Christmas is officially on but it will be like no other. At least the focus this year will be less on gifts and more on family and relationships.
This can only be a good thing as for too long Christmas has been a spiralling, senseless, spending spree on superfluous goods and services - all for the sake of a few days.
If Covid in 2020 has had any benefit, it has allowed us time to re-calibrate our work/life choices.
The prospect of a Christmas alone has forced us into recognising the importance of time spent with family and friends. Family events may be scaled back but are not completely written off. This will make the tougher six week lockdown somewhat more bearable.
Some people through no choice of their own will be alone at Christmas and we should make every effort to reach out to them.
The rest of us may not be able to hug as before but at least we will be together.
The new measures are a necessary evil for the common good. The 8pm curfew is perhaps the most important measure of all.
Without a shred of credibility the executive finally acted in unison. Better late than never.
The TV footage of 17 ambulances loaded with patients outside Antrim Area Hospital said it all. Even the hardliners in the DUP could not disagree.
Incredibly, within days of the press coverage, keyboard warriors took to social media rubbishing the story as a fabrication.
Like many others I don’t know what it takes for some folk to comprehend the true threat posed by this awful virus.
Having stood in two concentration camps I have wondered how some could still deny the Holocaust but they do.
Trump, Brexit and Covid have brought to the attention of the mainstream the dumb and dimmer world of conspiracy theories, fantasy facts and truth denial. All promoted by wackos whose reference points are no wider than Facebook and Dr Google.
Frankly, these gormless, reckless and selfish individuals would be first to queue jump into a GP surgery or Emergency Department if they had as much as a sniffle. The new vaccines against Covid-19 will be a welcome relief for those working in the health service. Unfortunately there is no such immunisation from the stupid who will no doubt find some new Quixotic target in 2021.
If we are in the business of using this downtime time to re-evaluate our personal and work relationships we should also use this opportunity to revise our relationship with the planet. Like many locals in south Down, I was surprised to learn that shredded plastic waste from Northern Ireland was being shipped to the USA.
Two bales of this material literally fell off a ship into the sea and three tonnes of it washed up on beaches in Maine.
The incident prompted SDLP climate change spokesperson Pete Byrne to tweet: “We can’t continue to send ships of waste from our shores. We must improve the capacity to deal with our own waste through additional infrastructure”.
He also said we need to embrace a circular economy by keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible.
He is right. We live in a disposable world. The old make do and mend mentality is gone. We need to reclaim it.
At a time when the most popular man in the world is environmental campaigner David Attenborough, it is remarkable that we don’t have viable or sustainable waste strategy.
2020 has seen an upsurge in parcels being delivered across the country - the packaging waste is humongous. Blue bins are at capacity a week earlier than collection. It is not sustainable.
Covid walks may have given us a better appreciation of our environment but it has also awoken us to the man-made environmental damage caused by fly tipping and dumping.
Could 2021 be the year for improving our lives and our environment?
