The nature of vitamin deficiencies is well known; if you don’t have enough of a given vitamin you will finish up with a deficiency state, something unpleasant and oddly named, like beri-beri, scurvy or pellagra, rickets or defective night vision. In short, bits falling off. A reasonable corollary suggests that if you become deficient in other essentials of life - not just vitamins or other dietary components but less tangible parameters - there will also be consequences, as appropriate. For instance, consequences resulting from a lack of a safe environment, a lack of love, of self-esteem, of meaningful things to do, of a sense of usefulness, of being self-determining and in control. These deficits are among the factors that make for an inadequate life, according to Abraham Maslow and his famous pyramidal hierarchy of needs and what he called meta-needs, in other words, desirables rather than must-haves. Well, now. We’re all living inadequate lives at present. What, long term, is it doing to us, I wonder? What are the bits – and meta-bits - that might be falling off?
As this miserable pandemic continues, I guess that – despite all the individual efforts, all the diversionary tactics and displacement activities – many of us are becoming steadily more deficient in the things we ordinarily rely on to keep us going, to keep us mentally healthy. All those things you hear people say they’re missing: closeness to family and friends, physical intimacy, a reliable source of income, shopping, the spontaneity of a visit to a café or a cinema or a museum, the familiar jostle of bus or tube or pub, going out. Nature. Culture. Civilisation. Getting and spending. Having. Doing. Being. Yes, an active person is more of a verb than a noun. Being - in situations that confirm our identity and purpose as individuals, our reasons for living, situations that provide stimulation, meaning, and pleasure. Life itself. For too many, of course, the losses have been far more profound and painful.
Well, anyway, here we are. Summer has receded and now the autumn rushes through; as I write the clouds race northwards across the sky. Tomorrow it will be November. Shortly, we will hurtle into winter, down that slippery slope towards Christmas, a time normally so pleasurable and busy, but this year a season that will be hollow and empty, and a distressing, lonely, grieving, non-event for many. Not just because of seasonal affective disorder, with the darker evenings may come a darkening of mood. We’ll have more time to ruminate deliberately on what is obvious, namely that our world has been unapologetically screwed up, perhaps for a very long time to come. Let’s hope those scientists at Oxford and elsewhere can soon succeed. Meanwhile, as regards the current year, our timetable of joyful expectations has been wrecked, and for many of us there have been none of the normal markers of season or anniversary, no celebrations, no travel, no holidays. Day follows day, if we’re lucky.
Holidays. Remember holidays? Holidays take many forms, and can simply provide an opportunity to relax, to potter and do leisurely things, or strenuous and adventurous things, or sporty things, or excitingly different things. For many they provide the chance to explore somewhere new – or even somewhere familiar – away from home, either overseas or elsewhere in one’s own country. They extend one’s personal geography and with it one’s life experience; they add to the quality of life, they add to one’s character. For someone like myself, an instinctive topophile with itchy feet, retired and with time on my hands, someone strongly attracted to place in general and to specific places with their specific psychological satisfactions, the constraints of lockdown have been particularly difficult. I’m grateful for what has been possible, but only so many picnics on grassy verges next to farm gates or on tranquil riversides dotted artistically with grazing (but potentially homicidal) cattle can fulfil my needs. Naturally, not everyone is similarly afflicted, but many surely are. A world that we had come to regard as our own, just a drive, train ride, or flight away, available as long as we had the fare and the motivation, anywhere we fancied, anywhere at all on a whim. A world now denied, perhaps - for those of us of a certain age - for ever.
Some geographic meta-needs are attributable to personal foible; appetites for landscapes and cityscapes and seascapes that must be satiated, aesthetic specialisations to be nurtured, compulsory destinations to arrive at, calendars of events and exhibitions to attend, and all the subtle pleasures that make for a civilised life – as citizens of the world - in a taken-for-granted ready-and-waiting global terrain. Besides the personal agenda there are national variations too, no doubt, local habits and regional mythologies that determine optional travel. For instance, Central Europeans tend to need mountains and forests for their psychological comfort; Scandinavians allegedly long to see the sun whenever they can; affluent Parisians have a weekend house in the country or on the coast of Normandy. Generalities of course. As inhabitants of an island nation we, collectively, tend to need to see the sea. Although I live about as far from the coast as is possible in England, under normal circumstances I see the sea often enough. It’s always there and I can always go and look at it. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in the middle of a large continent where seeing the sea is something one would do only rarely, or perhaps never, in a lifetime. If I lived somewhere like Vienna, Kansas City, Khartoum or Novosibirsk I think I would suffer from a kind of claustrophobia at not seeing the sea – but then of course I’m basing that on my own life experience and not on the mindset of someone who had grown up in those places. This year I’ve only seen the sea – and not a spectacular part of it either – for only a few hours one warm day in September.
My greatest deficiency this year has therefore been that of sea. I’ve been making up for it with extra satsumas and blueberries.
D, or rather Dee, comes next. The alphabetic-vitamin parallel came into my head along with a vision of the Grosvenor Bridge in Chester, a yearning to see once again that great brownish-grey stone arch, the longest span in the world when it was completed in 1832. A scene so familiar to me and from so long ago, as seen from the coach park next to the castle, on the Little Roodee. I ache to be there. And then on foot across the bridge, into the area of Hough Green, B&B territory and the main road through Saltney into North Wales, turning off down through the affluence of Curzon Park and onto the footpath alongside the girder bridge that carries the railway over the river. Then the huge sweep of the Dee, that gigantic meander, with views across to the Roodee racecourse, the tower of the cathedral, and all the other much-loved landmarks of the city of Chester. Not being able to go there actually hurts.
The Dee was really my one and only alphabetic river, since the Trent and the Thames are the only other rivers with which I can claim genuine affinity. For some other lucky folk their longings might be for the Devonian Exe, the Herefordshire Wye, or even the tumbling and transporter-bridged Tees. Mercifully, it’s a silly pun that soon runs out - of examples if not of water - and cannot cater for the Mersey, the Clyde, the Tyne, the Severn, the several Ouses and Avons and all the other great streams that help to make our wonderful country such a distinctive, varied, and beautiful one, and whose mysterious influences lend local character to the populace. But it has been different this year. Topographical deficiencies, however named, and of every nature, have been the common lot – an inability to visit tiny villages, large cities, coastlines, cliffs and headlands, distinctive peaks, forests and copses, distant spires, towers, lakes, landmarks, views, all the natural templates for our lives. And for me, even the handy formulae of humanised space - W.10, N.W.3, S.W.9, E.5, or even Liverpool Eight – places that I love so much. All denied this year.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, although LGW is one alphabetical deficiency I can happily accommodate. I shall make up for it with chocolate instead.
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