Diary? 10.8.2021
Sixteen months after first getting it, and two vaccine doses down, I have Covid again. It is rotten, and I'm in a very bad temper about the entire bullshit situation; angry with the government as much as I am frightened and disappointed by the behaviour of friends. This variant, whichever I have, is very different in nature from the first time of being ill with it: it's an absolutely stinking cold, sometimes flu-like, for a few days; and at this point I can neither smell nor taste but I hope that as my legal isolation time is almost over, so are the symptoms. I'm very lucky, in countless ways, and it still absolutely sucks.
Last year I remember it being absolutely terrifying: it was like a panic attack raised to the power of a panic attack, and inverted, angled entirely inward. The visual claustrophobia of looking through the wrong end of a telescope, but covering all consciousness. I have never felt more ‘trapped in my own head’. That was only part of it; there was, on top of that, what I suppose is called ‘brain fog’. If my entire consciousness was, as if seen down an inverted telescope, already a wobbling disc of vague activity, almost impossible to concentrate on or hold steady, then the brain fog was the fact that regularly that disc was covered in vaseline. Every single thought smudged out to nothing, a sort of utter indistinct grey ing-out of all wakefulness which, nevertheless, was a constant source of fear and alarm. Going for a ‘nice calming walk’ in Craven Woods, above Brighton, was more like those jagged, blurred shots in The Blair Witch Project where they just leave the camera dangling while they tear through the woodland, shouting at each other.
I'd contrast that — that wherever I was, I was very much only in my own head, stuck there, and in a wild panic about it — with the weirdest aspect of getting Covid this time round. Everything is unfamiliar. I'm not describing being feverish, this is in the better moments: I feel like I don't know my own habitat. The last time I was outside, the walk to the priority postbox returning my PCR test, a familiar route, I had absolutely no sense that I truly knew where I was. I could have been in any city in the world.
All that pre-amble by way of saying — and, please do imagine this in a real toddler's voice, as I really am sulking about everything: I want to go to Grimsby.
Isolation and claustrophobia and strangeness have brought home to me the fact I have not been on anything even slightly like a holiday for many years. I'm not going to go abroad, because I live on benefits and will never be able to afford to, and because we are still in a pandemic, whatever anybody would prefer to pretend to believe.
Grimsby is relatively easy to get to from where I am — where I am is very, very landlocked, and I am very much someone who loves the sea. I used to be very close with someone who grew up in Cleethorpes — we once spotted a relative of his waiting for a bus on Google Streetview! — and I was treated to descriptions of the coast there, the coast and the sky. Such a flat landscape apparently that the sheer size of the sky, uninterrupted all about, becomes actually oppressive. Like being under an enormous domed lid, I'm imagining, a little like those cosmic models where our planet sits somehow inside a great shell, stars and other objects in the sky being projections or even pinholes.
In Grimsby, though, there are the Guardians of Knowledge. Five extraordinary sculptures, each 11 feet tall, installed halfway up the wall of Grimsby Central Library. I dreamt of them, once — I've no idea how I had come to know about them, since it wasn't from the friend I mentioned before. It took me a couple of hours on the internet to figure out just what they were; since somehow, in the dream, I knew they were real figures. Or perhaps I had astral-travelled, as they call it. Though why the place my deepest-sleeping soul had thought to soar to was Grimsby, I don't know. I am not surprised, however I encountered them, if some part of my memory thought them worth hanging onto. I think they're absolutely magnificent.
In the dream, eventually, it was necessary to broker a peace of sorts with these not-so-benevolent sentries — but not before (by some inscrutable, parallel logic) we had all caught fleas.
In the dream, throughout, neither I nor any one of us knew the name or identity of the Guardians of Knowledge — but they were the right colour, and their material had the correct properties, and they were, as in real life, installed halfway up a building, as if either sunken into it or emerging from it.
In the dream, their fabric was intricately rendered in stone, or metal, I wasn't sure; but the stone or metal changed as if it was fabric being blown about in the wind. And in the dream they were alive, and were totally malevolent.
They were in reality put up in May 1968, after 18 months of work, by Peter Todd, former head of the art department of Grimsby College. ‘The library is a repository of wisdom' he said, 'and the figures are intended as guardians’. (This article from the Grimsby Telegraph, as well as a tornado of adverts and pop-ups, has more information on them, and at the end a really gorgeous photograph of Todd.)
In the dream, the statues had no faces; they had strange swirling voids, or pulsing grey foams, where their faces ought to have been.
So, when finally I remembered, or tracked down, these real-life figures on the side of Grimsby Central Library, it gave me an awesomely entertaining chill that the first google hit I got was a December 2015 article — with pictures — about the fact that Google StreetView had snapped a pic of Grimsby Central Library, only for its algorithms to smudge out the faces of the Guardians of Knowledge.
And that's it. There's no more than that to this post, I still don't know what this substack really is. Thank you, if you read it. Hope you are well. x