2020’s obituary

It would feel wrong to miss out a year in my series of annual end-of-year letters – even if, for the most part, we can all collectively agree we’d much rather pretend 2020 never happened. Unfortunately, it did, and it’s left a mark on us all. And, try as I might, it’s difficult to look at this mess of a year and make any kind of sense of it; to seek out some semblance of meaning, or a lesson.

That, I suppose, isn’t strictly true, though. There are things to take away from it, but I want to be stubborn, to dig my heels in and refuse to allow the year 2020 to have any kind of ownership over me. That said, in all that it has stolen from me, it has also given me a lot.

Breaking up

I always come back to this space to process and mark the downfalls of life. The last six months have seen continuous knock back after knock back. Not even really just ‘knock backs’, but entire walls of everything I’d built crumbling down, with one bad piece of news after another being delivered relentlessly to me.

As a whole, I can appreciate the majority of 2020 hasn’t exactly been peachy for anyone. I wish I could take solace in the fact the entire globe is living the same reality of this pandemic. In my immediate circles, though, I seem to have taken the brunt of the bad luck.

I lost my job and subsequently moved out of my flat in London. I lost the life I’d built myself having finally achieved it only a year prior. In more recent times, my two year relationship ended. The worst part – though sometimes it feels like a glimmer of good (it changes every day) – is that that love was not entirely lost. To me, that seems like a great shame, to throw something away when we still had love for each other. To not consider where we might be if the pandemic hadn’t happened, that this is all just circumstantial and not a reason to throw so much time away.

‘Pretending’ by Holly Bourne

★★★★★/5 stars

Published by Hodder & Stoughton!

April just wants her happy ending. She wants to meet a man, somehow miraculously get past date number five and forget everything that came before. When yet another date turns sour, though, and her previous trauma looks to well and truly get its claws into her, April hatches a plan to become the woman every man dreams of — easy-going, effortlessly beautiful, certainly not clingy, and, of course, no emotional baggage in sight. April becomes Gretel and Gretel meets Joshua. However, when Joshua begins to challenge everything April thought she knew, and feelings start to fester, it might just be about time to face up to all the things April has been trying to keep under control

2019 – the year everything changed

Usually by now I’ve already written most of what I want to say for my final post of the year. Admittedly, I haven’t blogged an awful lot this year, which is a shame because there’s been plenty to document. But here and there there are pieces documenting 2019, the year everything changed. I also filmed short video clips, which I’ve compiled together into a sort of summary of the year. That can function largely as the highlights reel, because from that you’d think that the back and forth between Bath and London over and over again, the constant reprisals of my boyfriend and the sheer amount of food would make this year a perfect one.