Urban Miscellanea
2020-2022, 2025
Urban Miscellanea is an experimental multimedia anthology that celebrates creativity situated within the urban.
2020/21: States of Apprehension
2021/22: Urban emergency / urban rhythms
2025: Archiving
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Emilia Weber2020/21
Emergency 2021
Essay
Bio
Emilia Weber is currently undertaking doctoral work at UCL. Recent writing has appeared in MAP magazine and her poetry pamphlet Familiars was published by Sad Press (2017).
For me, the global COVID emergency was almost entirely refracted through my pregnancy or the experience of becoming a new parent. The restrictions imposed in the UK had a huge impact on this experience, but the pregnancy also seemed to eclipse the restrictions, or make the global events seem somewhat distant. I wanted to explore how the new baby appearing in my life related to the term ‘emergency’ in a personal capacity, while we were living through a global emergency.
I also felt like I was losing myself in the early days of parenthood and that in itself felt like an emergency. Writing this piece, and carving out the time to do so, became strangely necessary and urgent task in order to claw back some semblance of myself.
Full text:
In November 2020 the second national UK lockdown comes into force. I am nine months pregnant. NHS restrictions mean that partners are not allowed to accompany pregnant people to antenatal appointments: they can’t come to hospital until you are in established labour, nor can they stay with you in hospital after the birth.
In December 2020 everyone I know is searching for my unborn baby. Midwives, relatives, friends all try to work out when it will arrive. Sylvia Plath’s line ‘Vague as fog and looked for like mail’ circles in my head. As the pregnancy continues the wondering turns to enquiry about what I wish to do. Risks and statistics are presented to me, new sets of choices are revealed, birth plans are rewritten.
Everyone apart from me is looking for the baby. There is a gentle rhythm to my final weeks of pregnancy, accompanied by a feeling of quiet optimism. I attend appointments large and happy. I sit at my desk trying to finish a piece of work. I walk the streets of South East London each day. The world remains locked down around us, but I am looking forwards towards my ward.
‘Ward’ from the Old English wearde means both watchman (think of ‘warden’) and the act of guardianship itself (keeping ward). A ward is also what we call someone who is under guardianship, and also refers to the electoral area you are resident in. My local electoral ward takes its name from the hectare of common land to the west of my flat, Camberwell Green. And although the baby is technically already here, inside me, accompanying me on my daily walks, I like to think of them too as travelling long enough that they will eventually arrive to this specific geographical place.
A ward is also part of a hospital. On Tuesday 29th December 2020 the baby arrives at King’s College Hospital - the place where my cousin works, where my uncle was in a coma for a year, up the road from the shopping centre where I had my first job. The baby arrives to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Everywhere’ playing on the operating theatre radio. Later on this fact moves me. The first night in the recovery ward I call the buzzer to let the nurses know I am falling asleep, to let them know that someone else needs to take over and watch the baby. They laugh and tell me it’s ok to sleep.
‘Emergency’ is from the Latin emergere, which means ‘arise up or out of’ or ‘bring to light’. In that first dark month of the baby’s life I spend money on candles. Outside the bedroom window is a magnolia tree that is surrounded by the blue reflection of snow. Inside the flat the walls are green and Christmas lights and candles illuminate the path that I follow between the bedroom and living room. I lay the baby in different positions along these ley lines.
February 2021 lockdown continues. There are no baby classes or parent support groups running; we are still not allowed to visit family and friends. I walk and walk and walk with the baby. I speak my thoughts out loud to her. Did she know that this small street that we cross everyday that leads down to Morrisons is named after Christopher Wren. He supposedly stayed in a house on this site during the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral. We stop to look down the street together with this in mind, and even though any trace of Wren’s abode is long gone, there is something suitably classical about the view. I tell her I wanted to call her Wren, but we ended up with Robin, but actually I was quite happy with that because she was born near Christmas.
Does she know, I continue, that the storeys above the Turkish Food Centre used to be the headquarters of the SDS, the undercover unit of the Met Police’s special branch who sent undercover cops into protest groups. A private detective hired by one of the spied-upon activists traced an IP address to this building. Yeah it’s quite weird that that was the HQ, I agree, baby. One day these buildings too will be long ago, baby.
March 2021 and we are still in lockdown. The days are still cold, still monotonous, and life seems unbearably slow. I always wanted to be someone who could garnish their writing with ready botanical knowledge, but now I am that person observing the minute changes in the hedgerows and cracks in the pavement as I walk the same streets everyday, it turns out I hate it. I long instead for the rush of heading places, for life moving so fast and being so full I have no time or space to tell my mugwort from my ragwort.
I decide that, having long had it on my urban to-do list, I will pass the days by becoming adept at mudlarking. I walk the baby to the river; proud of her and me for linking her long sleeps together. I read blog posts in preparation for the larking but it’s actually much harder than I imagined. I don’t understand how I’m meant to know where you can access the river, and when I do locate a suitable spot I discover it’s actually really very hard to find anything of note. I do it twice, fail to identify some shards of something, and sulkily give up.
Gradually, though, the baby grows and the world becomes a little wider again. Its May 2021, we go to parent and baby classes, we meet friends for lunch. I always thought I would be a bit of a Rachel Cusk mother and despise the inane chat between people who have nothing in common except the existence of their children, but in reality I find myself enjoying knowingly acting in my new role – soon I can be found walking with other parents, three buggies astride we strut the local parks like a Motherland pastiche. Feeding! Laundry! Don’t even get us started on sleeping!
It’s May 2021 and the baby’s existence has been fully absorbed into my reality but the landscape remains imbued with a fond topographical significance of pregnancy and her birth. It’s like getting the bus past an area you once knew well. I see the streets differently: there’s the midwives’ clinic, the hospital, the medicine centre where the scans took place, the hill I used to get out of breath walking up. One day this will be long ago, baby.