liv | Year in review 2020 (Reply)

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.

Milestones in endless March:

Pesach on Zoom; Shavuot on Zoom; High Holy Days on Zoom; Chanukah on Zoom.
One disproportionately exciting day trip to the beach, an hour's drive away, in August when in hindsight we probably should have been more adventurous. I expected the case rate to shoot up much sooner than it did, after restrictions were relaxed at the start of July, but actually we had two months when we probably could've gone out more before things went really pear-shaped in September.
A couple of weird, socially distanced trips to meet jack's mum in Northamptonshire, about halfway in journey time between her home and ours. Coton Manor Gardens in a gloriously warm September, and Brixworth Country Park and reservoir in slightly less clement conditions in October and December. Hardly things that would have made it to the end of year round-up in a normal year, but that's 2020 for you.
Lots of delightful Zoom readthroughs organized by wildeabandon, most memorably for me playing Aziraphale in one episode of Good Omens.
Most excitingly, my OSOs and metamour had a baby daughter in mid-June, and I've really enjoyed getting to know her from a distance. Milestones like smiling at me, the first time she clearly spotted me in a Zoom call and waved back, her starting to use consistent words, her completely astonishing speed at learning to stand up. Basically far more interactive than I expected from the first 6 months of relationship with a baby, but also extremely weird because we have had to stay 2m apart for most of that time.

Reading I think I only finished two books in 2020, at least only two stick in my mind, The world my wilderness by Rose Macaulay, and the brilliant A memory called empire, by Arkady Martine. As with Hild I'm dying of impatience for sequel; I know some people have seen ARCs of it so I think it's more imminent than the Hild follow-up.

I received a few new exciting books for my birthday, Chanukah and Christmas:

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Chronicles of the Kencyrath by PC Hodgell

A deadly education by Naomi Novik.

Plus some exciting non-fiction books about tea. I hope I'll find enough focus for some of those and maybe even to dip in to my sprawling TBR list in 2021, but I'm really not certain of it.

Games

This has definitely been the year of Gloomhaven. We bought it for eachother for Christmas 2019, and after a year we're probably about halfway through the main storyline. I still stand by my earlier review; it really ought not to have been implemented as a board game, but it's very good and it's a highly original way to tell a story. It started out as a treat for me and jack but we ended up assigning characters to our OSOs and Judith, and playing big games over a Zoom link. With five players and the inefficiencies of trying to play over video it ends up needing a whole afternoon, but we're enjoying it when we can find time.
Mystic Vale. ambyr very kindly taught me this on Yucata, and I loved it an enthusiastically recommended it to my partners. And then ghoti_mhic_uait gave me a physical copy of the game for our anniversary and that's seen a lot of play since. It is a deck builder, but with a really original twist: you buy thirds of cards rather than whole cards, and slot them into little plastic sleeves. It's also incredibly pretty with a sort of high fantasy theme. Like many deck builders it can be slightly swingy and early good luck can set one player unreachably ahead. But it's pretty quick to play and so delightful that it's well worth putting up with that downside.
Bridge. All the bridge, especially duplicate games kindly organized by emperor on BrigeBase. But also some more casual rubber games with my parents and brother and OSOs.
Dominion, which has a very nice online implementation.
Surprising entry on this list: Epic Games's Fortnite. Andreas has been heavily into it and I sort of joined in because it's nice to be able to play with the children (especially when lots of other options are precluded by social distancing), and I expected to hate it because it's a lot of running around a landscape shooting people, but it's actually a really well-designed game and I had at least a few months when I was voluntarily playing with jack without having to be nagged by the kids. It's obviously not the same situation but I somewhat related to the Dad in this Tom Vanderbilt piece.

Music: Really hardly a feature of this year at all.

I rewatched Hamilton when they released the recording of the show.
I've been getting somewhat into OSHUN, probably the only totally new to me artist I've discovered this year.
Basically no live music this year; the best recorded show I saw was LSO's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (I still can't quite believe it was recorded in the middle of the pandemic!)
Out of ideas, so I'm going to re-up the amazing Puppy for Chanukah by Daveed Diggs.

People: