It’s been often remarked, how odd our experience of time is in lockdown. The days are long; the weeks disappear so quickly. It seems just a few days since I watched a hugely enjoyable concert by the painist Ivana Gavrić playing Grieg, with great warmth and humanity, in the intimate setting of a lovely drawing room. I was about to put up a link where you could subscribe to the archived recording … and it has sadly gone.
Sorry about that. However, all is not lost! For a start, you can still of course get her captivating 2013 Grieg CD (“Everything glows with affection” said the Gramophone). And even better, there are still two more concerts to come in her current online series. You can get details here (where you can buy tickets for the live stream: the concert then becomes available for a while on City Music’s archive). I’m particularly looking forward to the second of these, when Ivana Gavrić will be playing early Schubert and Janacek — I so admire her earlier recording of the Janacek, which made me fall in love with the music, and her only recording of Schubert so far is really very fine too. Two forthcoming concerts to relish, then.
I wonder how much the experience of time in lockdown differs from person to person.
The days don’t seem long to me, though they sometimes seem cut loose from their normal position in the week. A Thursday might feel like Sunday, for example, or not like any particular day at all. Longer units — weeks, months — seem compressed, so that things I remember seem nearer in time than they are, but that could just be the often-reported phenomenon of time seeming to pass faster as we get older; I’m not sure it’s very different for me than before the lockdowns. This lockdown, I’ve been finding it harder to connect with things, though. The Christmas period (which is normally one of my favourite times of the year) never quite felt ‘there’, for example. The spring lockdown was better.
Anyway, I looked online for ‘lockdown experience of time’ and found this: The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown, published July 6, 2020. From the Abstract:
Yes, I agree, it is difficult to know in my case too how much the compressed weeks, months, are a function of lockdown, and how much it is just (as you put it) the often-reported phenomenon of time seeming to pass faster as we get older. And for me, lockdown has meant full-on retirement too, not hanging around the maths faculty occasionally seeing friends there. It is difficult to disentangle things: but the combined result isn’t exactly welcome!