"I'm going to sit in my garden and watch the birds"

In an interview on breakfast TV an elderly couple were asked about being confined to the house during the coronavirus epidemic and how they'd cope.

“But are you worried about potentially being cooped up for months on end?”

Elsie replied “I’m going to sit in my garden and watch the birds”

I used the sample of Elsie with my garden birds track.

It struck me that sitting in the garden watching the birds is something I'm a bit of an expert at - having done it for ten years!

During my decade of illness being wheelchairbound watching the birds in the garden is practically all I did. It was a revelation! Despite having a brain and body that wouldn't function I was seldom bored, seldom miserable. During that time the birds and the garden kept me going.

With confinement - does your perceptual world contract to a shrunken fragment? No, it stays the same size or maybe even expands. As your attention homes in, so there is a mental blossoming – what was coarse-grained becomes finescale.

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