdsong, leaves of moving psychological hue… The feet talk….’Take Me Out’.

Well then, on with worn trainers… wafer thin of parting soles.

New varied feelings penetrate straight upwards from underfoot. Terrain of squelch, angular hard shape shifting stoniness, Moss of tender soft pad.

Relanguaging Aliveness as Now. Gratitude of Time and Place… Of being held deep in the World. Feelings of sparkly stars beaming down out there.

Smell of rich breath of earth as shared history to legacy… To determined decisions on dying unnecessary habits. Life held together rooted within the same moment of day… In the shared spectrum between hues; yellow and blue.

Socks off for extra vitamin D, a dragonfly comes to rest on the right bare foot. And for tonight… an organic green leaf salad.

United by Duthchas…carried forth by ancient unity of land, Embracive of all living creatures, nature and culture.

Lockdown Noriko Matsubara

In March 2020, lockdown happened. Schools closed. It was difficult to work while the children were home. I got stressed. I was complaining to my husband about how little time I had for myself. My husband turned to me and said, “Hey, you won't get this time again. So treasure it.” Something pinged in my head. He is right. Why don't I take this situation as an opportunity rather than a problem? I could choose to stay complaining, but it won't change the situation any better. Let's see if I could turn it around and use this time to connect with my children deeper. So I started documenting my everyday family life with cartoons. Instead of struggling to find time to work, I decided to incorporate my children into my new creative project. When my perspective shifted, my experience changed. When I started focusing on 'humour' in my everyday family life, my relationship with my children improved. I no longer felt as a victim but felt grateful for what I have. I realised what I had taken for granted is a precious gift – everyday life. Lockdown taught me a great lesson. When you change your focus, your experience will change.

Noriko’s 4-koma Manga Link： https://norikoart.com/cartoons/

Thanks to all the contributors and to Martin Brader for converting our work into an e-book. Miyoko Y. McGregor 30 March 2021

Cover Image by Miria Mira

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