Last year – well, last month – I saw a thread on Twitter of “ten things that have brought a smile to my face in 2020”. I was going to copy the idea, but I didn’t get round to it, and now it’s January.
But there is never a bad time to say thank you for creative consolation.
I have missed a lot of things during the past year, and still do. Trains. The sea. My family. (Not necessarily in that order.) And I miss art (in its widest sense), too.
I miss jumping on a train to go to the theatre or an art gallery. I miss that these things used to be a normal part of my daily life. Things to feed the soul. A year on, I feel diminished by the lack. Life’s flat without it.
When lockdown started last spring, we had online art thrown at us. Lots of it. But it wasn’t the same. Like many people, I found I couldn’t read books any more. And I couldn’t focus on plays either.
I tried the National Theatre’s Twelfth Night and gave up, because 2 hours 44 minutes was so long. Also, I do usually enjoy Twelfth Night but it’s one of those plays that is only funny when you’re actually there. In the audience.
It did make me see the play with new eyes though. The “plague” and “pestilence” quotes jumped out in a way they’ve never done before (and that context also made sense of Olivia losing her father and then her brother). So I learnt something, which was good. Learning things nourishes me.
A month ago, I blogged about some personal things during the past year that were reasons to be cheerful. Here’s part 2: the art stuff.
Finding nourishment
Early on in the pandemic, I read a piece in the Guardian Review section called Art of Survival by Olivia Laing. Art, she wrote, can be “an antidote to times of chaos”.
Written in March, the piece had some prescient things to say about “paranoid reading”. More importantly, it focused on the opposite: “creativity and repair”.
She talked about being “more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison”. I’d just spent a month focusing despairingly on the government’s sociopathic incompetence (I’m used to it now), so I needed to hear this.
Around the same time, a blogger I follow wrote a post called Why am I making piano videos during a time of global crisis?
Her answer: “For many of us, the arts are our gateway to hope.” She called her short videos "droplets of beauty". At that time, it felt that droplets was just what I needed and maybe, when novels and plays were too long, as much as I could cope with.
So here’s where I found nourishment during the first year of the pandemic. Some were affected by the pandemic, some were a response to it. They all helped.
Telly
His Dark Materials: OK, I’m in danger of getting into fangirl mode with this so let’s just say that Series 2 was perfect storytelling. Everything came together: writing, direction, visuals, music, acting... At the end of each episode, I didn’t just feel emotionally moved, I felt that calm sense of satisfaction at seeing good art.
The filming was, eventually, constrained by lockdown, and (as often happens) working with constraints meant something good came out of it.
Staged: As TV drama looked for ways to work with lockdown, this was an early experiment. It worked so well that there’s a new series starting tomorrow. I’d loved Tennant and Sheen in Good Omens – one so louche, the other so fey – but they camped it up in a different way this time, playing fictional versions of themselves. It was the first time I’d laughed for a while, and I laughed a lot. I needed that.
Taskmaster: I was a bit late to the party because I hadn’t seen this before it moved to Channel 4, but the timing was right. It was the perfect antidote to what we are starting to call “gestures vaguely… all this”. I love its artschool aesthetic and its absolute silliness.
Poetry
The lovely Samuel West tweeted on 31st October “Only poetry can save us now,” introducing another poem from his Pandemic Poems series on Soundcloud.
I was happy to discover that in Dublin they have poetry as graffiti. A line from Séamus Heaney: “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” This is a long article (and worth reading), but scroll down and there’s a section titled “Arts: We need artists to make sense of it all."
Oh, and it turns out that the quote is from Heaney but it’s not actually from a poem.
A clip of Andrew Scott reciting Derek Mahon’s Everything is going to be all right went viral. Turns out the original was in Emilia Clarke’s ‘Poetry Pharmacy’ series on Instagram. (And in honour of the poet himself, who died last year, here’s Derek Mahon reading it.)
Poetry is good in bad times: “droplets” again.
Also, I’d recommend following Ian McMillan on Twitter. He’s made the medium his own, and he’s made it life-affirming. Not just for what he says, but for what he shares.
Museums
I missed the Clash exhibition at the Museum of London, because I couldn’t get to London. But I did get to see a 15-minute film based on it, which they put on as part of the BBC’s Museums at Home day. It was wonderful, and it’s still on iplayer.
I also missed out on Museums Unlocked, but I’ll be keeping an eye on them this year.
Film
Film maker (and musician) Carl Hunter created a short called More Than Time which he described as “a poetic response to the COVID pandemic”. Liverpool’s empty streets are populated by voices talking about the things that they miss. It’s beautiful and, because it’s about people, hopeful. Please watch it.
Radio
In April, Frank Cottrell-Boyce was on Radio 4 talking about Tove Jansson (it got repeated yesterday). He said: "One of the best things a children's writer can do is to implant signposts in childhood to things that are good, and to the small pleasures that will get you through life." We really needed that stuff now.
Someone read from Jansson’s letters from the war: "One isn't really living, one just exists." The thing about the Moomin books, said Frank, is that they are about “small people who can endure big events”. That’ll be us, then.
Books
Ali Smith’s Summer was published in the summer (obviously), the last of the “seasons” quartet produced as a “time-sensitive experiment”. It would have been anyway, but without the pandemic it would have been a different book. This time covid was also a (minor) character.
But, as she said in 2019: “nothing is really new in what’s happening to us now.” The series is about art and humanity, and connections and resilience. All the things we need now.
And this year I happened to read The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, about the end of Roman Britain and the beginning of the Dark Ages. In the final chapter, someone says: “I sometimes think that we stand at sunset. It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can into the darkness and the wind.”
The book is as old as I am but suddenly, everyone is sharing these words.
And the light? Make of it what you want, but part of it has to be art.
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