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A brief moment of calm

Sometimes, there is a particular sort of stillness before things start becoming lively. The hackneyed phrase would, I suppose, be "the calm before the storm" but I'm not overly sure that that's the right one. Like most overworked drudges of phrases it has lost something of its original meaning and become universally applicable. In my case, I had such a moment of stillness yesterday, and it's hopefully not a storm that's coming.

I should explain. I've spent the last couple of weeks of my personal lockdown pottering about getting ready to open up a pub. This was not something I expected to be doing at the start of lockdown. Another overused phrase, though one of more recent vintage, is "life comes at you fast", grammatical pedantry aside it's a reasonable enough way of describing my recent change of circumstances. I've moved from employee to employer with bewildering speed. Owning a business again wasn't remotely part of my thinking a few short months ago.

(but were they short? there have been reams of column inches devoted to the curiously elastic nature of lockdown time - the lengthy days of baking heat which marked its first weeks seem now to belong to a different order of time altogether, almost as if they were part of an alternative history, a mass hallucination. Can it possibly be that we spent April and May doing nothing but going on long walks, lolling listlessly in the heat, it's like a fragment of existence taken entirely out of context, or at least, that's how it feels to me)

But I'm older now, and I 've learned a few things, and I plan and prepare properly and hopefully, when we open today, I'll be as ready as I possibly could be. So what I experienced yesterday, sat in my empty pub, compiling a few spreadsheets of suppliers costs, my stint in the kitchen done and my prep list knocked off, wasn't, hopefully, so much the calm before the storm as a brief interregnum marking the transition from one phase of life to another.

What it was, though, was a moment of utter peace. There is a curious quality to sunlight when you've been predicted rain all day. It's a fugitive light, a particularly joyful golden, dodging its way down between clouds that aren't quite as all encompassing as they thought, and as it slid through the (my!) windows and warmed up the (my!) wooden table as I sat looking at columns of figures it was lulling and soothing, there was birdsong in the garden, the distant sound of a lawnmower, opening was still an abstract concept, I was about to stroll home, have a glass of wine and some dinner with my family.

And now it's the morning, and opening is very much not an abstract concept. I'll finish this blog, go and have some breakfast, and then a new life begins. Or rather, a new chapter. Maybe yet another mutation in the content of this hoary old blog, which has been puttering faithfully along with me for seventeen years and in that time has moved from spleen venting to absurdist in-jokes, stuff about writing, various essays and then back to mostly spleen venting. Possibly another shift in the tone of the content is coming, it's hard to say for certain.

What is certain is that I've got a fully-booked pub, walk-in fridges groaning with food and a full cellar. Time to see what happens next.

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