There Is Life Outside Your Apartment

(It's an Avenue Q reference)

When I left my flat, almost a year ago, I never imagined that a year later I would be sat in the study come junk room in my parents' house typing this blog. At the time, I was convinced that COVID 19 was going to go the same way as SARS and the other viruses that have happened over the last few years. It was going to be a whole lot of panic and then it would turn out to be nothing. Thankfully, I was quick to admit that I was wrong. 

Although there have been times in this year where I have wanted somewhere to escape to - the dog snores really loudly, we all get on each other's nerves at the best of times and it's been a year with everyone else on furlough for a stretch - except for the times I went back there to pack down, clean up and generally get ready to let go of the flat, I haven't really missed that specific place, and so it makes me feel as though the time was right to leave it, even if I feel the universe kind of forced me into it. Universe, to note, next time, smaller signals are fine, okay? 

There have been points in the pandemic where I have looked over Rightmove and seen a couple of flats in my brother's building up for sale and thought about the idea of buying one, but I also looked at some of the studios set out as a one-bedroom flat on Salford Quays and thought about how I could squash all of the things I actually needed into them. Particularly when you were allowed bubbles. The idea of being able to see my family but also get a bit of distance from them was a blissful thought, but it was a thought which ended up coming to nothing because the simple fact of the matter is I have too much stuff and I need too much space. 

On the night before I left 'Old Flat' in Surrey, I managed to hand off three large pieces of furniture which I no longer needed to someone whose son had just got his first place and was stuck for furniture. It meant that it was less to pack into the van, less to store, and no need for a trip to the tip or a bonfire - I wanted the bonfire - to get rid of the ugly as anything sofa which had become a focal point for my rage and dissatisfaction with the world. I cannot tell you how much better I felt when that sofa was out of my life. Even with all of that stuff out, there was a lot of stuff in the van and then subsequently in my storage unit, which will then have to go into another van before it finally finds a fixed abode back with me. Thinking about how to fit all of that stuff into a flat gives me nightmares and heart palpitations, so the plans for an apartment have needed to either be scaled up, or scrapped. Now that we're getting to the stage where things are reopening and life can restart, I'm having to look at options because I can't just be working from home at my parents' house forever, so some serious decisions need to be made, and I need to start being a fully-fledged adult again, and quite frankly, that is terrifying, but it is life, everyone does it and everyone finds the things that they struggle with, and there is only one way to do it, and that is to just do it and get through it. 

Where Is My Mind?

Well, it's certainly not been on writing, has it? 

That's not really true; it has and it hasn't. 

At the end of last year, I decided that my 4thewords streak was going so well and I wanted to commit to it further so I bought myself a year-long subscription and thought that would be enough of a kick up the bum to get me writing more regularly. 

The truth is though, I needed a bit of a break because the world feels like a lot at the moment, life feels a lot, work is a lot and the last thing I really need is to be heaping more pressure on myself, and yet I am doing in other areas, so writing had to hit the backburner. Yes, it is very often cathartic, and I know that's a common experience among writers, but when it's also something where you put pressure on yourself, whether it be to write a number of words or pages a day or to make a project come out beautifully, anything really where it is forcing yourself to do something, it adds an extra layer of pressure that is not necessarily healthy. 

A lot of people in the UK have been furloughed, whether that was during the initial lockdown or whether it was the flexi-furlough where people have been on reduced hours, but that's not been my experience. The industry I work in very quickly told those of us not tied - figuratively - to an office space that we should work from home for the foreseeable future. At the time, we thought that was likely to be maybe a few weeks, then maybe three months and we're now nearly twelve months on from that decision and we haven't been asked to go back in just yet. 

Whilst that has meant I haven't had to worry about my job security like a lot of other people have experienced, and I do count myself as exceedingly lucky given the number of people who have needed to start using food banks and other support just to make it to the end of the month and get their next paycheck, it does mean that work has been a bit relentless. I've had odd days of leave here and there, and I have gone through most of my entitlement for the year, but I haven't had the same kind of break I would normally get from taking some time off and going to somewhere that is away from work and I haven't had the masses of time to fill that others have described. I know of a lot of people who have actually enjoyed the furlough scheme, for their own reasons, and whilst I am really glad, as mentioned, of not having to worry about job security, I can't help but be a bit envious of the ten weeks plus that others were away from their jobs on a fairly decent proportion of their wages. I'm not saying I would have written any more if I had have had that time because that's something I will never know, but it is something I'm curious about.

Something that definitely has factored into my lack of writing though has been my almost complete and utter inability to self-censor. 

I'm having to get a lot better at this, but it's something I find really hard! What I'm talking about is things like, I want to share how difficult I have been finding certain things to do with, for example, putting clothes on ebay which were my previous size. (I have been finding this difficult, but it's not something I really want to talk about!) Whilst that in itself can seem harmless, it's often the reason why I'm doing certain things is the reason I want to talk about the thing itself. Following the example, I might say something like finally admitting I'm more likely to gain more weight rather than lose enough to fit into the things that no longer fit. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but that's the conversation that is prompted by the talking about the ebaying... All will become clearer in a few months, honestly. 

So, that's kind of it for now, because otherwise I will fail epically at the self-censoring.

2021

 I was really excited about not writing a blog for a while because I had this fabulous reason and I was really excited to get to the point where I could share it and then have all of this stuff to talk about because of said reason. I'm rubbish at keeping secrets. I even have a bounce that people can tell I'm holding onto an hiding something, or I just accidentally blurt it out without thinking, so more people knew about this than I originally wanted, but that wasn't so bad. Until today. 

Today I got some news about the new house I am in the process of buying and it's bad enough that I'm looking at all of the bills I have already paid out for and wondering if I should just write it off as a lesson learnt and walk away. It's an expensive lesson, and the few people I have talked to about it have said that oh so useful phrase of 'it happens' but it's that whole thing of trying to avoid the 'sunk cost fallacy' - I've already paid out money I won't get back if I don't do the thing, so I should do the thing even if it causes more stress or costs me more money. Honestly, it's probably the reason people go through with ridiculously fancy weddings - you know, when the world isn't going to crap because of a horrid virus - and then get divorced a year later. They're too deep in the hole already. 

Unfortunately, the nature of the system does mean that you pay some of your solicitor's fees, a broker fee if you're using one (based on my experience, I would say don't) and for a survey, and that survey can throw up all sorts of issues that you never would have imagined, which either puts you back to the start with price negotiations, or it puts you even further back to the start of things by pulling out of a sale and trying to find something new. 

In the least snobbish way possible, the people I know work in offices. My family, my friends, friends of my family - the majority of people I know and trust work in an office doing office-y things and not building or renovating houses. That's not a conscious or intentional choice; in fact, I would prefer to change that because having mates in trades normally means you can get issues solved more quickly, even when you don't believe in asking friends for discounts on their labour. Looking around at houses, I don't know what I'm looking for in terms of issues. I don't know how much things will costs to change. I am the definition of a newbie to all of this and that makes it really difficult. 

At this point, I am still waiting for the full report to come through so I can figure out what on Earth to do, but even if I can get my head around to doing all of the work, and we can sort out the financial side of it, it doesn't feel like the same house anymore. I don't feel the same way about it, because I'm scared that a lot of the things I loved about the place will need to go and it will effectively become an absolute money pit, which I definitely wasn't signing up for. So maybe I should just go back to writing about literally anything else. 

When I Think About This Year

 When I think about this year's National Novel Writing Month, I get a bit sad. 

One of the reasons for this is the painfully obvious reason that I was desperate to see my novelling friends who pop out of the woodwork in time for NaNoWriMo and then retreat again to hibernate until next year. Not all of them came along to the virtual write-ins, and even when they did, it's not quite the same. Yes, there were some amazing parts, like being able to say hey to all of our American friends who visited London and then had to return to the USA, but we can be quite a huggy bunch, and by this point in the year, I would say that we were desperate to have a hug from people we didn't live with, and unfortunately, it was not to be. 

Another reason is that, despite knowing that I can be terribly harsh on myself, I was beating myself up a bit, and continue to do so, about how out of sync I felt with the whole thing. I felt like I wasn't being an overly great ML this year (Municipal Liaison - think Regional Coordinator and you're about there) and I felt like I was being a terrible sprint leader. I enjoyed doing both, and I enjoyed the challenge of being an ML in a virtual world, but there were some things that were so difficult about the whole situation, not just NaNoWriMo, but the whole thing of lockdowns, work, shorter days, and longer nights rolling in and a whole pile of other things which made the whole backdrop of the event different and it made it harder. Every year I fall out of November into December with a cold that comes on through exhaustion and a need to sleep for a week to recover, because I run around like a blue arsed fly trying to do everything I need to do. Despite the exhausting nature of it, it's exhilarating. This year kind of wasn't. 

The thing I'm most upset about though is that I had a plan. I had a pretty solid plan and I figured that actually, this year was the time I was most likely to pull it off because my mum makes tea throughout the day, and even when she doesn't bring it to my desk, she puts it half way up the stairs and it's not far for me to go and grab it. I wasn't having to shop for meals or cook them or worry about anything like that. My mum does the laundry - though anyone who knows me knows I own enough clothes to get through most of, if not all, of the month without doing a load of laundry if I really have to, even if it means wearing things which aren't really weather appropriate on the days I'm not leaving the house. In theory, all I had to do was my job and my writing, as well as a bit of human-ing like showering and sleeping. 

What I wanted to do was write a few different projects that I have either had in my head for a while or that I have had a couple of runs at and decided I didn't like in that format. I wanted to just hammer the keyboard throughout the month and think about the editing later, in classic NaNoWriMo style, and more than anything I wanted to sprint to my personal best for NaNoWriMo, get my first 50k done in under five days, and then keep going at said alarming rate to really cement my membership in the overachievers club. 

I did none of the above. 

If I'm being completely honest with myself, I struggled to function as a human being during November. We were in the second set of national restrictions, I wasn't going out for a walk or a run as often as I had in the first national lockdown and my mental health took a dive that looked similar to the path of Oblivion at Alton Towers (a complete nosedive, following a brief pause where you stare down into the waiting abyss.) I finished "early" by most people's standards, but not by mine. I wrote a lot more than the 50k, but not what I was going for and I wrote every day, which is something I haven't done for a long while, even if NaNoWriMo. Despite having a 4thewords account and a streak that is very close to a year, I don't write every day. I think about it almost every day, and when I don't, I pay for it the next day with having to recover my streak. Writing every day, focusing on writing every day, and bringing myself back to the keyboard even when it was the last thing I wanted to do was a bit of an education and it was one that I was glad of. 

As you can see, there are things I am glad of from this year, and perhaps I needed this year to be a bit of a battering so I could knock my idea of myself during NaNoWriMo and this feeling that I can do anything in NaNoWriMo and sod the consequences, right off of its pedestal. I think I needed to remember that the rest of my life does not get suspended for the month, and also remember that I need a lot more tea and a lot more pizza than my parents do, particularly in November. I think that those things have made me develop a new reverence for NaNoWriMo and the dedication it demands, but, after a significant rest and turning my attention to finishing a few projects which are not writing-related and have lain on my desk untouched for too long, I think I finally feel ready to tackle the things I wanted to do in November, but just a little less fiercely and with a bit more time to get them done... 

I'm not expecting anything to get better overnight. The simple fact of the matter is that Brexit is on the horizon, the UK mutation of the virus will not be the only one, and vaccines take time. 2021 will not be a catch-all cure that repairs all that went wrong in 2020, but it is an opportunity, not to start again, but to keep going. 

It's Been a Long...

  It's been a long... 

I feel like here, in twenty twenty, we can fill in the rest of that sentence with any measure of time and it would be pretty accurate. It was a long weekend with the All Night Log On replacing the All Night Lock In on the London calendar of events for NaNoWriMo. Being so close to your bed that no one could actually stop you from just going and getting into it and checking out for the night brings a new measure of difficulty to an event which is already a marathon sprint. It's almost like someone is driving a golf buggy in front of you when you're running a marathon, but instead of just a normal golf buggy, it's one with super plush seats and it's warm enough but cool enough and there are snacks and drinks and cushions and it's lovely, but there is that nagging thing of you would be letting yourself down and no one wants to do that. Unlike on a normal day, well, a normal ANLI, we lost of fifty per cent of the participants overnight as people finished their fifty thousand words, realised that they were keeping partners, parents or pets away or they just started getting headaches and other issues and had to retire for the good of their health, and believe me, the thought of following them was so tempting, especially when I went into the fourth hour of a caffeine headache and my wifi was dropping out despite the laptop being sat directly next to the router, and there being seemingly no issue with the router or the other laptop I was actually writing on - just the one that was hosting the call - though it only booted everyone out on one occasion so that's pretty good going. 

This year NaNoWriMo felt like Such. A. Long. Month. because rather than being able to meet people in person and spend time with them, give them a big squeezey hug as you're leaving each other for the evening and scream I LOVE YOU, DON'T DIE! down London's streets to them followed by a fit of the giggles, we had to resort to online writing events that took us away from our favourite destinations of coffee shops in town and all of the museums, from having a brew and a natter and seeing everyone's lovely faces, to dealing with strange microphone and web cam set ups that don't necessarily inspire a great deal of comfort. Whilst the community survived online, and there are definitely advantages to being able to, or being forced to, host in this way, I can't wait for the day I am able to wrap my arms around my writers again and tell them how much I missed them, because I did. And I missed having loose leaf tea with them in Yum Chaa. I'm praying that Yum Chaa survive this year. 

It's been a long year because there has been a constant bombardment of bad news (EXCEPT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!) with the pandemic adding further pressures onto businesses that were struggling and causing many to buckle under the weight of new pressures. Once more we are seeing an economic recession which is costing jobs and livelihoods and robbing people of the stability that has, in many cases, been exceedingly hard won. I can't help but watch the news and wonder what will become of the local high street and the city shopping district. Are we moving towards a day where we order everything online, because we can, and then what? How soon does it become that we stop going outside because we don't have to and, those of us who can afford to, just get everything delivered to our doors? It is a horrible thought. 

I've been considered lucky, because being a civil servant gave me the flexibility to work from home from the moment things looked a bit too ropey, and that's exactly what I have done. I've been really lucky because there's three of us and a dog in a house with a spare bedroom. My parents and my brother were all furloughed, so for a long time, there was only me having to work, which was a frustrating and exhausting experience of its own, but also hearing people talk about how difficult furlough was for them, not because of financial issues, has got to the point where it pisses me right off. People are saying they were bored, and I know it can very much be a the grass is always greener situation and if I had been furloughed I might have been bored within a week and wanting to get online to do some work, but I also spent the whole of lock down one doing things like knitting baby blankets (I am nearly finishing my third) and making face masks for friends and family and also selling a few to help me raise some extra cash for Macmillan. I ran for London Landmarks Half Marathon, though on the day I didn't do thirteen miles because of injury. There was so much more I wanted to do as well, but whilst working a full time job and spending time with family, it was a bit of a juggling act. 

I'm really hoping that this start of the twenties is not setting the tone for the whole decade, because that would be a more than difficult pill to swallow. It's long and arduous and in some places people are working together and doing amazing things and in others they are throwing parties and not caring who it hurts, or who it could kill. There are organisations who are penalising their workers for the crime or infraction of not living with the person that they're in a relationship with and that is one of the hardest things imaginable. I once complained to an ex that I was not a f***ing tamagotchi and that's what we have all turned into this year. If lock down rules mean you can't see your significant other, it becomes texts and calls of I love you, I miss you, I want to see you, and strain like that can break relationships, though so can being thrown together too soon and for extended periods of time when we were only allowed out of our homes for an hour. Friends of mine have been quite lucky that they have been ready to move in together and the lock down just became their excuse, but for some people that wasn't feasible, or it might not have been practical. 

It's really hard to imagine that many doctors and nurses or other hospital staff moved out of their homes to try and keep their families safe. It is hard to imagine a lot of the things that people have been through this year, but with the vaccine now on the horizon, it looks as though there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's the light you see as you pass out from your medical stabbing because, like me, you are petrified of needles. That being said, I got myself used to needles enough to be able to give blood so hopefully I will be alright. 

How's Today's NaNo Going, Charlie?

Well, I was working, didn't really take a lunch break, still don't have my head on straight after a few days of feeling like my brain was just causing panic attacks every hour on the hour and a few more as surprises and I just went to copy across my words from my Dana to my PC and I forgot to press the start sprint button because I'm actually a bit of a moron, so all those words were counted for NaNo but not in my current sprint battle with a monster I'm trying to defeat to open a new area. (I love how nerdy 4thewords makes me sound :))

I had fully intended to get up today and be a fully functional human again because I actually managed to get to something that felt a bit more normal yesterday after a very slow start, but unfortunately, I couldn't sleep properly anyway and then Teddy started snoring. I know he can't help it but having a companion animal that doesn't sound like they have aggressive sleep apnoea would be wonderful. I had even put a bottle of Sneak by my bed so I could caffeinate early, but unfortunately, it was not to be.

That being said, I should still be able to break the 30K barrier today and I realised this morning, thanks to Facebook memories, that the record I was trying to break, I actually did it last year, so my all-time PB is actually already five days and that was the best I was hoping for this year after the first day didn't quite go to plan.

What I am really thankful for this year as opposed to last is that the verbal abuse, or written abuse, that was hurled at Overachievers has died down. I get that people struggle to understand how the likes of the Overachievers do what they do at the speed that they do it, but that isn't a reason to be sour about it. Granted, I'm not sure if there are more people accepting that that's the way it is because people have decided to be a bit more compassionate or because they know a lot of people have ended up at home that would not have chosen to be there and that additional time on your hands can really help, even if the additional stresses don't. I think we all might be a bit slower than usual as well because the pandemic stress is touching all of us. That may just be my perception of it though. Either way, I'm really glad, because it is thoroughly disheartening in an otherwise exceedingly inclusive competition. 

Something else I found really encouraging recently was Grant Faulkener's admission that he had not been writing for a few days because of the election. Sometimes it is difficult to accept that external forces will have that impact on u. Whether it makes you more jittery or unable to focus, or you're just so busy with other things, it isn't necessarily a bad thing and it doesn't mean that it's over. No one has to make up three days word count at once, no one has to be writing every day, and no one should feel ashamed if the world outside their front door is a little bit scary and it makes you feel a bit neurotic. We're still only in the first week. We have plenty of time.

Something Happened and Now I'm Typing Really Slowly,

 No, it's not an injury and no, I don't think it's anything sinister, but I was hoping to be further ahead of NaNoWriMo par by now and I'm on 25k. I was hoping to beat my record of 6 days, set last year, but being 7k behind what I had planned on the first day didn't start me off too well and yesterday was less than great, so I feel as though something happened and now my typing speak has dropped. 

To be fair, I think it's more of a focus thing. The last couple of days I have been really out of it, or so it feels when it comes to trying to focus on anything and it just slips off into the ether. I was considering typing the rest of this from the bath before I realised I needed a bit of a brain break from writing for twenty minutes. 

Maybe I could actually do with taking a few days off of writing, but this is November, so that is not happening.