There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year
Overly-long answers to an old-skool meme lifted from huskyteer.
1. What did you do in 2020 that you'd never done before?
Appeared in a podcast! A magazine published one of my stories, and as part of that they also interviewed me for their podcast. It's here, should you feel your day would be improved by me having unwarranted opinions at you for 30 minutes.
Like most people, I dislike the sound of my own voice recorded. I sound much higher-pitched and much posher than I wish.
The actual story has now vanished behind the Patreon-only bit of the magazine's site, but you can still listen to the audio version.
This is the same magazine that recently published my Christmas story, so there is another interview coming soon.
2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions?
Some of them. Some were thwarted by Covid ("spend more time with friends, invite people round more"). Some were actually assisted by lockdown ("do more cooking"). Some were going terribly well ("run a 10K") until I developed a weird leg injury and the physio told me to stop running - although in the event, it turned out there is nothing wrong with my leg, I have prolapsed discs in my spine. The cause is unknown, but it is more likely desk-sitting-related than running-related.
3. What countries did you visit?
Wales. We managed a short holiday in September, where we booked a lovely AirBnB and went and were fairly antisocial there instead of antisocial in London. We deliberately booked somewhere this side of the border, to avoid dealing with two countries' sets of Covid rules, but in the event did stray into Wales a couple of times while hiking.
4. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?
Time with friends.
I am naturally someone who likes a lot of time alone and, while I enjoy company, often end up wishing there was a bit less of it. But towards the end of 2020 even I have been missing people.
One-on-one conversations work well over phone/Zoom/whatever, but the thing I mis is the messy, cheerful banter of group conversations. That is less well-replicated over video calls. I want to sit, in a pub, with my mates.
5. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Were there any dates? Most of the time, I've been fairly unsure what day it was.
Logically, the date that lockdown was first declared should be the answer, but I can never actually remember it. March the... seventeenth? Hardly etched.
6. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
This is an interesting one. I've had a few stories published, but so much of that feels out of my control. I can write something, and make it as good as I can, but whether it actually gets picked up by anyone is a total lap-of-the-gods job.
Early in lockdown, the morris team I joined in 2019 asked whether anyone was willing to edit a quick video to send to Shrewsbury Festival (which was trying to go online). I quite enjoy a bit of video editing, and volunteered.
The actual video turned into a total monster, way more complex than anything I'd ever tried before. Video editing takes ages anyway, and it takes even more ages when you don't know what you're doing and are trying to manage 24 separate clips in the same frame. I also hadn't foreseen how many people would send me video with either no audio (so I had to sync it manually) or that was totally out of time with the audio (so I had to twiddle about speeding up/slowing down tiny sections to make them look vaguely in line).
The end result is still very far below professional editing standard, and in some ways all I can see is all the many, many things wrong with it. But the team (and the festival) were pleased, and for a first attempt I think it's probably OK.
7. What was your biggest failure?
If someone had told me, in March, that I would spend almost the entire rest of the year basically confined to barracks, I would have predicted getting So Much Done.
Spoiler: I didn't.
I have written much less than usual. I haven't tidied out all those cupboards that I thought I wasn't tidying because I was too busy. I have made some inroads into all those tasks that have been waiting around, but way less than expected.
I've seen lots of posts on the topic of not being too hard on your self for lack of achievement, we're all just trying to get through this, etc. But to be honest, I still feel like I really should have got more done.
8. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I had a weird viral-lung-infection-like thing in April. It was fairly minor, I felt a bit off for a few days, and it would have been wholly unremarkable had there not been the spectre of Covid looming over everything. Testing wasn't available at the time, and the headline news then was "do you have a cough" (no) and "do you have a fever" (probably not, but don't own a thermometer). I still have no idea whether that was an extremely mild Covid experience, or something completely unrelated.
I was MRI'd and diganosed with slipped discs in October. What had started off as "weird leg pain when I touch my toes" slowly morphed into "random back pain", but was all fairly minor and dealable-with. In the past few weeks, it's become obvious that the back issue is making me walk slightly lopsided. I can't feel/see it, but walking any distance now does cause quite a lot of pain in one hip. I walk a lot, usually, and am very much not down with this development.
9. What was the best thing you bought?
A lot of postage.
I have kept myself entertained in lockdown by sending letters and parcels (mostly containing experimental cake) to people.
I enjoyed it immensely, and I think the things were mostly well received.
10. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Every single person who followed the rules, looked out for their friends and neighbours, and did their best to help.
11. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Everyone who didn't.
12. Where did most of your money go?
The savings of not-commuting and general hermitude were somewhat mitigated by being put onto 80% hours for a large chunk of the year. I spent less on eating out, gigs, etc than usual but spent a lot more on physiotherapy. I don't feel I either have a big-picture answer to where my money went, or a large pile of money that has not gone.
In the event, I decided I quite liked time over money, and elected to stay on 90% hours. I now work 9 days in every fortnight, which feels like a nice compromise.
13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
In July, Indietracks festival didn't happen. But on the Sunday, we had a chaotically fun Skype call doing the Indietracks quiz with the people we weren't at the festival with. Then there was a bloody brilliant recorded-separately-and-mixed online gig from would-have-been-headliners The Just Joans, and then we had our usual Zoom Sunday pub quiz.
A few weeks earlier, we drove across London to visit a friend. She cooked us lunch, and we sat in her garden and chatted. On the way back, we swung through Battersea Park and met someone else for a walk along the Thames path. These were the first real, live external human friends we had seen face-to-face in months, and it was lovely.
Both of these felt like action-packed, glorious days (I've been out! To a place! Someone else made me lunch! I saw two whole new people! In two separate social engagements!)
14. What song will always remind you of 2020?
Weirdly, I don't feel like I have been listening to music nearly so much. The omnipresence of video calls has somewhat dented my ability to listen to music at work, as has the company-wide ban on using external storage (all my mp3s live on a hard drive and, although I flirt with Spotify, I've never really got the hang of it). There are plenty of ways round this, but I don't seem to have taken them.
15. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Writing. Reading. Useful use of the time available.
16. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Whatever the hell it is I've spent all that time available doing. I'm genuinely not sure what it is.
I have spent more time on Twitter this year, and also more time reading news than usual. But I don't think I've fallen victim to the generalised doomscrolling that others have mentioned.
I honestly think I must have just spent protracted periods staring slack-jawed into the middle distance.
17. How will you spend Christmas?
ChrisC and I spent Christmas in our flat in Ealing. We opened a few presents, cooked dinner, phoned/Zoomed various bits of our respective families, and went for a little walk round the local area.
That clearly shouldn't have filled up an entire day, but see (16).
18. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
I don't think I hate anyone. It takes a terrible amount of energy to hate someone.
19. What was the best book you read?
I haven't read nearly as much as I might have expected this year, see (16). I did enjoy Idiot Brain, which is a very accessible book about neuroscience.
I read a lot of short stories, at various times. I think possibly my favourite all year was the lovely and not-at-all-scary Open House on Haunted Hill.
20. What did you want and get?
I always wanted "more time to stay at home by myself". I got it.
21. What did you want and not get?
One of the sub-clauses of my rather overly admin-heavy new year resolutions was to cook dinner for friends more frequently. In December 2019, some people came over to eat a Sunday roast and play Lovecraftesque, and I thought "this is fun! I should make things like this happen more!"
In January, the answer to (26) all came round for a Sunday roast and to solve one of the previous sets of DASH puzzles, but I think that was it until some local friends joined us in the garden for a picnic in August. I may have got slightly over-excited and somewhat over-catered.
22. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I was
44. My birthday fell at the end of summer, when restrictions were at about the laxest they've been all year. I had a picnic with 5 whole other humans.
(Technically, 4 other humans had arranged a picnic, and very kindly invited ChrisC and I to join them - none of them actually knew it was my birthday.)
In the evening, ChrisC and I had dinner in a pub beergarden.
I'm very aware that this is way more celebration than lots of people got to have on their chosen festival-days.
23. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
I don't know.
I mean, a lack of pandemic would have been nice. Although, of course, had it not happened, I wouldn't be here typing "2020 was so satisfying, there was absolutely no pandemic at all".
Given the situation, if I knew what would have made the year more satisfying, I would have been trying like hell to organise it.
It would have been satisfying to run the 10K I had planned. I had already covered the distance in training, but had the date of the obviously-cancelled Ealing half marathon pencilled in to try and run my 'race time'. I don't feel it would have made an "immeasurable" difference to the year, though.
24. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?
Hoodies.
My at-the-weekend clothes for decades have been t-shirt/hoodie/jeans-or-combats. I always used to wear something a bit smarter to go into the office.
Dressing smartly to go and sit at the other end of my flat simply didn't seem worth the bother, though, especially since the angle of my laptop camera means you can only really see me from shoulders upwards.
25. What kept you sane?
I don't think I have been at particular risk of insanity. Or no more than usual.
As I wrote earlier in the year, I've felt very lucky. I have a job I can do at home, that still pays me. I have a home I feel safe in. I am not worried about where the money for my next rent cheque/food bill is coming from. I don't have kids to homeschool, or specific caring responsibilities, or health requirements which have been sidelined due to Covid. I have a lot of greenspace in my local area that I can walk in. I live with my partner, and we get on well.
Sure, 2020 wasn't the year I would have chosen. But on a purely personal level, it's been more-or-less fine.
26. Who was the best new person you met?
I don't think I've met any new persons.
ChrisC always used to go to Puzzled Pint with a group of his colleagues (I love puzzles, but it is a well-documented fact that I am not allowed out on Tuesdays). When lockdown started, we did our own virtual Puzzled Pint over Skype.
We've kept this up all year, working slowly through the Puzzled Pint archive at weekends. I would have counted all these people as friends before this, but feel I've got to know them much better.
28. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020.
Stolen from ao_lai: Lack of time is not the reason that things don't get done.
29. What were your favourite moments of the year?
The occasional moments on Puzzle-Skype, Mabel-Zoom, SundayQuiz-Zoom or other generic video social engagement when it felt almost like a normal, group conversation.
30. What are your plans for 2021?
Well, obviously, to try and make better use of my time.
Beyond that, making plans seems like outrageous hubris.
My family intends to have a Christmas at some point (notionally Easter, though as my mum put it yesterday "it feels like even that is receding"). ChrisC bought End Of The Road tickets (it's a small music festival in September), although we agreed at the time it was more about having something in the calendar to look forward to than actually expecting it would happen. [Originally posted at https://venta.dreamwidth.org/541759.html]
1. What did you do in 2020 that you'd never done before?
Appeared in a podcast! A magazine published one of my stories, and as part of that they also interviewed me for their podcast. It's here, should you feel your day would be improved by me having unwarranted opinions at you for 30 minutes.
Like most people, I dislike the sound of my own voice recorded. I sound much higher-pitched and much posher than I wish.
The actual story has now vanished behind the Patreon-only bit of the magazine's site, but you can still listen to the audio version.
This is the same magazine that recently published my Christmas story, so there is another interview coming soon.
2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions?
Some of them. Some were thwarted by Covid ("spend more time with friends, invite people round more"). Some were actually assisted by lockdown ("do more cooking"). Some were going terribly well ("run a 10K") until I developed a weird leg injury and the physio told me to stop running - although in the event, it turned out there is nothing wrong with my leg, I have prolapsed discs in my spine. The cause is unknown, but it is more likely desk-sitting-related than running-related.
3. What countries did you visit?
Wales. We managed a short holiday in September, where we booked a lovely AirBnB and went and were fairly antisocial there instead of antisocial in London. We deliberately booked somewhere this side of the border, to avoid dealing with two countries' sets of Covid rules, but in the event did stray into Wales a couple of times while hiking.
4. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?
Time with friends.
I am naturally someone who likes a lot of time alone and, while I enjoy company, often end up wishing there was a bit less of it. But towards the end of 2020 even I have been missing people.
One-on-one conversations work well over phone/Zoom/whatever, but the thing I mis is the messy, cheerful banter of group conversations. That is less well-replicated over video calls. I want to sit, in a pub, with my mates.
5. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Were there any dates? Most of the time, I've been fairly unsure what day it was.
Logically, the date that lockdown was first declared should be the answer, but I can never actually remember it. March the... seventeenth? Hardly etched.
6. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
This is an interesting one. I've had a few stories published, but so much of that feels out of my control. I can write something, and make it as good as I can, but whether it actually gets picked up by anyone is a total lap-of-the-gods job.
Early in lockdown, the morris team I joined in 2019 asked whether anyone was willing to edit a quick video to send to Shrewsbury Festival (which was trying to go online). I quite enjoy a bit of video editing, and volunteered.
The actual video turned into a total monster, way more complex than anything I'd ever tried before. Video editing takes ages anyway, and it takes even more ages when you don't know what you're doing and are trying to manage 24 separate clips in the same frame. I also hadn't foreseen how many people would send me video with either no audio (so I had to sync it manually) or that was totally out of time with the audio (so I had to twiddle about speeding up/slowing down tiny sections to make them look vaguely in line).
The end result is still very far below professional editing standard, and in some ways all I can see is all the many, many things wrong with it. But the team (and the festival) were pleased, and for a first attempt I think it's probably OK.
7. What was your biggest failure?
If someone had told me, in March, that I would spend almost the entire rest of the year basically confined to barracks, I would have predicted getting So Much Done.
Spoiler: I didn't.
I have written much less than usual. I haven't tidied out all those cupboards that I thought I wasn't tidying because I was too busy. I have made some inroads into all those tasks that have been waiting around, but way less than expected.
I've seen lots of posts on the topic of not being too hard on your self for lack of achievement, we're all just trying to get through this, etc. But to be honest, I still feel like I really should have got more done.
8. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I had a weird viral-lung-infection-like thing in April. It was fairly minor, I felt a bit off for a few days, and it would have been wholly unremarkable had there not been the spectre of Covid looming over everything. Testing wasn't available at the time, and the headline news then was "do you have a cough" (no) and "do you have a fever" (probably not, but don't own a thermometer). I still have no idea whether that was an extremely mild Covid experience, or something completely unrelated.
I was MRI'd and diganosed with slipped discs in October. What had started off as "weird leg pain when I touch my toes" slowly morphed into "random back pain", but was all fairly minor and dealable-with. In the past few weeks, it's become obvious that the back issue is making me walk slightly lopsided. I can't feel/see it, but walking any distance now does cause quite a lot of pain in one hip. I walk a lot, usually, and am very much not down with this development.
9. What was the best thing you bought?
A lot of postage.
I have kept myself entertained in lockdown by sending letters and parcels (mostly containing experimental cake) to people.
I enjoyed it immensely, and I think the things were mostly well received.
10. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Every single person who followed the rules, looked out for their friends and neighbours, and did their best to help.
11. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Everyone who didn't.
12. Where did most of your money go?
The savings of not-commuting and general hermitude were somewhat mitigated by being put onto 80% hours for a large chunk of the year. I spent less on eating out, gigs, etc than usual but spent a lot more on physiotherapy. I don't feel I either have a big-picture answer to where my money went, or a large pile of money that has not gone.
In the event, I decided I quite liked time over money, and elected to stay on 90% hours. I now work 9 days in every fortnight, which feels like a nice compromise.
13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
In July, Indietracks festival didn't happen. But on the Sunday, we had a chaotically fun Skype call doing the Indietracks quiz with the people we weren't at the festival with. Then there was a bloody brilliant recorded-separately-and-mixed online gig from would-have-been-headliners The Just Joans, and then we had our usual Zoom Sunday pub quiz.
A few weeks earlier, we drove across London to visit a friend. She cooked us lunch, and we sat in her garden and chatted. On the way back, we swung through Battersea Park and met someone else for a walk along the Thames path. These were the first real, live external human friends we had seen face-to-face in months, and it was lovely.
Both of these felt like action-packed, glorious days (I've been out! To a place! Someone else made me lunch! I saw two whole new people! In two separate social engagements!)
14. What song will always remind you of 2020?
Weirdly, I don't feel like I have been listening to music nearly so much. The omnipresence of video calls has somewhat dented my ability to listen to music at work, as has the company-wide ban on using external storage (all my mp3s live on a hard drive and, although I flirt with Spotify, I've never really got the hang of it). There are plenty of ways round this, but I don't seem to have taken them.
15. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Writing. Reading. Useful use of the time available.
16. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Whatever the hell it is I've spent all that time available doing. I'm genuinely not sure what it is.
I have spent more time on Twitter this year, and also more time reading news than usual. But I don't think I've fallen victim to the generalised doomscrolling that others have mentioned.
I honestly think I must have just spent protracted periods staring slack-jawed into the middle distance.
17. How will you spend Christmas?
ChrisC and I spent Christmas in our flat in Ealing. We opened a few presents, cooked dinner, phoned/Zoomed various bits of our respective families, and went for a little walk round the local area.
That clearly shouldn't have filled up an entire day, but see (16).
18. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
I don't think I hate anyone. It takes a terrible amount of energy to hate someone.
19. What was the best book you read?
I haven't read nearly as much as I might have expected this year, see (16). I did enjoy Idiot Brain, which is a very accessible book about neuroscience.
I read a lot of short stories, at various times. I think possibly my favourite all year was the lovely and not-at-all-scary Open House on Haunted Hill.
20. What did you want and get?
I always wanted "more time to stay at home by myself". I got it.
21. What did you want and not get?
One of the sub-clauses of my rather overly admin-heavy new year resolutions was to cook dinner for friends more frequently. In December 2019, some people came over to eat a Sunday roast and play Lovecraftesque, and I thought "this is fun! I should make things like this happen more!"
In January, the answer to (26) all came round for a Sunday roast and to solve one of the previous sets of DASH puzzles, but I think that was it until some local friends joined us in the garden for a picnic in August. I may have got slightly over-excited and somewhat over-catered.
22. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I was
44. My birthday fell at the end of summer, when restrictions were at about the laxest they've been all year. I had a picnic with 5 whole other humans.
(Technically, 4 other humans had arranged a picnic, and very kindly invited ChrisC and I to join them - none of them actually knew it was my birthday.)
In the evening, ChrisC and I had dinner in a pub beergarden.
I'm very aware that this is way more celebration than lots of people got to have on their chosen festival-days.
23. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
I don't know.
I mean, a lack of pandemic would have been nice. Although, of course, had it not happened, I wouldn't be here typing "2020 was so satisfying, there was absolutely no pandemic at all".
Given the situation, if I knew what would have made the year more satisfying, I would have been trying like hell to organise it.
It would have been satisfying to run the 10K I had planned. I had already covered the distance in training, but had the date of the obviously-cancelled Ealing half marathon pencilled in to try and run my 'race time'. I don't feel it would have made an "immeasurable" difference to the year, though.
24. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?
Hoodies.
My at-the-weekend clothes for decades have been t-shirt/hoodie/jeans-or-combats. I always used to wear something a bit smarter to go into the office.
Dressing smartly to go and sit at the other end of my flat simply didn't seem worth the bother, though, especially since the angle of my laptop camera means you can only really see me from shoulders upwards.
25. What kept you sane?
I don't think I have been at particular risk of insanity. Or no more than usual.
As I wrote earlier in the year, I've felt very lucky. I have a job I can do at home, that still pays me. I have a home I feel safe in. I am not worried about where the money for my next rent cheque/food bill is coming from. I don't have kids to homeschool, or specific caring responsibilities, or health requirements which have been sidelined due to Covid. I have a lot of greenspace in my local area that I can walk in. I live with my partner, and we get on well.
Sure, 2020 wasn't the year I would have chosen. But on a purely personal level, it's been more-or-less fine.
26. Who was the best new person you met?
I don't think I've met any new persons.
ChrisC always used to go to Puzzled Pint with a group of his colleagues (I love puzzles, but it is a well-documented fact that I am not allowed out on Tuesdays). When lockdown started, we did our own virtual Puzzled Pint over Skype.
We've kept this up all year, working slowly through the Puzzled Pint archive at weekends. I would have counted all these people as friends before this, but feel I've got to know them much better.
28. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020.
Stolen from ao_lai: Lack of time is not the reason that things don't get done.
29. What were your favourite moments of the year?
The occasional moments on Puzzle-Skype, Mabel-Zoom, SundayQuiz-Zoom or other generic video social engagement when it felt almost like a normal, group conversation.
30. What are your plans for 2021?
Well, obviously, to try and make better use of my time.
Beyond that, making plans seems like outrageous hubris.
My family intends to have a Christmas at some point (notionally Easter, though as my mum put it yesterday "it feels like even that is receding"). ChrisC bought End Of The Road tickets (it's a small music festival in September), although we agreed at the time it was more about having something in the calendar to look forward to than actually expecting it would happen. [Originally posted at https://venta.dreamwidth.org/541759.html]