Pi in the Sky

PANDEMIC PLANTING  

𝚷 in the sky?

A lot of folks are going stir-crazy. Me, not so much. I like solitude and, having lived on my own for the best part of ten years, enjoy my own company. It gives me time, when so inclined, to do stuff; creative stuff.
And it's dangerous out there; lethal in fact. Today was the worst day of the Coronavirus so far with 563 deaths recorded in the UK alone. No-one can say with any certainty how many people are infected as only a tiny proportion of the population are being tested. 
My neighbour telephoned this morning to tell me that she had "a sore throat, a cough, but no fever"! So I asked her, tentatively, if there was anything I could do.
"I'd like a bottle of Lucozade, some of those menthol sweets - the ones in the black packet - and if you see any toilet roll...". Her voice tailed off. No explanation was offered, or sought.

Ok, I thought. I wanted to visit LIDL in town anyway. I've been adapting to the lockdown this past fortnight. I have had to move my teaching online. I'm using Zoom, like the Prime Minister. Like the Prime Minister I have a lot yet to learn. I am a student of one of my students. He taught me the basics one day, whilst I was still sat adjacent to him, trying to upload GCSE Geography to him. Since when I have been baffled by his greater knowledge on more than one occasion. Why only today, as I struggled to even get connected to the internet, his screen remained blacked out for the vast majority of the lesson on River Processes and Pressures. Save for the moment it blinked into life with him standing on his chair, in shorts. Some things are better left unsaid and unseen.

My morning consisted of my other student of the day, for whom I prepare English and Maths lessons, declining even to speak with me. It's not personal. Pretty much the entire cohort at the college where I work part-time are declining to engage remotely with their tutors - or should that be remotely engage?
 Like many in her position she simply doesn't know what she ought to be doing in connection with her studies. Will she get a decent grade? Hard to say when we haven't yet learned the basis for the arbitrary awarding of grades; will it be predicted grades? She never did Mock Exams and has refused to attend school since last July. Perhaps an assessment, invigilated by me might be crucial? Hopefully we'll be communicating directly again between now and the day of judgement.
She's very bright but being a prisoner of a lockdown doesn't suit her. I understand. So I decided to export my latest projects and upload them to her as an olive branch. I woke at 5am puzzling over how to assuage her implacability. I'd spent some time yesterday recording a bass guitar part for a young friend's lo-fi track, part of his 3rd year undergraduate degree course. He'd composed this track which had proven so popular on Soundcloud it now required completing. 
I'm a bass player and had time to spare in my schedule due to my irresistability as a tutor, so I accepted his request and enjoyed the challenge. It wasn't English or Maths, more of an ice-breaker. My long and unsuccessful record of maintaining good terms with women haunts me. Sometimes best to do nothing but I am contractually bound to keep offering myself up to ritual rejection. A nice piece of music was my 6.05am offering of acquiescence. 
Project 2 is very much work-in-progress. An aerial garden.

I decided when the lockdown was first announced to turn over my 2 metre x 1.5 metre balcony over to food production and not the solitary preserve of the Passion Flower which had somewhat run both amok and then to seed last summer whilst I cavorted around the Channel Islands of Guernsey, Alderney and Sark under the improbably plagiarised moniker of Sea-sick Gaz. 

My Ivy had become home to the vine weevil grub who had turned the leaves dull and the roots non-existent. Two large Aloes - the leftovers from another failed attempt at union - stabbed at my calves whenever I surveyed the carpark from the first floor, or the flat roof below on which there was a growing profusion of cigarette ends, courtesy of my upstairs neighbours on whom the gift of an ashtray had proven wasted.
So I decided upon some aerial trespass: a vegetable garden in the sky. And why not? 

LIDL 29p per pack

Sorry but there is no rotate picture option! But you get the picture. I also bought seed potatoes and growing medium and containers. How they gravitate vertically onto the roof will no doubt provide a whole other blog post, but when I had acquired the stuff required to set and germinate this lot I saw these:

£4 for 2

It got me thinking. Maybe this could be a worthwhile experience for people of ALL ages? After all, Covid-19 is the least serious of the main existential threats we currently face. Maybe we can all get ourselves back to the garden? I also bought some of these:

Not so much inspired by William Blake's poem ...

Ah! Sun-flower

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the travellers journey is done. 

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: 

Arise from their graves and aspire, 

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

... but more the idea of an interesting way of marking the passage of time, for the Pandemic generation, God Bless 'em.

   I'm hoping that charts will appear to measure and compare growth; soil science be consulted to spur it; rainfall recorded; and perhaps journals, maybe even blogs, written to share the moments of the life of these organisms which mark and eke out the days of our collective confinement and despair. Time will tell all ...