Happy New Year's Eve everyone! What a monumental year it's been - it's really quite difficult to put into words the sheer emotionality of the 2020 experience and I think it's definitely the case that we haven't yet fully processed everything that's happened. It's been strange and sad and scary and quite unbelievable, but we're here at the tail-end of a truly historic year, and it's appropriate at this point to reflect a little on how our lives have been so massively overturned compared to this time last year (we really had no idea what was coming down the tracks). Families have been torn apart, our cultural and societal scaffolding has been rent asunder, we have had to go to war with an unseen enemy and there has been a surfeit of human suffering and loss - everyone has been seriously affected in some way by this pandemic, including the most hardened COVID-deniers. We have been subjected to a non-stop onslaught of fear, spilling over into overt terror at times, and have had to endure the most severe curbs on personal freedom ever seen in a democratic state; people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, pretty much all familial and community supports and there has been no real respite all year apart from a few golden weeks during the summer - Christmas was not the free-for-all we had been promised and which was desperately needed. Now, we are back at full lockdown in Ireland, with even the re-opening of schools being delayed to give our country a chance to reduce the high number of infectious cases before our health service is no longer able to cope. Dramatic times, indeed...
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About my blog
Really, it contains a little bit of everything, from a celebration of science and the English language to the joys of travel and the Shipping Forecast. The title ('Meanderings') is a fairly accurate description of its content: I write about different things as the mood takes me, but hopefully there's something in here for everyone... Categories
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March 2021
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And on another note... |
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