Yet another belated New Year’s post! This is becoming a habit.
I don’t know about you, but 2020 is one year I just want to forget.
It started brightly enough – my new car meant that making my regular shows at Weybridge and Kingston radio stations were feasible once more.
I was working on getting my squash playing back on an even keel after the shock closure of the mighty Kingfisher Leisure Centre – all in all things seemed to be progressing nicely – my life was busy in a good kind of way.
I’m sure you can all guess what happened next. The curse of COVID19 struck in March, and over the space of about three days my life as I knew it had more or less shut down – squash, broadcasting, following football on TV – all ground to a screeching halt!
Run-of-the-mill stuff like going to the pub, catching a movie at the cinema, even seeing friends and my ex-girlfriend were all given the red light – as our glorious leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, put it on one of those many television addresses, it was all about ‘staying at home and staying safe’.
Most of those months I recall through a strange grey filter. One blessing was that I still had a job over all the various forms of lockdown periods – as a key worker I mercifully had something to do during the day from Mondays to Fridays.
As well as working from home, time was spent doing those strange COVID rituals like ‘clapping for carers’, queuing to get into supermarkets, and swabbing down the shopping trolley hand bar with alcohol cleaning gel whilst out for my weekly highlight – the family shop at a well-known grocery store. Life really was that exciting!
My boiler also went to the great water tank in the sky – its total failure turned out to be a very costly episode indeed.
To be fair, it wasn’t all doom and gloom – after the first lockdown period eased, I was able to socialise again, do my radio shows at the Kingston Radio Station, and even got a few games of squash in.
Highlights included a very good family holiday in Wigan where we visited my sister, and the return of Premiership Football was very quickly followed by Arsenal winning the FA Cup for the fourteenth time!
The year 2020 also turned out to be the year of home improvement – as well as getting a new boiler, my front wall was eventually repaired, and at the time of writing, is still standing vertically! Can’t say how long it will stay that way, though …
Rain water from a guttering issue in my yard caused the wooden back door to become wedged shut.
This was the impetus for me to sign up for a brand new back door/door frame from a well-known double glazing company, who also mentioned that the installation date would be delayed due to COVID backlogs.
At least this should buy me a bit of time of time to get the back yard guttering repaired.
Towards the end of 2020, a new strain of COVID19 meant a tier-filled Christmas followed by a pretty much full blown lockdown.
I had the quietest New Year’s Eve ever – I was at the family home and saw in the bells with a couple of whiskies.
There were signs of life in New Malden, though – towards the Kings meadow area there was an impromptu firework display that exploded into life at the stroke of 12 midnight on New Years Day. It was indeed an impressive sight to behold.
Anyway, needless to say let’s hope for a better, vaccinated 2021.
Have a very happy and healthy (not to mention safe) New Year!
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