Driving in the dark night along the coastal road, on route to Brighton and the back of beyond, I pass the multi-coloured industrial lights of the Shoreham Port, reflecting and rippling on the surface of the deep black sombre waters like plain lit, skinny, Christmas trees.
I drive past the night-lit terraced homes, illuminated council flats, and derelict streets – abandoned save the odd lonely homeless soul. I drive past the dark deserted pubs, mournfully bereft of boozy punters. I drive through the elongated green traffic lights mirrored against the jet-black puddles in the road.
All under the iron hammer of Lockdown.
As the Covid winter bites, baring the whites of its long incisors, Fear is spreading like a merciless wildfire with the second wave of the Virus.
The Fear of a lung depleted planet has become the Fear of a lung depleted people.
Driving now, past Hove Lagoon, in the dead of night, I suddenly swerve to avoid three black birds in the middle of the road.
Peering closer through the windscreen, I watch the three crows fly from the tarmac, transporting me back to the early weeks of Lockdown, when I was first fingered by the Virus.
6 AM. The crows were crowing outside the window, in the early false dawn chorus. The same breed of birds that fed on carrion and the dead flesh of the unburied corpse victims of the Black Death.
My lungs were heaving, crying out for breath. Tiny Indian daggers were peppering my heart. Deathly paranoia of my own mortality manifested my wandering mind. Quarantined in my bedroom. Isolated. In solitude. Days of wellness. Nights of terror. The Virus had one hand pressing on my Adam’s apple, another squeezing the life-giving air from my lungs.
A memory floated into my feverish consciousness, of a very mortal ordeal I experienced while back packing in Vietnam another lifetime ago.
The night before the mortal scare, I turned the Death card on a Tarot reading, near a mosquito infested paddy field in the colonial backwaters of Hoi An. The morning after, I felt the Grim Reaper run his finger up my spine, on a long fitfully ill coach journey northward’s. Fearfully preparing myself for death, a local doctor I visited at the end of the journey pronounced the illness as nothing more than the Asian flu. A close brushed shave with the mortal blade of Death.
So, there I laid, bedbound for weeks with the Virus, trying to remember where that Van Morrison tune about TB sheets had come from. The one about the dying lover, writhing in her sweaty infected bed sheets, fitfully passing over, hospital windows boarded up. Was it from his seminal ‘Astral Weeks’ album? Or later even? The question plagued my brain, as the plague reigned in the dawn of every new day.
The very modern Plague…Virus…Covid…Corona… found its way to my door in the first week of Lockdown. I was none the wiser to its origin, be it from friends, family or straight off the supermarket shelf of life. No test. Only the word of a kindly doctor, who calmly diagnosed my condition as positive for Covid.
Weeks after the Virus, long after the solitude of self-isolation, thoughts turned to Van the Man. Digging in the digital crate, I found the tune on his debut album, a Blues inflected number, called ‘Blowin’ your Mind’ from 1967, and listened closely to ‘TB Sheets’, reflecting on the days of my own Corona sheets.
In the cool room.
The fool’s room.
The crow’s room.
.