The dog was sick of it. I was sick of it.
The two kilometre lockdown meant the woods were out of reach. The beaches were out of reach. The hills were out of reach. In reach was a three kilometre loop on back roads near our home. Every day, for what seemed like months, we walked the three kilometre loop. I came to loath the loop. The dog disliked the loop. On the walk he would dig his paws in and refuse to move. We offered treats to encourage him along but even they were insufficiently attractive to generate enthusiasm for the daily walk.
It wasn’t as if the walk was unattractive. It was spring. The days were getting longer. The weather was good. The sunrises and sunsets were striking. The only colour I hadn’t noticed in the sunsets was emerald green. The trees were starting to bud and then leaf. A flock of Jacob sheep in the field next to the house were easy on the eye. The smell of wild garlic and the cloak of its white flowers along the side of the road on the loop were quite attractive. But.
The dog was getting fed up with the same route day after day. I shared his frustration. Knocknarea, only a few kilometers away, was out of bounds. Strandhill and its beach, only a few kilometres away, were coastal chimeras and I wondered would they still be there when lockdown ended. Union Wood and the long strand at Streedagh ceased to exist, even in my fevered imagination. There were rumours that you could be named, blamed and shamed by transgressing outside the two kilometre limit. I didn’t believe the rumours, of course,………but you couldn’t be sure. We all viewed cars with out-of-county registrations suspiciously.
We checked the ‘2km from home’ app daily to see if somehow we had missed an opportunity to walk somewhere different. We checked the app daily to see if Covid had distorted the space-time continuum and places worthy of walking that had been beyond our two kilometre limit had moved to within our reach. We checked the app daily as we day dreamed about distant, exotic places; Bundoran, Manorhamilton, Tubbercurry…
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The easing of restrictions over the summer provided a little relief. Union and Slish Woods reappeared on the walking itineraries. We frequented the beach at Strandhill. We visited Streedagh and walked its length; the dog, he gamboled. We brought flasks of coffee and homemade buns and we picnicked. We broke out to visit Westport and made the most of our escape by climbing Croagh Patrick. We bathed in the sea in Rosses Point, even though we didn’t have summer’s most desirable fashion accessory, a ‘Dryrobe’.
Life, while not normal, was better than in the spring. The dog (and we) was, once again, happy – sort of.
The need to stay out of the indoors by going outdoors was an upside to the pandemic. I noticed increased interest in walking, hiking, cycling and sea swimming by young and old.
A downside to the lifting of restrictions was the littering of woods and hills. The epidemic of litter reached levels that matched the Covid pandemic. Face masks, coffee cups, drinks cans, bottles and paper tissues competed with bags filled with dog shit in the woods, on the roads and at the beaches. These bags, with their enclosed goodies, were left hanging from branches like baubles on a Christmas tree, thrust into stone walls and tossed into ditches. That owners were bagging their canine companion’s excrement should, I suppose, have been welcomed as a step forward. But why leave the bags hanging from trees? What did they think was going to happen to them? Did the owners think someone was going to come along and harvest the bags of shit like apples from orchards in the autumn?
Over the year, my frustration with the 2km limit was replaced by anger at the carelessness and disregard for the environment by the recreating public.
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The website of a well known string of off-license shops in Dublin describes its Santa Rita 120 Sauvignon Blanc as ‘crisp and youthful with concentrated aromas of citrus blossom and peach’ and references the wine’s patriotic origins which can be traced back to the exertions of ‘120 patriots… exhausted after a long, hard battle during the fight for Chile’s independence, reached the lands belonging to Santa Rita.’ The wine, apparently, was crafted in their honour. I won’t comment on the contents of a bottle of Santa Rita 120 Sauvignon Blanc, but the bottles themselves interested me.
187ml Santa Rita 120 Sauvignon Blanc bottles were slowly accumulating amongst the wild garlic and the other roadside flowers of my three kilometre long, two kilometer lockdown, walk. Over several weeks the clear bottles with their white and black labels and red 120 lettering grew in groups of three. Most of them had been carefully dropped but some had rolled on to the road where the rare passing traffic smashed them. My anger with bags of dog shit was rapidly replaced by my anger with the danger this behaviour was posing to passing cyclists, children, people in sandals, dogs and livestock. Our frustration reached the point where removal of the bottles became necessary. We couldn’t behave like the owners of the bags of dog shit and assume that someone else would remove them. We walked the stretch of road where the bottles had been dropped and collected seventy of them. The bag became so heavy it took two to carry it back home and thence to the bottle bank.
Once we had collected and disposed of the 70 Santa Rita 120 187ml bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, I took to wondering what was behind their appearance, particularly when they started to reappear several weeks later. Were they being consumed by someone out walking the road and who didn’t want to or couldn’t drink at home? Were they being surreptitiously dropped by someone who was too embarrassed to bring them to the bottle bank? Were they being dumped to hide them from a partner? What distress drove the person to discard them along the roadside?
According to the Irish Times ‘An “ocean of alcohol” has been pouring into Irish homes since the start of the Covid-19 crisis with official data showing wine sales for home consumption increasing dramatically’. Net excise receipts for alcohol sales were down by only 2.4% in 2020 compared to 2019 despite restaurants and pubs being closed for much of the year. Wine consumption was up by 12%; home consumption must have rocketed during lockdown.
I hadn’t noticed the Santa Rita bottles in the run up to the lockdown in March 2020. I made the assumption that their appearance was due in some measure to the stresses and strains of Covid. Judging by the frequency with which my own bottle recycling has taken place I can’t say for certain my wine consumption hasn’t gone up in the last year but I am certain it hasn’t gone down, so I am in no position to pass judgement on the drinking habits of others.
The link between Covid lockdowns and domestic distress is well documented. The link between alcohol and drugs consumption and domestic violence is well documented. We don’t know what the long term effects on mental and physical health will be but that there will be effects is certain; the 70, and counting, Santa Rita 120 187ml bottles dumped by the roadside tell me that all of us will be impacted in some way. Under those circumstances the discarded bottles remind me that the frustrations shared by the dog and I are really of no consequence.
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