Everybody's got a hungry heart
Or why I can't possibly write another word about lockdowns. Oh wait.
It’s like...I don’t have any more good words on the pandemic.
I know the worst feeling is thinking when you have finished something and then realising that you’re only halfway through. I think that’s why everyone is feeling 2021 way harder than 2020 (though personally 2019 tops this list, I had a year without a bathroom). No one has the energy for Zoom drinks any more. No one has time for anything on Zoom that they’re not getting paid for, quite frankly. Sometimes I’m just getting through a day and I don’t turn the camera on for my remote classes, “sorry kids, camera isn’t working, just follow the sound of my voice and the screenshare”. Look, sometimes it just feels impossible to smile and be the beacon of hope and stability when you can’t feel your own feet because the chaos and sadness has swallowed them whole.
‘How are you getting through this time?’ people ask. To my “staff banter” WhatsApp group I was full of cheery advice, beacon of hope switched up to 11: “try to find variety in the days Lach and I have set weird challenges like only watch Australian films for a week, find every park in the 5k bubble, go a whole day without screens, use up everything in the fridge, listen through the 1001 songs you must listen to before you die”. My best friend Jo says she’s mostly getting through it with acceptance. My teaching colleague who was a monk for seven years says that he has the mantras looping in his head. Lach and I keep chipping away at our album.
It feels like war time, but the really grindy bit of the war where people weren’t even sure if they were going to win and they were both bored, tired, terrified and hungry at the same time. Lach and I have been obsessed with watching the BBC gem Foyle's War during the last year. Foyle is a detective that has to police his local village while everyone else is over in Europe fighting Nazi’s. He’s low key depressed the whole time, having to uphold the law because what else is there to believe in if people just do whatever in the war. At least we don’t have rations Lach and I console each other during the episode they raffle an onion for the war effort. But then we do have restrictions on human contact. And that’s what I’m starving for right now.
Think I’ll call my Mum. But not Zoom.
CADENZA:
Anne Helen Petersen, my favourite internet writer, on the exhaustion of the pandemic
Oliver Burkeman’s thoughts from his Newsletter The Imperfectionist: That’s why you should give up on trying to reach a phase of lifethat’s problem-free. It’s also why you should stop trying to clear the decks and instead just get on with doing stuff that matters, while tolerating the fact that the decks aren’t clear. And it’s why you should treat your pile of unread books and articles as a river instead of as a bucketyou might one day manage to empty.
It’s official. I will listen to any podcast Jamie Loftus creates, whether it’s about Lolita, Cathy comics or that Year she joined MENSA.
Slowly discovering in my thirties just how much I love Bruce Sprinsteen. Apparently this is a thing.