I think it is about time that we conversed about the elephant in the room, namely the small matter of the worldwide pandemic that ripped our normal lives apart. Early breaking news stories in January and February 2020 began to indicate that something extraordinary was about to happen resulting in the first lockdown in March which for us in the North of England never really lifted for nigh on eighteen months.
There was a certain surreal novelty to the first few months as we pounded the deserted streets on our daily exercise, inadvertently serving to appraise us of our still new local area and the weather was thankfully very kind. We organised home offices with trips to the horror establishment of IKEA to purchase desks and got used to queueing everywhere and discovering new words like furlough and lateral flow tests!
Once the initial spell wore out, the isolation kicked in and both Gill and I had unpleasant bouts of Covid and I personally found the period astonishingly tough and it wasn’t even as if I was living on my own, so I can only imagine the challenges faced by millions of other people, and I am sure we will all have our personal tales and experiences. I know people who took it all in their stride and I am glad they could cope admirably with the enforced change, but I was not in that number.
I think the absolute nadir was reached at Christmas 2020 when the ability to gather with family and friends was severely curtailed. On a very cold 29th December we arranged to meet our good friends Jo and Paul at a local park, resulted in us finding a muddy picnic bench to sit on.
On the bench was left abandoned a plastic sword which we christened the sword of Gryffindor, which at the very point became the overriding pandemic symbol for us! We imbibed whiskey and brandy laced coffee until it went dark and then we separately walked home with tears in our eyes because we had nowhere else to go and like 99% of the population, we were compliant with the Government rules!
Music also dropped off my radar for a fair while and I didn’t invest in the podcasts or live streaming gigs as I stubbornly wouldn’t settle for anything less than the real live experience. Now people who know me would say I am generally by nature a pragmatic, glass half full kind of chap, so apologies for the maudlin tone of this article, but it has tended to pour out of me as I was typing away, however I think it is high time l lifted the mood now.
So, three very instrumental elements contributed to the upturn in fortunes. The first was the very existence of this blog and the therapeutic weekly routine it instilled. Alongside this, was my burgeoning interest and following on Twitter via interaction and invaluable support from some terrific and knowledgeable like-minded folk who shared my musical passion, who I have affectionally coined as ‘muso geeks’!
The second was the introduction of the vaccines which led to the very exciting third development, the return of live music. So, from the last rather strange pre-pandemic gig of Nada Surf on 12/03/20, it was 477 days or 11,448 hours to 03/07/21 (but who’s counting!) before I witnessed another gig, which is not unsurprisingly my longest dry spell ever!
