I’ve had an extensive collection of hats for a long time. Masks, not so much. And I have to say that I enjoy wearing masks considerably less than I do hats. But here we all are.
I’m lucky in that, working from home, I mostly don’t have to – it’s just trips to the shops, or church, or (as here) the post office. I’m also lucky in that I can see without my glasses if I really need to, so I do have options if I can’t keep the fogging under control.
And it’s quite fun to be an international woman of mystery. I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know that, after months of meticulous preparation, I was able to make the drop well before zero hour.
We haven’t put any Christmas decorations up yet: this reindeer belongs to one of our neighbours – one of the few we’ve actually met in person.
It’s been a bit of an odd year to move house, and not least among the ways it’s been odd has been the way that we haven’t got to meet our new neighbours. We’ve met next door, on either side, over the road, and behind us. Everyone else remains a mystery. We might have seen any or all of them in town, but we wouldn’t know.
Which is not to say we don’t know them. There’s a WhatsApp group, via which people swap recommendations (and jigsaw puzzles). There was socially-distanced trick-or-treating at Hallowe’en. They seem a very friendly bunch. Next year I hope to meet them.
This hasn’t been a year for huge decisions. The one that’s made the most enduring, most positive difference, was the commitment I made back in May, to go for a walk before breakfast every work day.
I haven’t managed every day: illness, bad weather, and the increasingly tardy sunrise have occasionally stopped it happening. But I’ve managed most days in the average week, and it’s made a difference.
Usually I take the same route: south along the footpath that runs behind our house, and back again. Sometimes I go all the way to the main road; sometimes, if time is short, I turn around part way. Occasionally I go up into town instead and explore the back streets. But mostly I’m walking the same path, out and back, every week day morning, home in time for a shower and breakfast and to join Morning Prayer over Google Meet.
I’ve walked through three seasons. I’ve walked through the silence of the first lockdown and the hum of rush hour. I’ve walked through rain and frost and sunshine, freezing fog and sultry heat. I’ve come to recognise the dogs and their walkers and the young couple with cropped trousers and reusable coffee cups.
Some more photos:
I’ve come to understand a little more about where I live now, have grounded myself in space and time by taking a very small journey through the one, moving through the other the only way I can. And I return a little more awake, a little less wound up about the state of the world.
As for last year’s decisions, which I was a bit vague about at the time, one was ‘which house to buy’, and has worked out very well so far. The other unmade itself, very decisively, in January. (There’s an argument for calling that this year’s biggest decision, but it didn’t feel like a decision at all from where I was.) They were both big, and took up a lot of my headspace, and it’s something of a relief that this year has only involved little ones.
I wrote this letter on the last day of 2008, to be opened on the last day of 2018. It took me until well into 2019 to remember about it, at which point I took it out of the box with all the other important documents, wasn’t brave enough to open it, put it down, and promptly lost it.
It turned up again a couple of weeks ago when I unpacked the last but one box from my study at the old house (in the sitting room at the new house, not that it’s really relevant). This time I opened it and read it. I didn’t laugh at my poor curious twenty-three year old self, not really. I wanted to reach back through time and give her a hug. She was so grimly cheerful, so resolutely clinging on, so obviously scared that she wouldn’t keep on doing that.
It’s an interesting mixture. Curiosity about my own future (in answer to my questions: yes, though it takes a year to find one to stick, but that one really sticks; no; yes – funny you should mention epidemics, though; yes, finished, self-published – bet you weren’t expecting that! or that I’d prefer it that way!; no, if anything it’s got worse but I type most things these days; yes, but then it went away again; yes, no; not in any practical way; haven’t tried). Gossip (no; yes; not that I know of; yes, and would you believe four children; haha, no; yes; very well; some of them; yes; OK so far as I know; ahahahahaha, no; yes, most of them, every now and again.) And a gloomy fatalism:
I’m guessing that life isn’t going to get easier. I almost wish you could write back – but not quite. I don’t want to know.
It’s probably just as well that I can’t. I don’t know that I’d have been able to convince her that, though we’re twelve years closer to the end of the world, I’m a thousand times happier than she was. I could tell her that I’ve fallen on my feet over and over again, that I have some of the things on the list of things that she wanted for me, that I very much don’t want some of the others, and that actually some of them are none of her business. I could tell her that all the things on the list of things that worked for her still work for me. But would she believe me if I told her not to worry: we were going to make it? Because look, she was worried that we wouldn’t:
What do I want to tell you? Not to give up, I suppose. Because if you give up, I might as well not even try. To live, to love, to be what I can be – what you can be, I mean – & not to make excuses. To hold on to what is good & true.
She had her excuses. Good ones. 2008 was an awful year – she knows that, she listed the reasons at the opening of the letter. I think she’d be wary, rather suspicious, of my compassion for her; she’d worry that I was letting us off too easy.
And of course I wonder what my self of twelve years hence would make of both of us. I don’t know that I’d write another letter. I notice that I’m just as wary of hearing back from her as my twelve years gone self was of hearing from me, though for rather different reasons. But I do wonder what she’d see me hiding from myself, what she’d read between the lines that I wouldn’t be aware of having written between them.
Assuming, of course, that either of us could read my handwriting. Perhaps I’d better type it.
I was tempted to skip this day. I am in no way the kind of person who talks about ‘warm fuzzies’. I know the concept that other people are referring to when they do. It’s possible that I even experience it myself, but, you know, I’d never admit to it.
Possibly I am a stony-hearted snob.
Actually, I think part of the issue – beyond the unbearable tweeness of the phrase – is the fact that I don’t experience that sort of intense emotion as fuzziness. Rather the opposite. Clarity. And light rather than heat. Even when it’s generated by concentrated contentment it doesn’t feel fuzzy to me.
‘I don’t know about warm fuzzies!’ I told my husband. ‘You married one!’ he told me.
That’s his dressing gown I’m wearing in the picture, except it’s mine now. We swapped years ago. He has the big fluffy white one.
We’ve both been working from home through this year, ever since we moved into this new house and the lockdown came in, keeping each other company from opposite ends of the landing, occasionally dropping in on each other. It’s been very pleasant.
The greying is genetic. My mother found her first grey hair at fourteen, and I was younger than that when I found mine. One of my brothers is going the same way.
Through my teens, my hair was very dark. In my wedding photos (age 23) there’s a grey streak visible if you know where to look, springing back from each temple. Through my twenties and into my thirties the white has been spreading steadily, working its way around the sides, not quite so dominant at the base or the crown. It’s a different texture, thicker and springier than the dark, and I think it may be faster growing, too.
I’ve been adamant for a long time that I wasn’t going to dye it. Or that maybe I’d wait for it all to go white and then start playing with exciting colours. (This year someon told me that white hair doesn’t take dye so well. Heigh-ho.) Whatever, I wasn’t going to get into a running-to-stand-still situation trying to keep it the colour it was when I was fourteen. (Could be worse, anyway. I was bald until the age of three.) I just let it go white.
It’s worked surprisingly well for me. Grey hair even came into fashion a couple of years ago. Women a decade younger than me were paying good money to get their hair looking like mine. It makes interesting highlights and lowlights, meaning that all my hairdresser (when I have one) has to do is cut. (Excuse the horrible job I’ve made at the base of my skull: that’s lockdown for you.) People who didn’t know me when my hair was brown are surprised to learn that it just grows like this.
It avoids awkward situations when I’m trying to buy wine or scissors (I did get carded the other day, but then I took my hat off and everything was fine). It confuses creepy men because they can’t tell how old I am. I, meanwhile, feel pretty damn glamorous.
And then there was this year, when not having a dye habit proved to be a great blessing: it looked the same as it always does (if a bit straggly), and I didn’t have a slowly widening tidemark getting me down.
It’s true, I do have to get it cut more often, because it doesn’t look so good long (mind you, I’m not sure that my dark hair wouldn’t have looked better short, come to that).
But I like it. Maybe it’s that I’m happier in my thirties than I was in my twenties. Maybe it’s that I have a more robust sense of my own style. Or maybe there is something about silver, after all.
I’ve already mentioned how much I’m enjoying the camera on my new phone. It’s better than the camera on my old phone. It’s better than the camera on my camera – and, because it’s on my phone, I’ve been taking it with me pretty much everywhere.
So I’ve taken a lot of photos this year. Many of them are of things in my garden: beans, flowers, fruit, ladybirds, trees. Trees outside my garden, too. Lately I’ve been fascinated by the richness of winter morning light on lichened bark, by silhouettes of bare branches. Many of them are of the amazing fenland skies that I’m coming to know better: sunsets from my study window, sunrises from my morning walk, imposing cloudscapes over flat ploughed fields.
I couldn’t have chosen between all the trees. I couldn’t have chosen between all the skies. But there was only one morning when I saw three squirrels in the same tree, and this is the photo in which they’re looking their most squirrelsome. So here it is: my favourite photo of 2020.
I’ve been trying to take a trip down the Rhine ever since 2018 – when I got very close, but was thwarted by train delays. In 2019 we were saving to buy a house, and also just weren’t very efficient. 2020 – well, no. I was quite sufficiently twitchy about going to the Isle of Wight: crossing any international borders would have been too much.
And I have to admit that things aren’t looking great for 2021, either. (Plan B for next year is to hire a car and see how many of the Great Little Trains of Wales we can get around.)
Still, we’ve put together a convincing itinerary; we just need to find a convincing week-and-a-bit to slot it into. Maybe that’ll be next year. Maybe it’ll be some other time. Anyway, the Rhine is staying on my wishlist until I actually manage it.
I told this story a little while ago, but I’m going to put it here again, because I don’t have any other story that’s half as good for this prompt.
The year my parents separated, there were suddenly two houses and two Christmas trees. And only one of me.
That Christmas was grim, but one thing was worth doing, and has stuck: I bought two identical tree ornaments, one for each of my parent’s Christmas trees. I couldn’t be in two places at once, but I could at least show that I wished I could be.
Over the years, I’ve expanded the practice, and now send tree decorations to both of my parents, the two of my brothers who have moved out, and my in-laws, as well as keeping one for our own tree – so even when I can’t be with someone for Christmas, there can be something of me there.
Sometimes I’ve made decorations. Sometimes I’ve bought several identical ones. Sometimes I’ve got a set and split it up. Glass angels, laser-cut wooden dragons from Ljubljana, crystal stars, iridescent hummingbirds… This year I’ve been threading gorgeous faceted glass beads onto thick silver-plated wire and bending it into abstract spirals. This tradition, born of one of the most painful experiences of my life, has become one of the preparations that I most enjoy.
This year, it’s a particular blessing. I don’t need to think of something new in a year that’s already had more than enough strangeness. I already have this way of letting people know that I’d like to be with them and acknowledging that I can’t. My family is large and far-flung: we would never have got everybody in the same place anyway. (All the same, maybe we’ll give that a go next year! In the meantime, I’ll wrap these little ornaments up and put them in the post…)
2020 hasn’t really been a year for lessons – at least, not the sort that you can wrap up in a sentence and paint on a wall. I know less about who I am and what I’m meant to be doing than I did at the beginning of the year. Nothing’s crystallised for me; the only epiphanies have shown me where not to go. I have no words of wisdom – at least, none that I think anybody else won’t have worked out for themselves.
I cannot say that in 2020 I learned that…
Which is not to say that 2020 has not been a year for learning.
I have learned how…
… to change a tap and paint a wall
… the security light on the garage works
… an apple or a pear will just come off in your hand when it’s ready to be picked
And I have learned about…
… staying in the same place for a long time
… walking the same walk, summer and winter, morning and noon, rain and sun and snow
… going deeper rather than broader
… time and space, time and space
… finding large things in small spaces
Putting that into small words, one lesson, is at present beyond me. Perhaps that will come next year. Perhaps it doesn’t need to happen at all.
Kathleen Jowitt 