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 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.
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.
This year we moved into the first place we’ve owned, and we brought plenty of stuff with us. The curtains, for example. My mother made them for the high Victorian windows of my childhood home; I used them to cheer up the horrible bedsit I rented when I first moved out; turned them up to fit the french windows in the 1960s maisonette that was our last rented property. They’ve always been comforting: good for hiding behind when I was small; good for keeping the draughts out now; bold and cosy.
Then there was the pig picture, inherited from my beloved godmother Héloïse. Her house used to be full of vibrant, mischievous pictures: this was my favourite. And there, at the middle of it, is that bright red lobster.
This was not the only picture we brought with us. It wasn’t even the only one with a red element to it. We also had a drawing of the two of us that we’d had done, in true tacky tourist fashion, at Montmartre, on our honeymoon.
The new house had its own contributions to make. Most of the fanlights in the conservatory were decorated with a stained glass red rose.
With all that, it became obvious pretty quickly that the dining room wall – an insipid lavender when we moved in – needed to be red. We bought a pot of paint in our first week, on 17 March. We painted the wall on 25 May, bank holiday Monday.
My new book goes beautifully with my red wall, though in fact I didn’t plan it that way. That started with stained glass flowers rather than with domestic decor. I’d had my eye on the passion flowers in one of the windows of the south aisle at my previous/current church (it’s complicated!) for ages, wanting to replace the more realistic one on the cover of my first book. But if it was going to be a series then I was going to have to find other stained glass flowers to match. I knew I wanted this one to be red, but it was surprisingly difficult to find ones that weren’t roses (made it look too much like a historical novel) or poppies (also made it look too much like a historical novel). I eventually found these ones at a church I popped into on last year’s narrowboat holiday. I’m not sure what they’re meant to be – maybe carnations? – but anyway, I’m really pleased with them.
Really, when it comes to it, I’m just very, very fond of red.
It would probably be cheating to say ‘Sunday’, wouldn’t it?
I remember one day in March, standing on Clifton Suspension Bridge with two of my friends, looking out over the gorge, feeling intensely aware of all the strata of my own past, intensely uncertain of the future, with empty air under the bridge under my feet, feeling faithfully supported.
That one was a Sunday.
And I remember one morning in late July, having been blessed with a visit to the Isle of Wight and my family, revisiting all my favourite spots around Ventnor, spotting lizards, walking the dinosaur labyrinth, drinking coffee on the seafront.
That one wasn’t a Sunday.
But it’s the cumulative effect of those quiet Sunday afternoons at home that feels both the loveliest and the most characteristic of 2020. Sunday afternoons, with a stack of books and a folding chair and the contained space of the garden; the sound of a neighbour’s cockerel; the traffic not too obnoxious; bees and butterflies.
I had to go back through my diary to find the one I was thinking of specifically: 12 July. Earlier in the day, after church, I’d taken my bike out into the fens to the west, climbed the nearest hill and kept going under big fenland sky.
And after a shower and lunch I took my chair and my books out into the garden, and sat and read a few lines at a time, and watched the ladybirds crawling over the rose leaves and whizzing around the place in tiny red blurs, and much higher, white birds soaring, and, higher still, gliders circling, winking in and out of sight.
Kathleen Jowitt 