Thoughts on the Pandemic and the Theme for 2022 - Renew

And just like that, I felt like blogging again for the first time in two years. When I happily picked ‘green’ for my theme of the year for 2020 because I wanted to give the ‘green light’ to new experiences, I was thinking slightly more attending a life class or visiting a new country, and really less coping with a global pandemic that felt like being in some kind of disaster zombie movie where we all had to hang in there and wait for Jack Bauer to come over the horizon with the vaccine… and when I planned to spend more time outdoors enjoying nature and ‘green spaces’, I had envisaged having picnics with friends in the Peak District, and bonfires on the beach, rather than YET ANOTHER socially distanced walk in the park with friends (heaven forfend if we stopped to sit on a bench and drink a takeaway coffee).

Still, we have made it through so far… my husband and I have been very lucky with our jobs that allow us to work from home, the girls were all able to attend school during the second lockdown being the children of key workers, and the wallpaper in our dining room makes for a very nice Zoom background. Having a house with enough space for the five of us (eight including the doggos… Enrique is now about 142 but is still hanging in there) and a nicely sized garden is a massive luxury that I have never, and never will, take for granted… and although a couple of folk in my family have had the virus, it was thankfully mild, and the rest of us have consistently tested negative.

So while it feels sad that my youngest daughter can barely remember life before Covid, it’s clearly something that we all have to live with, and I’m certainly not going to complain about being able to work from my kitchen while kneading sourdough (my starter Orlandough Bloomer was born in lockdown and is nearly two years old) and tending my plant babies (turns out the secret to green fingers is keeping your seedlings within easy reach of your laptop to adjust them minutely as the sun moves across the back window).

Flowers grown by me, including ammi, scabiosa and sweet peas grown from seed.

Is it worth setting a theme for 2022, given everything we have had to accept about the things we can’t control? I think so… it was always about intention-setting for me, rather than hard and fast resolutions that I inevitably break and then feel guilty about. And really I did bring the ‘green’ theme to life… Covid was certainly a new experience, but so was discovering all the walks around our neighbourhood (including a secret beach in Didsbury), and doing Les Mills workouts at home (am addicted), and making sourdough and growing sweet peas from seed and finishing loads of DIY jobs in the house and garden including an outdoor kitchen and a new seating area. And of course spending more time outside than I have ever done in my life, including many wonderful camping trips to Abersoch on the Llyn Peninsula, the Isle of Wight, Bala Lake in Snowdonia, Devon and the Peak District… with my own family and with groups of friends. Yes, yes, that was because the whole of Wales was sold out (“there are… zero… properties available on your selected dates) but hey, I like camping, and we spent the money saved on holidays on a Lady Shed and a hot tub, so it’s all good.

So, whispering in case the powers that be hear me and snort with laughter at my hubris… my theme for 2022 is ‘renew’. I’m hopefully that this is the year that we will be able to pick up where we left off, while also retaining everything good that we’ve learned over the past 48 months.

I want to resume and re-establish the activities that I’d stopped doing… like writing on this blog (because I just couldn’t face more time in front of my laptop after eight hours of non-stop zoom calls), and going on the holidays that we’ve missed (ugh, I miss feeling the wall of heat when you step off the plane in a hot country), and hosting parties where everyone dances till they drop while the kids sleep on sofas and in other people’s beds.

I want to keep renewing old bits of furniture and wood and turning them into new things for our home. I’ve always been an upcycler, but in lockdown I tried my best to make a virtue out of necessity (ie B&Q being closed) and use all the random pieces of wood that I’ve been storing in the cellar for years instead of buying new supplies. I furnished my new Lady Shed (we did buy that, to be fair) with old cupboards, skirting boards, silver birch tree branches, leftover paint samples and old doors, which I turned into a potting bench and shelving…. and we built a seating area with pieces from old Victorian doors that I had rescued from various skips, and an outdoor table from more bits of skirting board and floorboards. Making do with what you’ve got is good for the planet and good for the soul, and I want to do more of it.

In my workplace, we use a psychological mind management model of ‘drive, threat and renew’. I’ve spent a lot of time in the self-care renew space over the past two years… running, exercising, walking with friends, making bread, spending time in my garden… but really this simply maintained mental equilibrium as best I could in an environment besieged by the constant threat and anxiety of a never-ending global pandemic, and the need for high-energy drive in my job (we had to completely revise the way we deliver our service during the pandemic, and of course I had the wellbeing of my team to look after, both of which took a lot of focused attention). So what I would like to do in the coming year is spend more time doing the things I enjoy that renew and refresh me, while letting go of the things that don’t serve me.

Finally, there is something about the notion of ‘renewal’ in refreshing and refocusing on what I already have. I don’t necessarily want to start doing lots of new things… I want to catch-up on some of the family holidays we have missed over the past two years, but really what I want overall is to keep it simple… by not doing too much, and instead focusing on what I’m already good at and what I’ve already good… whether this is refreshing and improving existing relationships that have been affected by lockdown, tweaking and repainting the parts of the house and garden that are looking a little tired ten years into our renovation, or working on my hobbies and interests (this will be the year that I finally get round to framing and hanging all those pictures in the charity shop frames that have been leaning against the living room wall for an embarrassingly long time now).

Hold onto your hats, people… 2022, we are coming for you, and I am all in for whatever comes next.