December 19, 2021

Felt very chipper this morning, which I'm putting down to:

1. Getting enough sleep.

2. Yesterday's unexpected apology development.

3. Briefly seeing my friend Sam for a present-swap.

4. Deciding for real that I won't be going back to university in January - the choice now is whether to suspend or withdraw. 

5. Feeling miles better now the booster side effects have worn off (although it still feels like there's a hard-boiled egg in my armpit).

6. No more work until 10 January.

That's a fairly formidable list of chipper.

I even strolled around the lake the wrong way, which I haven't done since 2019, and it felt glorious to have this dizzying level of freedom again:

 

 

(When it was made a one-way circuit for covid reasons in April 2020, I remember approving of the council's decision to make it clockwise because that was definitely the right way to stroll round the lake. Ha. What a damn fool that girl was.)

 

Entertained myself in the park by taking pictures of pigeons, as you do:

 

And all the while I was wondering what exciting development the rolling news cycle would spew forth in the couple of hours I was out of the house. I remember the old days when you used to get your news through the letterbox at breakfast time, and then maybe a telly update in the evening if you could be bothered to switch on for it. Life was definitely better when there was less news.

Turns out I actually had to wait a few hours for the next Tory scandal. But there it was, inevitable. This time we got a leaked photo of the garden of 10 Downing Street on 15 May, 2020:

A "work meeting." Of course it is. When this photo was taken I was on my own in a cramped dingy bedsit, taking photos of my flowering cactus for entertainment and cutting up magazines to make a postcard for my friend Charlie because I was bored, lonely and afraid:

 

I'd left my flat 16 days out of 54, for hurried walks or dashes to the supermarket, since the start of lockdown (I know this because I marked those days on the calendar). I didn't have an internet connection or TV. My boss phoned me once a week to check I was ok and that was the only person I regularly spoke to. Going out felt dangerous and terrifying. Police and the coastguard patrolled the Rec telling people who sat on the grass or used the gym equipment to move on. Again, I took photos of it for something to do:

The patrols stopped after the Dominic Cummings weekend (May 23-24). After that, the Rec used to get so packed I didn't want to go out. That was when things got really bad for me. I don't remember anything much from the summer months but I know I cried a lot.

So forgive me if I loathe these lying, self-serving bastards who used a pandemic to line their pockets and carried on doing exactly what they wanted while the rest of us suffered. They should all be in jail.

Today's Photo: Tree Triptych