A few years ago, I received a Virgin Experience gift voucher for my birthday inviting me to a perfume studio. I went along with my daughter and we enjoyed designing our bespoke perfumes. It was an intriguing process. We joined a large group and a perfumier lectured for a while teaching us about the differences between eau de cologne, de toilette and de parfum and about top, middle and base notes. The group then sat around two round tables and the practical workshop began. I remember closing my eyes, concentrating hard to attune my sense of smell and create my unique choice of fragrance combinations.

In the end, I called my perfume Cherish. It’s such a beautiful word, one of my favourites in the English language. For me, it evokes the most wonderful feelings. You can only ‘feel’ cherished, not ‘think’ cherished. Its definition can vary: ‘To love and protect someone or something’ ‘To keep a wish close to your heart’ ‘To care for tenderly.’ ‘To nurture.’ ‘To gladden.’ ‘To nourish’. ‘To enshrine.’ We cherish memories or our most treasured possessions and, as it is also used in wedding vows, it has sacred connotations.

In a recent article in The Observer, Nicci Gerrard reminds us to “cherish the ties that bind.” It has been heartwarming to read people’s accounts of socially distanced reunions in the Sunday papers, from friends to partners, from parents to siblings. I love the romantic photos of young lovers, a couple from Kent smiling away having a picnic in the park, each sitting on their own mats two metres apart. Friends resuming their gossiping and giggling, a sister expressing how when she saw her little brother “My sunglasses hid my tears.” Lovers admitting: “All I wanted was to go and grab her!” Or a couple married for over 20 years expressing how “The home quarantine and social distancing has reminded me how much I love the person I married.”

I recently saw my mother again after nine weeks. We met in her local park. Initially, I just looked at her numbly, hardly able to process my feelings. Then feelings of deep love and relief followed. She was still standing, still smiling and defiantly taking her walks, maskless like the rest of the Londoners that surrounded us. Here was a lady in her late 70s wearing a navy dress and a pink scarf, somebody who had raised me and loved me my entire life.

How hard it was to stand back and not take her into my arms. The strength of my love could easily have lifted her off the ground! Instead we looked at each other and smiled. We laughed and chatted while strolling under a canopy of trees; it was about as private as a street party and passers-by walked by us with a half-smile. We stopped in the shade to sit on either end of a bench overlooking the River Thames. I sipped coffee from my travel-mug, and she drank from her small Evian bottle.

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Mother's Day tulips. Photo: Marisa Laycock

We talked about trivialities, what we’d been eating, and whether she’d liked the colour of those tulips I’d chosen for her on Mother’s Day, then about those couple of bottles of Chianti Classico I’d sent via M&S during lockdown for her birthday. Skateboarders and joggers whizzed by us. The sun beat down as our small talk continued. It felt like a privilege that we were both still alive and well and I was not bored to hear about how she had she paid her gas bill on time. How she got a special deal on a box of Barilla penne rigate last week in Waitrose.

I guess the word ‘cherish’ succinctly describes how I felt in those couple of hours. Human love is made up of these little absurdities and once they are gone, they will form our memories and sweep us away in the nostalgia of a loved one’s smile, their quirks and frailties, their worldly concerns.

Having endured social distancing and being isolated, many of us may feel more able to define our relationships with greater clarity, we are possibly seeing each other differently now. Having been isolated from one another we may have acquired a deeper sense of perspective. “Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” (Erich Fromm 1956). We may have a greater instinctive sense of who exactly we value in our lives, what we personally need and how we want to give to them.

This pandemic has undoubtedly given us a new sense of our own mortality and who we want or don’t want in our lives may have to be re-examined. For many, the lockdown has also been an awakening, a need to respect our own individual path and realise that sometimes we may need to move on from some of our associations that may be restrictive, thereby cherishing our individual selves and our own lives.

Hopefully in the midst of the ‘new normal,’ we won’t forget the tough lessons we have learned over the last three months and how we all still need to collaborate as a collective. By understanding that we are all interdependent and all facing human vulnerabilities, we can simply accept and love one another, or share the time we have left together without judgment or self-importance.

  • Marisa Laycock moved to St Albans in 2000. She enjoys sharing her experiences of living in the city. These columns are also available as podcasts from 92.6FM Radio Verulam at www.radioverulam.com/smallcitylife .