A year ago, the UK went into it’s first Pandemic Lockdown. We were all essentially grounded, by order of the Government. Never having been a particularly sociable person, I was worried about how much time I would spend inside my own head. So I decided to post daily on facebook. I wanted to record the strange times we were living in, I wanted to reach out and keep in touch with family, I wanted a void to scream into. I called it my Lockdown Diary.
The initial lockdown was expected to last 3 weeks, maybe a month. It lasted 3 months. We came out of Lockdown, and I kept the diary going, to document the changes. I called it My Middle Age. It was a reference to me feeling very old and very young at the same time. It turned out it was an appropriate title, because it documented the middle of the year. We went back into lockdown in November, emerged into a nonsensical ‘Tier’ system, then back into full lockdown in January, where we remain.
By this time, I was feeling a little beaten down. 2020 was a year in which everything happened globally, nothing happened personally. I was either staying home or staying safe. If anything was going to happen it was likely to be Covid related, so nothing was better than something. But the lack of happenings or personal milestones left me feeling a bit disconnected. As 2020 drew to a close, the most reaction I could muster to anything was “Okay, So that happened.”
My Family and Friends on Facebook have been a very loyal following, and after a year, I can’t imagine they’re reading it just to be nice. So I’ve decided to go public. I will continue my daily posts on Facebook, and once a week I will edit them together and post them here. Consider this a ‘Best of’ blog. You’ll just get the most coherent of my thoughts here. I mean, I’m posting on FB every day; they can’t all be gems.
So welcome to my void; receptacle for my screams. Let’s see how we get on.
So That Happened 