Month 1: Murray Gold - The Shepherd's Boy

It's April 19, 2020, and it has been one month since I started this Frankenstein's monster of a song- diary-blog experiment. It's day 28 of the UK-wide lockdown, with no perceptible end in sight.

During this month, this blog has accidentally become my main source of how I can tell human time. You might have noticed that the days are increasingly congealing into a gigantic mulch that are impossible to tell apart, after all. Days of the week? Ha. Everything is Sunday is Monday is Thursday but definitely never Saturday now. Dates? Don't be ridiculous. Months are just about possible to keep straight, but don't be trying to actually distinguish where we are in that big blob of time. There is the golden times of Before Corona, there is the endless Now, and there is After Corona, a theoretical future both close and far, depending on which government exit strategy leaks you read. Moving forward or progressing in the endless Now seems basically impossible, because every day is roughly the same and even though you promised you would learn to code, it's easier not to bother with that new skill just now. It's a boring Edge of Tomorrow without any funny deaths or character development.

Being cursed with who I am, the best way I can describe this current state is with an episode of Doctor Who - to be specific, my favourite ever episode of Doctor Who. In this episode, the Doctor (not played by David Tennant) is trapped alone in a castle and pursued endlessly by a faceless, voiceless creature. He finds an apparent exit, but it's encased within a huge wall of impossibly hard material for which he has no tools to remove. But he'd really, really like to get out of there, so he starts going at it with his fist. This is massively inefficient, and he is quickly murdered by the horrible creature thing, but he has just enough strength to go back to the teleport room where he arrived, leave a small clue, burn his body as fuel, and 'print' a new, fresh version of himself ready to start the cycle again.

This is a loose metaphor.

Eventually, this new Doctor makes his way back to the room, realises the same thing and punches again. He's killed again, so it's back to the room to print another version. And so on, and so on, in a montage that clicks through the same events at an initially snail-like pace. The Doctor is trapped in a loop with no immediate promise of return other than the almost imperceptible shred of progress he's able to manage. Oh, and he's reminded every time of how much he has already sacrificed, so there's that regular existential crisis to deal with, too. A lot of time passes in this montage - we actually later learn that it was four billion years or so (it's a loose metaphor). The same loop continues. Time bends back on itself over and over with almost no forward momentum possible. The horrible monster is still always there, and he may come at any moment, too.

That bit is horrifying. What I try to concentrate on is that, as time goes on, he does make a dent in the wall, and the dent becomes a passage forwards. It takes a long, long time, but it's not for nothing, and it means that he's never in exactly the same loop each time. It's like a Waiting for Godot where Godot actually exists. Time speeds up, and progress is made, and when that final punch sends the wall crashing down, it's the most satisfying thing one can imagine.

This is a very loose metaphor. It's not a one for one situation. We're not actually punching a diamond wall and murdering ourselves for fuel for the next punch. Maybe I just want to pretend I'm Peter Capaldi. But it still resonates for me: the endless grind of seemingly worthless effort with no promise of reward that eventually, eventually gets somewhere. It makes something out of the seemingly invisible act of just getting through the day - people's ability to do just that has been one of the small things giving me a shred of hope during this. I would rather that somewhere come sooner rather than later, but we cannot know that. At least time is going forwards somehow, right?

Today's song of the day is a track from that sequence. It's called "The Shepherd's Boy", and it captures that journey from frustration to triumph much better than I just described it.

Tomorrow is still a thing, against all odds. See you tomorrow.