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dolorosa_12Well, that was a year. It seems to be a pattern with me that I experience each year as a time of great personal and professional success, set beside near-apocalyptic levels of malice, incompetence, incompetent malice, and destruction across the wider world. 2020 was, sadly, no different.
Let's do the year's-end meme.
1. What did you do in 2020 that you'd never done before?
Buy a house! Teach remotely via videoconferencing software (oh, so much remote teaching!). Live through a global pandemic. Vote out a tyrant. (I've voted out one vile political leader in my time, but much as I despised him, I cannot describe him as tyrannical.)
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolutions for 2020 were, as they have been for several years now, to carve out spaces of safety, kindness, empathy and beauty where I can, to draw my own personal lines in the sand, and hold to them, to support and live and love with integrity, and to remember, always, that love, love is a verb, love is a doing word.
I actually think this year I did this really well.
I had some concrete professional goals relating to teaching, getting published, presenting at conferences, and in general receiving professional recognition, and these were all achieved. I also had a goal to log every book read, movie and TV show watched, concert or exhibition attended, and to write something, even if it was just a sentence, about each of these things online, either on Dreamwidth, on my Wordpress blog, or as a throwaway remark on Twitter. I also managed this.
My resolutions for 2021 are probably a mixture of the above. I want to stick to my 'fire can be a candle flame' resolution that I've made each new year since 2016, and will continue to do my best, no matter what my various countries throw at me. I have resolved every year to make light, and warmth, and kindness in the smallness of my own life, and accept that this is enough. Again, I have a few concrete professional and personal goals, but I prefer to keep those private until the close of the next year.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
There are a lot of new babies in my various social circles!
4. Did anyone close to you die?
This was a year of death, but it passed me and mine by. I had a moment in the early months of the pandemic, during the first lockdown, of such intense and guilty relief that all my grandparents were already dead, because the thought of them having to live through this was terrifying.
5. What countries did you visit?
Ahahahahahaha. No.
6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?
To be honest, I think what I said last year kind of sums things up for this year as well:
One of the most confronting things about recent years is how much hope and good fortune I have for myself and the small things I can control, and how much despair I have for the wider world. My own immediate material circumstances have been improving sharply since 2015, and it's been horrifying to watch the reverse happen outside my own life.
What I want for 2021 is what I wanted for 2020: hope for the future.
I said last year that this year represented the point at which I utterly gave up on expecting any kind of hope to materialise. I no longer think it's realistic or possible. 2020 was the year where I reconciled myself to this, to the point where I have a kind of acceptance about it. Past me would have felt that this was morally lazy. Current me is more forgiving.
7. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
21st December, when we completed the purchase of our house. As with UK visas and citizenship applications, however, my feeling on finally having the keys in my hands was not one of happiness, but more of weary, exhausted relief, because the amount of incompetent bureaucracy that we'd had to wade through to get to that point had worn me down.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Buying the hosue is the obvious one.
I'm also quite proud of my professional achievements this year. Our library was unique across all the Cambridge libraries in continuing to offer synchronous research skills training (online) throughout the entire year, and this meant that our training numbers doubled, our teaching skills improved, and we were lauded by the powers-that-be. My colleague and I were repeatedly invited to speak at workshops and conferences to share our experiences, and we wrote on the subject for our professional body as well.
I also coauthored six systematic reviews, including one whose data was presented to the UK government and led to the NHS changing its COVID diagnostic criteria. Librarians change lives!
I also believe that the quiet work of everyday labour — cooking, cleaning, gardening, managing relationships both personal and professional, supporting people in their learning and research — is a kind of achievement in itself, and requires effort that is not often noticed or valued, so I think that I, and all who do this kind of work do an unequivocal good. During the pandemic, this was even more important, and did a huge amount to lift my spirits. This was the year when I rediscovered the beauty and joys of my small, everyday life, and felt the happiest and most in control of my circumstances.
9. What was your biggest failure?
To be honest, I genuinely can't think of anything. I was even good at managing my mental health this year.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Weirdly, no. I am fortunate and privileged not to have caught the virus (as yet). Inevitably, however, I am the only person in the world who suffered repeated colds in spite of working from home, only seeing my husband, and going out masked everywhere, surrounded by other people in masks. If there is a cold going around, I will catch it, even if I'm living in a hermetically sealed room!
11. What was the best thing you bought?
The house, unsurprisingly!
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Health workers. Epidemiologists. Frontline workers in retail, transport, logistics, warehouses, and hospitality, for doing the work they always do, unappreciated, underpaid, and at risk. Teachers, everywhere. My employers, for being sensible in the face of the chaos. My students, for being adaptable and forgiving. People who heal, nurture, and nourish others.
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Oh, where to start? There is the obvious answer of so many political leaders, whose utter inability to do the job to which they had been elected was made starkly clear. Some were incompetent, some were malicious, and many were maliciously incompetent.
I have to say that I am also appalled and depressed by the behaviour of ordinary individuals as well. This year was a test, with a single, simple question: do you consider yourself part of a community, and will you take (simple, straightforward, easy) actions to keep that community safe and healthy? Faced with that question, many people failed.
14. Where did most of your money go?
The new house.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Buying the house. Gardening. Walking. Swimming outdoors. Books, and books, and books.
16. What song will always remind you of 2020?
'Softly, the Sinister Hold' by Promenade Cinema:
All the dreamers left behind/ they will pay for your decision indeed.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier, if that's possible to believe.
ii. thinner or fatter? Fatter. Lockdown life is not conducive to the kind of exercise that I like to do, and I'm someone who tends to eat my feelings.
iii. richer or poorer? About the same.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
I wish I'd been able to travel this year, and been able to see my family.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
I genuinely can't think of anything, apart from my erstwhile tendency to lie awake worrying about things. This didn't happen all that much though.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
For obvious reasons it was a quiet Christmas at home in Cambridge with Matthias. On Christmas Eve we unwrapped presents over Zoom with Matthias's family in Germany, and then ate a nice meal of fish, baked apples, and brandy butter. On Christmas Day Matthias and I walked out to Grantchester in the stillness of the morning, I chatted to my family in Australia, and then Matthias and I ate a lot of food. We had leftovers for days!
22. Did you fall in love in 2020?
Spending almost every minute of 2020 in my house, alone with Matthias made me realise how right I was to love him.
23. Did your heart break in 2020?
The Australian bushfires broke it, as did all those videos of people singing and clapping and dancing in defiance from their balconies, all over the world. I wish we could get back to that kind of lockdown, nine months on, but I understand why we haven't. Our hearts are too hurt and weary.
24. What was your favourite TV program?
In a year in which I watched Black Sails for the first time, there can be no other answer. Warrior gave it a run for its money, though, and filled the Peaky Blinders-shaped void in my heart.
25. Where were you when 2020 began?
In Ely.
26. Who were you with?
With Matthias,notasapleasure and her husband.
27. Where will you be when 2020 ends?
Here in Cambridge.
28. Who will you be with when 2020 ends?
Matthias.
29. What was the best book you read?
I don't really have a single stand out book, but the entire Benjamin January mystery series really got me through this year. I'm so glad they were such a foundational part of my reading life in 2020, and I'm only sorry to know that there are just a handful of books remaining to read in the series!
I also did my annual Twitter thread of favourite books read in the year, so you can have a look at that if you want a longer list of favourites.
30. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Promenade Cinama!
31. What did you want and get?
To buy a house. A Biden presidency.
32. What did you want and not get?
Oof. To see my mother. To see my sisters. To swim in the oceans of Sydney. To travel further than Ely. Someone to wave a magic wand and make me an EU citizen again.
33. What was your favourite film of this year?
For sheer enjoyment, The Old Guard. In terms of being a well-made, clever film, Parasite. I also really enjoyed Armando Ianucci's adaptation of David Copperfield.
34. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Stayed at home and ate nice food, and drank wine and cocktails. I was thirty-six.
35. How many different states/cities did you travel to in 2020?
Ahahahahaha. No. I didn't leave Cambridgeshire this year.
36. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?
Like last year, all the stars. All the nebulae. Or, as I prefer to describe it, #intergalacticnebulousbisexual. I also started to fulfill my ambtion of turning into both the physical embodiment of the EU flag, and a garden. (These photos are from 2019 but they are representative.)
Thanks to a year working from home, I also discovered the joys of yoga pants, track pants, and going for days at a time without wearing a bra. Bliss.
37. What kept you sane?
Cooking. Reading. Walking every day in the beautiful fenlands outside my door. Growing things. Working slowly and methodically. Crossing things off lists.
And, like last year: 'Rain is not always a storm. The wind does not always howl. Sometimes death is quiet or love is peaceful.' 'Fire can be a candle flame.'
38. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I think I have to go back to my former answer: I am choosing to designate Pagan Kidrouk as a public figure.
39. What political issue stirred you the most?
The pandemic, and the various ways it was handled by different governments around the world. I used US politics as a faraway distraction from politics closer to home, so the election there also held a lot of my attention.
40. How many concerts did you see in 2020?
Again, hahahahaha. I did watch the online Eurovision celebration thingy, so I guess that counts.
41. Did you have a favourite concert in 2020?
I don't really think I can answer this.
42. Who was the best new person you met?
I am so grateful this year that I am in fandom, because I met so many fantastic new people through Dreamwidth.
43. Did you do anything you are ashamed of this year?
No.
44. What was your most embarrassing moment of 2020?
I'm not easily embarrassed.
45. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020.
Control over your own time, space, and daily activities is the most important thing of all in maintaining good mental health.
46. What are your plans for 2021?
Like last year, to grow among the growing things. To nest and grow in our new house.
47. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Looking back, 2020, mistakes — I've got many
But the truth is that I'd probably do it again
Who would have thought a twelve-year-old Australian hip-hop song about Kevin Rudd would prove so prophetic?
My heart will not give up, my heart will not give out, my heart will not give in.
Let's do the year's-end meme.
1. What did you do in 2020 that you'd never done before?
Buy a house! Teach remotely via videoconferencing software (oh, so much remote teaching!). Live through a global pandemic. Vote out a tyrant. (I've voted out one vile political leader in my time, but much as I despised him, I cannot describe him as tyrannical.)
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolutions for 2020 were, as they have been for several years now, to carve out spaces of safety, kindness, empathy and beauty where I can, to draw my own personal lines in the sand, and hold to them, to support and live and love with integrity, and to remember, always, that love, love is a verb, love is a doing word.
I actually think this year I did this really well.
I had some concrete professional goals relating to teaching, getting published, presenting at conferences, and in general receiving professional recognition, and these were all achieved. I also had a goal to log every book read, movie and TV show watched, concert or exhibition attended, and to write something, even if it was just a sentence, about each of these things online, either on Dreamwidth, on my Wordpress blog, or as a throwaway remark on Twitter. I also managed this.
My resolutions for 2021 are probably a mixture of the above. I want to stick to my 'fire can be a candle flame' resolution that I've made each new year since 2016, and will continue to do my best, no matter what my various countries throw at me. I have resolved every year to make light, and warmth, and kindness in the smallness of my own life, and accept that this is enough. Again, I have a few concrete professional and personal goals, but I prefer to keep those private until the close of the next year.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
There are a lot of new babies in my various social circles!
4. Did anyone close to you die?
This was a year of death, but it passed me and mine by. I had a moment in the early months of the pandemic, during the first lockdown, of such intense and guilty relief that all my grandparents were already dead, because the thought of them having to live through this was terrifying.
5. What countries did you visit?
Ahahahahahaha. No.
6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?
To be honest, I think what I said last year kind of sums things up for this year as well:
One of the most confronting things about recent years is how much hope and good fortune I have for myself and the small things I can control, and how much despair I have for the wider world. My own immediate material circumstances have been improving sharply since 2015, and it's been horrifying to watch the reverse happen outside my own life.
What I want for 2021 is what I wanted for 2020: hope for the future.
I said last year that this year represented the point at which I utterly gave up on expecting any kind of hope to materialise. I no longer think it's realistic or possible. 2020 was the year where I reconciled myself to this, to the point where I have a kind of acceptance about it. Past me would have felt that this was morally lazy. Current me is more forgiving.
7. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
21st December, when we completed the purchase of our house. As with UK visas and citizenship applications, however, my feeling on finally having the keys in my hands was not one of happiness, but more of weary, exhausted relief, because the amount of incompetent bureaucracy that we'd had to wade through to get to that point had worn me down.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Buying the hosue is the obvious one.
I'm also quite proud of my professional achievements this year. Our library was unique across all the Cambridge libraries in continuing to offer synchronous research skills training (online) throughout the entire year, and this meant that our training numbers doubled, our teaching skills improved, and we were lauded by the powers-that-be. My colleague and I were repeatedly invited to speak at workshops and conferences to share our experiences, and we wrote on the subject for our professional body as well.
I also coauthored six systematic reviews, including one whose data was presented to the UK government and led to the NHS changing its COVID diagnostic criteria. Librarians change lives!
I also believe that the quiet work of everyday labour — cooking, cleaning, gardening, managing relationships both personal and professional, supporting people in their learning and research — is a kind of achievement in itself, and requires effort that is not often noticed or valued, so I think that I, and all who do this kind of work do an unequivocal good. During the pandemic, this was even more important, and did a huge amount to lift my spirits. This was the year when I rediscovered the beauty and joys of my small, everyday life, and felt the happiest and most in control of my circumstances.
9. What was your biggest failure?
To be honest, I genuinely can't think of anything. I was even good at managing my mental health this year.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Weirdly, no. I am fortunate and privileged not to have caught the virus (as yet). Inevitably, however, I am the only person in the world who suffered repeated colds in spite of working from home, only seeing my husband, and going out masked everywhere, surrounded by other people in masks. If there is a cold going around, I will catch it, even if I'm living in a hermetically sealed room!
11. What was the best thing you bought?
The house, unsurprisingly!
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Health workers. Epidemiologists. Frontline workers in retail, transport, logistics, warehouses, and hospitality, for doing the work they always do, unappreciated, underpaid, and at risk. Teachers, everywhere. My employers, for being sensible in the face of the chaos. My students, for being adaptable and forgiving. People who heal, nurture, and nourish others.
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Oh, where to start? There is the obvious answer of so many political leaders, whose utter inability to do the job to which they had been elected was made starkly clear. Some were incompetent, some were malicious, and many were maliciously incompetent.
I have to say that I am also appalled and depressed by the behaviour of ordinary individuals as well. This year was a test, with a single, simple question: do you consider yourself part of a community, and will you take (simple, straightforward, easy) actions to keep that community safe and healthy? Faced with that question, many people failed.
14. Where did most of your money go?
The new house.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Buying the house. Gardening. Walking. Swimming outdoors. Books, and books, and books.
16. What song will always remind you of 2020?
'Softly, the Sinister Hold' by Promenade Cinema:
All the dreamers left behind/ they will pay for your decision indeed.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier, if that's possible to believe.
ii. thinner or fatter? Fatter. Lockdown life is not conducive to the kind of exercise that I like to do, and I'm someone who tends to eat my feelings.
iii. richer or poorer? About the same.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
I wish I'd been able to travel this year, and been able to see my family.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
I genuinely can't think of anything, apart from my erstwhile tendency to lie awake worrying about things. This didn't happen all that much though.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
For obvious reasons it was a quiet Christmas at home in Cambridge with Matthias. On Christmas Eve we unwrapped presents over Zoom with Matthias's family in Germany, and then ate a nice meal of fish, baked apples, and brandy butter. On Christmas Day Matthias and I walked out to Grantchester in the stillness of the morning, I chatted to my family in Australia, and then Matthias and I ate a lot of food. We had leftovers for days!
22. Did you fall in love in 2020?
Spending almost every minute of 2020 in my house, alone with Matthias made me realise how right I was to love him.
23. Did your heart break in 2020?
The Australian bushfires broke it, as did all those videos of people singing and clapping and dancing in defiance from their balconies, all over the world. I wish we could get back to that kind of lockdown, nine months on, but I understand why we haven't. Our hearts are too hurt and weary.
24. What was your favourite TV program?
In a year in which I watched Black Sails for the first time, there can be no other answer. Warrior gave it a run for its money, though, and filled the Peaky Blinders-shaped void in my heart.
25. Where were you when 2020 began?
In Ely.
26. Who were you with?
With Matthias,
notasapleasure and her husband.27. Where will you be when 2020 ends?
Here in Cambridge.
28. Who will you be with when 2020 ends?
Matthias.
29. What was the best book you read?
I don't really have a single stand out book, but the entire Benjamin January mystery series really got me through this year. I'm so glad they were such a foundational part of my reading life in 2020, and I'm only sorry to know that there are just a handful of books remaining to read in the series!
I also did my annual Twitter thread of favourite books read in the year, so you can have a look at that if you want a longer list of favourites.
30. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Promenade Cinama!
31. What did you want and get?
To buy a house. A Biden presidency.
32. What did you want and not get?
Oof. To see my mother. To see my sisters. To swim in the oceans of Sydney. To travel further than Ely. Someone to wave a magic wand and make me an EU citizen again.
33. What was your favourite film of this year?
For sheer enjoyment, The Old Guard. In terms of being a well-made, clever film, Parasite. I also really enjoyed Armando Ianucci's adaptation of David Copperfield.
34. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
Stayed at home and ate nice food, and drank wine and cocktails. I was thirty-six.
35. How many different states/cities did you travel to in 2020?
Ahahahahaha. No. I didn't leave Cambridgeshire this year.
36. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?
Like last year, all the stars. All the nebulae. Or, as I prefer to describe it, #intergalacticnebulousbisexual. I also started to fulfill my ambtion of turning into both the physical embodiment of the EU flag, and a garden. (These photos are from 2019 but they are representative.)
Thanks to a year working from home, I also discovered the joys of yoga pants, track pants, and going for days at a time without wearing a bra. Bliss.
37. What kept you sane?
Cooking. Reading. Walking every day in the beautiful fenlands outside my door. Growing things. Working slowly and methodically. Crossing things off lists.
And, like last year: 'Rain is not always a storm. The wind does not always howl. Sometimes death is quiet or love is peaceful.' 'Fire can be a candle flame.'
38. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I think I have to go back to my former answer: I am choosing to designate Pagan Kidrouk as a public figure.
39. What political issue stirred you the most?
The pandemic, and the various ways it was handled by different governments around the world. I used US politics as a faraway distraction from politics closer to home, so the election there also held a lot of my attention.
40. How many concerts did you see in 2020?
Again, hahahahaha. I did watch the online Eurovision celebration thingy, so I guess that counts.
41. Did you have a favourite concert in 2020?
I don't really think I can answer this.
42. Who was the best new person you met?
I am so grateful this year that I am in fandom, because I met so many fantastic new people through Dreamwidth.
43. Did you do anything you are ashamed of this year?
No.
44. What was your most embarrassing moment of 2020?
I'm not easily embarrassed.
45. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020.
Control over your own time, space, and daily activities is the most important thing of all in maintaining good mental health.
46. What are your plans for 2021?
Like last year, to grow among the growing things. To nest and grow in our new house.
47. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Looking back, 2020, mistakes — I've got many
But the truth is that I'd probably do it again
Who would have thought a twelve-year-old Australian hip-hop song about Kevin Rudd would prove so prophetic?
My heart will not give up, my heart will not give out, my heart will not give in.