Whilst out walking this week I bumped into a fellow choir member and his wife.  We chatted about this and that. “Still blogging?” he asked.  “Yes,” I said “Do you read it?”  “Oh no,” he answered with a wry, slightly apologetic smile “my wife says it’s too cerebral!”  The poor wife looked suitably embarrassed. I wonder, did HE think it was too cerebral?!  Blame it on the wife!!  So, there you go.  I know what she means. But I was grateful for the honesty and it made me laugh. We are all different and what appeals to one person does not appeal to someone else. So if you are one of my handful of regular readers you must quite enjoy ‘cerebral’!  Read on.

Each week I am curious as to what theme might emerge and this week it would seem to be ‘waiting’. We are now in mid-March and it feels as if we are all waiting: waiting to be able to meet friends and family indoors, waiting to be able to go shopping, waiting to be able to eat in a restaurant or visit a pub.  It’s a strange state to be in. There is no doubt that it will feel just glorious  when we are able to do all those things again.  

Yet I do wonder whether, when all those things return, we might individually soon find ourselves still waiting. At the moment our waiting is collective, we are all in it together, all longing for much the same things. But when the collective waiting ends I suspect we might resume our individual waiting: waiting for the holiday, waiting for the right person to come into our life, waiting for the new job, the new car, the new house, the new opportunity, that one thing which is finally going to make life okay again.  The thing about waiting is that when the longed for event arrives it really is wonderful, but then it is not long before it becomes the norm or perhaps a memory and waiting returns.

One of my favourite plays is ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Becket.  My dear husband introduced me to Becket when we first met.  The play is described as a tragicomedy and as a play in which nothing much happens. The two main characters are waiting for the arrival of a third, Godot, who never actually comes. Their waiting is full of both hope and despair. They play games to pass the time and there is that sense of the emptiness of expanding time and the desire to fill it.

Over the years we saw several productions and my husband directed one with members of our local amateur group. Unfortunately it did not attract a large crowd - not to most people’s taste!  But it was a wonderful undertaking of which he was rightfully proud. However, by far the best production we saw starred Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in London in 2013. We were captivated from start to finish and we also laughed for much of the time. Becket strips language down which in itself has a curious directness.  I suppose Godot appeals to me as it is deeply philosophical and raises many questions. Yet whilst it offers no answers, at the end you feel  that on some level you have gained insight.  It is a play about a particular kind of lockdown - the lockdown of waiting.