Year in review 2020

As several people have remarked, that was the year that wasn't. I've basically stayed at home since 16 March, 290 Blursdays with very few events. In some ways the hardest thing has been to be apart from my OSOs for most of the year, but in some ways the best thing has been the little snatches of time with them, on video calls, outdoors when we could manage it, and every carefully planned interaction to keep our relationships strong in this weird-as-hell sixth year.

Positives: well, I've stayed healthy as have all my close people. I've really enjoyed my job, fortunately with employers who've been entirely supportive of working from home. As part of that I've provided online training to about 70,000 people. I have felt really connected via various unsatisfying forms of technology, but I'm really grateful for my friends and especially my Jewish community.

Isolating with jack has been brilliant. He is the most wonderful pandemic partner I could have asked for. When we got together in 2008, and even in the more recent years of our relationship, I could not have begun to imagine spending nine months in each other's constant company. But he's been so good, talking me down when I'm stressed, making sure to give me psychological space even when we're constantly in the same building, and he's stayed interesting and fun to talk to even when we have no separate experiences to talk about. We never meant to be workmates as well as housemates and romantic partners but it's worked astonishingly well.

Also, right at the end of 2020 I turned 42 and had a surprisingly lovely Zoom birthday party, attended by friends from every stage of my life and all over the world. Lots of people I would never have been able to gather together in normal circumstances.

Significant events

Last couple of months of the Before Times:

• Thoroughly excellent production of Cyrano de Bergerac in Martin Crimp's new translation at the London Playhouse, with cjwatson
• I celebrated my second anniversary and 8 years of marriage to jack with an extremely fancy fine dining meal at Midsummer House. I'm particularly glad that we chose to spend a month's food budget on a tasting menu when it turned out that the world ended just a couple of weeks later and we haven't set foot in any restaurant since.
• I sent 19 of a planned 40 postcards, and really enjoyed the opportunity to wander around looking for interesting stuff to photograph and send to my friends. In principle I could have carried on through the lockdown but I lost heart for taking pictures of just the few streets around my house. So my apologies to the second half of the group who asked for postcards but never received them.
• I went to the Troy exhibition at the British Museum with jack.
• The very last weekend before we went into voluntary lockdown, (a week before it was nationally mandated) I attended a pop-up painting event followed by a very nice meal at Baltic as a last hurrah with ghoti_mhic_uait. Even at the time I almost thought it was too risky, it was a lot of time in enclosed spaces with lots of other people, but we got away with it.

( 300 days of solitude )

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