Christina Hollis: The Sound of Silence...

A belated Happy Easter to you all!

I spent the days running up to Monday 16th March this year in a torment of indecision. On that day I had a tutorial scheduled with my dissertation supervisor at the university, I was due to give a presentation as part of one of my modules, and I was going to be observing a session as part of my teaching module. 

Normally, I would have been raring to go. Instead, I was scared. At the time, the Coronavirus crisis was gathering momentum in the UK, and Gloucestershire had reported its first case of the disease. Like everyone else, I wasn't sure how safe it was to mingle with other people in a public space. 

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Right up until the moment I left home that day, I was in two minds whether or not to attend. In the end, my enthusiasm for the course won, and I went. It was also a chance to catch up with my son. He is also studying at the University of Gloucestershire although we're on different courses, in different campuses, and he lives on site while I commute. His immune system is compromised by the daily medication he takes, so he was also concerned about coming in contact with the virus.

Luckily for us both (although sadly too, as we both love our respective courses), the university soon decided the safest course was to put as much teaching online as possible and let those students who wanted to, leave.

On Wednesday, 18th March, my son and I loaded all his belongings into my car and I drove him home. We stopped on the way to fill up with petrol and buy some milk, but since then the whole family has been in lockdown. We've been taking the dog out for walks each day since then, but apart from that none of us have been anywhere. We're all now working from home. The cash I withdrew at the beginning of March to pay for that month's local group meeting of the Romantic Novelists' Association is still untouched in my purse.  

Wild cherry blossom in the wood

Saving money because there's nowhere to go is one of the very small number of good things to come out of this horrible crisis.   Another one is the worldwide drop in pollution caused by the huge reduction in travel. We live in a wood, half a mile from the nearest main road and never imagined that would impact us. Yet it's surprising the difference this makes. For one thing, the sky used to be criss-crossed with white con trails from commercial aircraft passing high over head. We rarely see any of those now. As a result, the glorious weather of the Easter weekend was canopied by a clear blue sky. 

Perhaps the best unintended consequence of Coronavirus is the lack of traffic noise. The springtime dawn chorus is always lovely here, but this year we can hear far more birds, and from right down in the valley, too. All the summer warblers have arrived and there is singing from every tree, hedge and thicket. 

Willow Warbler, pic by E. Jagdmann

On Sunday evening we had a particularly surreal experience. We were on the far side of the wood with the dog, close to the main road and marvelling that minutes can pass between each vehicle rather than seconds. Then we heard a clock strike eight.  We were a couple of miles from our village church and in any case it doesn't have a clock, so the source of the sound was a mystery. When we checked on Google maps, the clock we heard is a good three and a half miles away from where we were standing. We'd never have stood a chance of hearing it if the usual aircraft and traffic noise had been about!

Christina Hollis's first non-fiction book, Struggle and Suffrage in Bristol is published by Pen and Sword Books. You can find out more about that here, catch up with her at https://christinahollisbooks.online, on Twitter, Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at christinahollis.com