It will be interesting in the aftermath of the current pandemic to take stock of the growing evidence of the adaptability of the human race. At first, when the isolation regime was announced, everything seemed to be impossible, and all that remained to us was to adapt to the loss of all of those things we had become accustomed to being and doing. As time goes by, however, we appear to be increasingly imaginative in our invention of ways of getting around the restrictions imposed on us.
Before writing the blog my wife and I spent an hour with a group of family members, courtesy of Zoom. A couple of months ago I had never heard of it, and yet this was the second such encounter we have experienced today. So much will be the common experience of many people, but more than this I have in mind the informal and ad hoc adaptations we find ourselves making.
I a little over two weeks’ time I have to submit an application to take part in a national exhibition at the end of the year. Looking through the application material I discovered that the standard of the images we have to put into the selection process is surprisingly high. Certainly I couldn’t guarantee to produce anything of this quality using my own resources. So I approached a friend who is a photographer, who has done work for me over many years, and asked him if it might be possible to devise some arrangement by which he could photograph my work for me.
Accordingly, this afternoon he came to the house with all his gear. I let him into the house via the front door, which we rarely use, and which is right next to the door into the studio. In anticipation I had laid out the work to be photographed, and made sure that he had access to a drawing board and easel, on which to mount the pieces of work. He remarked that, as he had first provided this service for me in 2005 he knew his way round the place very well, and had no difficulty finding electric power points. In no time at all he had everything set up.
I made cups of tea, and left the tray in a place he could reach. Then I retired to the room across the corridor and we en joyed an unusually remote conversation before he packed up and went home. A task I feared at first might be off limits turned out to be readily accomplished with a little ingenuity. There must be innumerable illustrations of this kind of informal adaptation of life going on all over the place. It will be interesting to discover how many of these emergency adaptations become, in a post-virus world, a part of the new normal. Will we still be “zooming” in two years’ time? Home deliveries of groceries have become veery common now, and I wonder whether this will persist. How many professionals will actually find that there are advantages in going to their customers rather than their customers coming to them?