Jenny
The New Year confessions. I don’t seem to be finished with 2021 yet, and there is a lot of the last six months that I know will wash up in the next if I’m not careful. By this stage of the year, I am usually still brimming with resolutions and making lists in new notebooks, in thrall to the thrill of the blank page. This time, there’s so much unfinished business scattered about in old, neglected notebooks and files, and stashed in piles of paper hidden in drawers, that I can’t ignore it and dive into 2022 like it’s any other year.
There didn’t seem to be time, somehow, to deal with any of it over Christmas, when it felt as though time had been suspended. It was no mean feat to make it to Christmas Eve through the omicron anxiety of every interaction and every lateral flow test. Having got there, I didn’t want to look back or forward.
Then I came out the other side and realised that the anxiety hadn’t disappeared but was skulking around waiting for me, making every encounter a near miss. Even vaccinated and boosted, to cross paths and come away unscathed takes luck, and I feel as though I’ve been riding mine for too long.
In the lockdown this time last year, a friend taught me how to trudge around the suitably bleak perimeter of a golf course and so to escape the crowds. It was allowed, but it felt like trespassing, and it was new. This year, there is more freedom, but there is privation in the grind of deciding to limit that myself, out of fear. I know what I need to do. I can find new empty places to pace, and I can make old ones new again. There’s plenty to see and do between now and spring, and, even if it’s a long old winter, there’ll soon be new light to see it in.
I know what I need to do to start the year. I just need to summon up the energy to do it. I need to relearn the minor art of getting organised. The fatigue and indecision that follow from universal uncertainty are no excuse for not dropping off a present or cooking any sort of meal. It’s a peculiarly luxurious kind of tiredness Other people don’t have the luxury of having to summon up the energy; they just have to do.
Some time between lockdowns, I (predictably) got a running injury that I (crazily, but also predictably) thought I could somehow walk off by exercising more. I just about managed a slightly chaotic summer of training and a marathon at the end of it, and then I couldn’t walk it off any more. There was one day when I could barely walk. Now I’m in rehab, doing tedious exercises, and following a programme of walking a bit, running a bit, and then walking again.
I’ve been slow to get started, and realising how unfit and ungainly I am has not been fun, but I know what I need to do, and I have a plan to do it. Maybe that’s the template for getting through 2022, when I get around to it.
mehrunnisa
the hiatus in writing was unplanned, a legacy of a summer that had vestiges of the past. the opportunity to travel presented itself, as did art, theatre and dining at tables other than the one in my kitchen. there was a trip to alassio in italy (fittingly the last published version of this newsletter). then one to pakistan to see my parents after more than two years (albeit circuitously as i had to fly into lahore instead of islamabad after a flight cancellation). there was a family wedding in the seaside town of sitges on the outskirts of barcelona. and a short trip to the hague to see my brother which coincided with the start of a partial lockdown.
omicron makes it seem like i had dreamt up the summer. a better way to look back at this time though is how the calculus shifted with vaccinations. a tiny little jab done twice over meant that there was a new line of defence and therefore a new chapter. but then along came delta, undoing the knowledge that had been gained and ramping up the uncertainty about the efficacy of the vaccinations. england had a persistently high case rate and people went about with some kind of business. most of us engaged in mental gymnastics of risks worth taking. i would have loved to go back to studio classes, especially spin and barre. but these felt risque. i did see a lot of friends though, mostly at home with a window open. and sometimes for dinner where we picked the first seating of the evening. there were a few breakfasts with the breakfast club (a trio of friends from work) with an added bonus because there were so few people. the first time at the theatre was really emotional. it was a full house, mostly masked and the only time that i had to show my vaccine certificate in london.
jenny and i did write a few times during this season. but in the weeks we did so, something new would come along causing our words to be out of kilter. it did not help that our handwriting was inscrutable too. we kept trying to keep to our writing though, because both of us found it helpful. it cleared space in our minds, a sort of real time processing as well as a record. is it naive to hope that a record in time is more accurate?
i am a weary time traveller having arrived in january worn and tired. i read somewhere that the years are long, but the decades short. some days it is hard to believe that it has been two years of living through a pandemic. two years of distorted time where some days felt extraordinarily long and others like the speed of light. there have been two seasons each of spring, summer, autumn and winter. and an extended one of wintering. the first year of the pandemic was an enforced lesson in presence. the past and future were like foreign countries having been ruptured from chronological and present time. the greek alphabet unmoored variants from geography in the hope that countries would not be punished for their discovery. it did little to change either the character or characterisation of variants. i am sure that some day linguists will explore lexical semantics. science kept trying to simplify and explain things, but even knowing more felt like knowing less.
among the prolific end of the year literature, mainly a list of things (like the best photographs of the year or twenty-one things that made the world better) was a slew of articles about how pandemics end and how omicron itself may be the beginning of the closing chapter of the pandemic. i am tempted to write to authors of these to ask how they have arrived at these predictions. there has been so much speculation about herd immunity, endemic and whether covid will evolve to mildness. the fact is, this will not be known until it is. this year neatly illustrates the folly of the new year neatly summed up by ‘new year, same old’.
So much resonates here. Thank you Mehrunnisa & Jenny. It's life-affirming too somehow to know how words as anchors is the one truth that stands the test of this non-linear, ruptured, broken time. I'm hanging onto that for sure.