As we enter week 7 (8?) of lockdown in London, it strikes me that my life now has similarities with caravan holidays from my youth.Back before I’d ever been on a plane, Summer holidays were taken in Devon. It was roughly a 5 hour drive from Stoke-on-Trent where I grew up, punctuated by an overnight stay in Bristol to visit my grandparents. I remember the … Continue reading Caravans
What I’ve learned from living by myself during the pandemic and lockdown SO FAR: 1. Stock the fridge It’s a funny thing going from being in a relationship and living together for a long time to living solo. On one hand, you get freed up from an awful lot of responsibility and on the other, you gain sole responsibility for everything. I love cooking, but … Continue reading Lockdown lessons
There has been a lot of talk of when and if things will go back to normal. I find myself questioning normal. It seems a narrow way to live at the best of times. The pursuit of normal may be unhelpful. Before the pandemic, I got on the underground train most days for work. I’ve been doing that one way or another for 17 years, … Continue reading What is normal?
Eventually there had to be some kind of upside to Coronavirus lockdown, the stay at home sentence which bans spending time with anyone outside of your household or going out for non-essential reasons. The mental health challenges are obvious. We put all plans on hold. We have to process the grief of everything being turned upside down. We are lonely and miss people. But I … Continue reading The neighbourhood is back
Lots of the time I imagine myself as a character in a film. I’m pretty sure this is how I got through high school. The awkward, pale, silent girl was narrating a much more exciting story in her head. But now each morning I wake up and feel like I’m in a bad film. Maybe it’s a B movie, a straight to video (DVD?) release. … Continue reading Waking up in a bad film
Hell is other people. We’ve all thought it, whether crushed by a backpack on a train carriage or hiding from a rowdy stag do in a bar. But now, under the Coronavirus crisis we are told to stay at home. Don’t go out because you might come into contact with other people. Stay distant. And now, other people are needed. We want to talk. We … Continue reading Communities of chaos
I know I’m not alone. The past few weeks have seen us all go from worrying about the daily minutiae – what’s for dinner tonight, have I paid that bill, should I book a holiday – to being overwhelmed and engulfed by the global Coronavirus pandemic. It confirms my belief that there is always a list of worries and we simply prioritise them according to … Continue reading Little and big worries
I’m emerging from an intense TV binge watching a Netflix reality show called Love is Blind. If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend as a way to escape from the 24 hour news coverage of the Corona virus pandemic. Has any topic so obliterated everything else and taken up residence in our collective psyche? We need all distractions possible. Love is Blind involves men … Continue reading Love is blind in the time of Corona
I’m in Montpellier, making an escape from the UK just a few days after the latest in a long line of cancelled Brexit deadlines. Leaving the EU on Halloween proved to be a dystopian step too far, even for this government. And so we cling on to hope for better politics in 2020. When the daily grind gets too relentless, I find France can be … Continue reading French escape
Decluttering. I’m lazy so I tend not to get rid of stuff until I absolutely have to, until I run out of space or I feel so emotionally unbalanced that tidying seems like a good idea. To be fair, I don’t have a lot of storage space (because London). My wardrobe had reached the point where I’d just stuff clothes in at random, meaning everything … Continue reading Sparking joy with square brackets
