OYSTERHOOD is reclusiveness or solitude, or an overwhelming desire to stay at home.
Glinka helped with the planning and Mozart assisted with the execution of my first ladies’ lunch since the beginning of the lockdown. To make it as safe as possible, I arranged two tables in the garden and divided all the dishes in two, so that each table had its own food and every one had their own serving cutlery, etc. We could be together, while keeping a safe distance to one another at all times. In the morning it was still raining, but luckily the skies cleared up just in time for us to enjoy the afternoon in the garden and it was soul-restoring. I missed my guests the moment they left and knew that I will have to do this again as soon as possible. It is different and complicated, but worth all the effort. Just what I needed at the end of a difficult week.
After cleaning up, I spoke to Mom and Krystian, worked a bit and then went to the last performance of The Outlaw Muckridge. It was wonderful to see a few friends there I haven’t seen in a while and to go out to dinner afterwards to celebrate the reopening of the Baxter with this simultaneously timely and timeless play.
A day that seemed ordinary, from the time ‘before’, but, of course, it wasn’t, because I prepared lunch wearing a mask and washed my hands a million times while doing it and had my name recorded while entering the theatre, sanatised and wore a mask for most of the time in the evening, unless I was drinking or eating. I spoke to people who had to completely reinvent themselves during the lockdown because they either lost their jobs or faced impossible challenges while still keeping one. And all day long I thought about loss, how a friend lost a parent in these already awful circumstances; how another, who is a doctor, lost colleagues to the pandemic; and another cannot be with her parents, who need her, but do not want to risk her travelling to see and support them. And there is no end to any of it in sight, especially if Europe is anything to go by.
If “all world’s a stage and all men and women merely players”, then the coronavirus is a shitty director and only love and kindness will allow us to get to the other side …
Be kind. Wear a mask. Support local.
“Physical distancing remains one of the key strategies to curb this pandemic.”
— NICD
Karina Magdalena 
This is so beautiful and moving. We have not managed the courage to ask friends even for drinks or socially-distanced walks, and my children think trying makes things worse. I haven’t had an appointment with the hairdresser since last November and we just backed out of adopting a kitten because we would have to visit the home of the people fostering it. Oh, some days, I just wish this was a horrible dream and nothing more.