What a year it’s been!  No Christmas celebrations, New Years Eve parties, birthday parties…let alone seeing friends and family and these events are just off the top of my head.  Not much has changed at all from last year which is really disheartening to realise.  In terms of the pandemic and how we have been existing?  I cannot wait for some sense of long term normalcy to return. 

 My only interest in politics is simply knowing that it is generally attracts the self serving but my God how I wish there were someone capable of actually executing a plan to permanently end this nightmare! 

 It’s been almost a year since we were first introduced to the in-out-in-out hokey cokey type response to the pandemic. The relentless ‘well we don’t really have a plan let’s just play it by deaths, and by the way you’re all responsible for the deaths of the vulnerable next slide please’ method of (not) dealing with this disease. 

Not a single day goes by without news on the economic, health and mental wellbeing impacts of the Covid pandemic.  I’m tired of worrying about it on one hand, and on the other, tired of pretending it doesn’t exist and everything is a bed of roses. SM to a tee.

The impact of this pandemic has fallen most heavily on people living in deprived neighbourhoods, in precarious or low-income employment, homeless, in abusive familial or personal relationships.  On a global scale the manufacturers and suppliers of the goods we insist on have been ravaged and poverty in developing countries could reach levels not seen for decades.  

It’s no wonder almost everyone, including superiors I honestly rely on, are visibly in some form of distress.  Many, if not most, of my friends have seen the industries they work in virtually disappear.  Some have been lucky enough to be on furlough but most are not so fortunate.  Regarding the self employed i.e. companions?  Ha! 

I do not know anyone who is not filled with anxiety and depression and it is unnatural not to feel this way, unless you are fortunate enough to have the social and economic resources and networks that buffer you from lockdown rules.  Even with this luxury, isolation from the life we had is abnormal and unprecedented.