Published Work: Strange Times Magazine 2020

"Isolation Together" by Charlotte Moore

Extract: " If what makes us human is our capacity for imagination then what makes us animal is our need for social embrace. No zoom call or Skype meeting can ever replicate the intricate intimacies of our inter-endocrine exigency.".

There has been an unexpected shift in the local community where I live my new quarantined life. Even though we are not allowed to see each other - and you would think we should be the most isolated here in the countryside - there is a bizarre aura of community surrounding us that has never existed before. Voices over zoom and garden fences indicate that in the near 90 percentile of my friends and relatives would have been overseas at this very minute were it not for this “pesky” pandemic. This leads to one inevitable fact; everyone is at home. For the first time in living memory there are people in our isolated countryside. Our little hamlet is buzzing, not just with bees, but lawn mowers, gossiping neighbours, interested dogs and children on bicycles at midday on a weekday. Kids are climbing trees, teenagers are baking sour dough and young adults are knitting yarn sweaters in the back garden. Drop the mobile phones for a minute and we could be accused of being transported back to the 1960’s, our parents era, when children actually helped around the house, international vacations were a thing reserved for diplomats and Hollywood stars and indoor plumbing was a fresh new luxury (who would have believed that toilet roll would be the new gold standard).

Really, it’s almost a miracle.There's more human traffic on our winding lane than anyone can care to remember and our isolation has been the least isolated I have ever felt when I've been at home. We are isolating apart but we are more together, can this isolation last forever?

I have been in a similar kind of captivity before. I once worked in a sort of gilded cage, a floating palace full of the kind of aristocracy that the present has almost forgotten. In a way, the yachting industry is another tiny fragment lost in time, where girls in skirts serve men in power and white-gloved maids place obscene caviar croquettes on golden plates with silver spoons then scurry unseen down the servants staircase. And the Stockholm syndrome-like sentiment rings as true now as it was then, the doors of the cage might swing open, but you may have become sympathetic with your surroundings, you may not want to leave. Captivity is conducive to creativity and so we can’t begrudge it. So many more things absorbed and so much less taken for granted. Our captivity is our time to appreciate and reflect.

But inevitably, as this isolation drags on and one starts to feel like a lost piece of luggage on life’s conveyor belt, us humans may well start rocking like baby prams and banging on our gilded bars, with no care for their carat count. Just like the toilet paper, our coveted freedom is a luxury we never knew we needed to celebrate. If what makes us human is our capacity for imagination, then what makes us animal is our need for social embrace. No zoom call or Skype meeting can ever replicate the intricate intimacies of our inter-endocrine exigency. The exciting buzz of the neighbours on the other side of the wall could eventually rise in exponential amplitude until we are all left emotionally deaf... If we remain barred from crossing that fence.

But one day, it will all be over, they say. Then real shift that lock down has created is blossoming I think, inside this wandering girl’s head; a foreign destination may no longer be palm trees in another hemisphere but instead a harrowing excursion up to the wilds of the alien territory of Dublin.

The memory of a shared pint beside the canal has never tasted so sweet.