Just living

It’s only the prospect of spring that keeps me going. The longer days, the warmth of the sun, the garden waking up from its bare winter slumber and the possibility that life just might be a bit better by then.

As the New Year approaches, I feel little to be optimistic about. There were over 53,000 new COVID infections in the UK today and there are more COVID hospital inpatients than at any time during the pandemic. In a week or so, this will translate into more deaths. Winter has never seemed so dark.

I speak to friends, via messaging services, and find some who to the best of my knowledge had never before struggled with their mental health struggling with their mental health, as much if not more than I have been. I’ve been finding myself starting to cry for no obvious reason – always a tell tale sign that I’m struggling – and they say, “Yeah – that’s happened to me, too.” And why shouldn’t it? These are such unnatural times, the worst of times. There’s no guidebook on how to survive a pandemic. My soul aim is literally to survive it.

I wish there was someone who could reassure us. A serious politician, perhaps, which rules out the entire government front bench, especially Boris Johnson, the most ill-equipped person to lead the fight against a killer virus you would not wish for. But there’s hardly anyone, except perhaps a centenarian who has walked around his garden to raise millions for NHS charities or two Turkish migrants to Germany who came up with the first COVID vaccine. At least they gave us hope, something to believe in. God knows we need more of that.

In the meantime, I’d rather stay at home. In an ideal world, I’d go to sleep now and wake up on the first day of the meteorological spring. I’m wishing two months of my life away, I know, but is it really life as we knew it? This doesn’t feel like life at all: just living.