It’s been three long years … we’ve done our bit for the planet by not going anywhere.
For several months in a row, we didn’t even travel outside the gate.
I look back now and wonder about the crop circle I trampled in the back garden during the worst of the you-know-what.
It feels like the woman I was back then is a complete stranger – so upbeat, so gung-ho clocking up 10,000 steps on a postage-stamp lawn, baking her body weight in meringues and apple tarts; listening to audiobooks and riveted to the daily television Covid press conference.
At the very beginning, when it felt like the clocks struck 13, when once busy streets were strewn with tumbleweed, we retreated into our house and sheltered.
My friend in Donegal said she was “cocooning”.
“That free state phrase is a much nicer one,” I told her.
She baked too and walked her dog through the blue fields every day and time ticked by slowly. Days and weeks ebbed away.
“It will only be a couple of months, by summer it will all be over,” I said with a certain degree of flippancy.
And now I think how foolish that was.
How my mother’s hair grew so long she could have had a Rapunzel plait and how we buried her at a Covid funeral – 25 mourners and no slap-up meal afterwards … she’d not have liked the thought of nobody getting fed.
How the months dragged on; how Chris Whitty felt like an old if distant and uber serious friend by the end of it; how fed up we got washing down the bloody cornflakes box, ordering face masks online and making jokes about Dominic Cummings’ eyesight.
And now, when there is a sense of a return to normal, we are sitting on our haunches, looking back and wondering how this world tilted on its axis and how we all got through.
“Seize the carp” I tell my other half. “We’ve been nowhere in three years, I’m booking us a few adventures.”
At this stage, an adventure feels like a day trip to Bangor and a trip out on one of those swan boats in the Pickie Pool.
Channel your inner Ride a White Swan as Marc Bolan once sang.
But January feels like such a dark dismal month and I can’t help longing for sunshine.
It’s got days like divorce day – the first Monday in January where, they say, many people decide they’ve had enough… Christmas tips them over.
It’s got blue Monday which some claim is the most depressing day of the year. This may have something to do with credit card statements landing through the letterbox.
The big SAD lamp glows beside me as we speak; I’m squatting under it like a hypnotised Meerkat.
The winter yearning for chips with mayonnaise, large cream eclairs and leftover Christmas cake with a whack of butter and a lump of cheddar is extreme... please don’t knock that combination til you’ve tried it.
I’m addicted to my twitter friend who counts out the quare auld stretch in the evenings, the slow return of the light – the fresh green shoots in the garden, the promise of spring like a shy child, hiding just around the corner.
You’ll find me surfing the net at all hours, dreaming up adventures in Spain and Greece and Portugal.
Japan is a dream destination – we’ve watched Tokyo Vice and I feel I’ve picked up a smattering of the lingo … so you never know.
But the flights to Paris are cheap.
Spring comes earlier there. I remember a beautiful spring day, sitting sipping kir at a pavement cafe in the 9th arrondisement as the sun shone and the trees in the Parc Monceau whispered in the warm breeze.
All the better because we shared it with friends who came over for a long weekend.
It was the first day of their adventure – a golden afternoon – a memory warm and sweet as the wine and cassis on our tongues.
For so long, we have been blinkered by disease and closed borders, by harsh news and heartbreaking stories.
“Now is our time; now is our good day,” my sister tells me.
Some people say you should list three things for which you’re grateful every evening.
Don’t knock it, til you’ve tried it.
It is not so hard for treasure lies in small things – that first coffee of the morning; a hug from an old friend and our boy’s deep belly laugh.
