March into June 2020
This piece gathers a small group of posts from the first months of lockdown. Home education had already begun. Then the world changed, and the fresh start we thought we were building became something else entirely.
At risk
At the start of March, I was trying to embrace the change of season.
The plan was simple enough. Get outside. Move more. Do some gardening. Dig borders. Use the better weather as a reason to get my arse moving again.
Then Covid arrived properly.
At first, it still felt like something happening out there. A serious thing, obviously, but still slightly abstract. Then the government published its list of people considered more vulnerable to the virus's worst effects.
Because of my weight, I was on that list.
That landed harder than expected.
I had written about my weight for years. I had made plans. Started again. Failed. Started again. Failed again. But this was different. It was not about fitting into old clothes or feeling better on a walk.
It was about risk.
Suddenly, the thing I had been avoiding had a sharper edge.
Social distancing for at least twelve weeks sounded simple on paper. Stay home. Avoid people. Be careful.
But simple is not the same as easy.
Food shopping
A few days into lockdown, I went food shopping.
The streets were deserted as I made my way to the supermarket. I arrived early and joined the queue outside, waiting for my turn to enter.
The shopping itself took about twenty minutes.
The queue and checkout took an hour.
Everyone was trying to follow the distancing rules, but the whole thing felt awkward and tense. People were polite enough, but there was a strange pressure in the air. You could feel everyone trying to act normally inside a situation that was anything but normal.
As soon as I got home, I stripped off, got in the shower, and washed my clothes.
That became the mood of those early weeks.
Every errand felt loaded.
Every surface looked suspect.
Every trip outside came with a calculation.
Could this wait?
Did we really need it?
How long before I had to go out again?
A few days later, I got up at seven and went to the village bakery. I bought a large bloomer and a farmhouse loaf. We had toast for breakfast.
That tiny errand felt almost absurd in its ordinariness.
A village bakery.
Fresh bread.
Toast.
A small piece of normal life, held carefully in both hands.
Nine weeks in
By early May, we were nine weeks into lockdown.
The news was full of stories about overweight people being at higher risk of complications from Covid. That made the whole thing feel personal again.
I was obese.
There was no point dressing it up.
I had struggled with my weight for most of my adult life, and I had written at length about my attempts to lose weight and improve my health. This time, though, something shifted.
There was now a real chance that if I caught Covid, things could go badly wrong.
So the question became simple.
Do I keep drifting and hope the pandemic passes me by?
Or do I use the next few months to make myself harder to kill?
Rhona had already started reducing the amount of carbohydrate she was eating. Nothing extreme. Just a sensible adjustment. A small course correction.
It was time for me to do the same.
Less bread.
Less sugar.
Fewer high-carb foods.
Eating between midday and seven.
Walking every day, either through the orchards or into the woods.
Not a grand reinvention.
Just a series of small changes that might improve my chances.
That felt like enough.
The lockdown conundrum
There was a strange truth hiding inside lockdown.
Part of me liked it.
That sounds odd, but there it is.
The expected social norms had changed overnight. I did not have to go where people expected me to go. I did not have to pretend to be more available than I felt. I could stay behind closed doors and answer only to my immediate family.
I caught up with books and films.
I worked on personal projects.
The world outside grew quieter.
For someone who has often felt overwhelmed by expectation, there was a kind of relief in that.
But lockdown was not simple.
Rhona still had to work. Her salary was our only income, and she did not have the luxury of hiding away indefinitely. I watched her become anxious at the thought of working in less-than-ideal conditions. By the time I dropped her off one morning, mild panic had set in.
That was the other side of it.
Some people could talk about staying home as if it were a lifestyle choice. For many families, it was not. Bills still needed paying. Food still needs to be bought. Work still had to happen.
So we began thinking again about what we could do from home.
Rhona makes excellent novelty cakes.
I can market things reasonably well.
Maybe that was something.
Maybe the small business we had put on the shelf could be brought back.
Stay tuned, as they say.
Course correction
By late May, I woke one morning with the familiar feeling of having lost direction.
The world had changed. The government seemed to have lost control of its pandemic response. People were talking about getting back to normal, as if normal had not already been broken.
But the wider chaos was not the whole problem.
I had allowed myself to become distracted again.
Too many tabs open.
Too many ideas.
Too many feeds.
Too much noise.
Lockdown made it easy to fall into the swirling vortex of social media. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were always there, offering the illusion of connection while feeding anxiety, irritation and distraction.
So I made another decision.
From the 1st of June, I would take a sabbatical from social media.
The only exception would be for business purposes, and even then, I would use Rhonaβs accounts where needed.
My writing would move here, to this blog (at the time it was at hkt.life).
The Substack newsletter would pause, too.
This place would become the permanent record again. A journal. A way for Karta to look back one day and see something of who I was, what I thought, and how we lived through these odd years.
That mattered more than keeping up with feeds.
Digital freedom
On 1 June, the smartphone went into the drawer.
For the whole month.
That was the plan, at least.
It was not only about social media. It was about endless news, binge-watching, casual browsing, and the constant low-level tug of the device in my pocket.
I wanted to see what happened when I removed the easiest route to distraction.
There would be problems.
Of course there would.
But I wanted to work through them rather than keep using convenience as an excuse.
At the same time, I made small adjustments to food and movement. I planned meditation once or twice a day. I wanted fewer inputs and more space.
I suspected no one would notice that I had stopped posting.
That was fine.
This blog was what mattered. The permanent record. The place where lifeβs twists and turns could sit without needing approval, engagement, or applause.
I still had a phone. It made calls and sent text messages.
That was enough.
What lockdown exposed
Lockdown did not create the problems.
It exposed them.
The weight was already there.
The money pressure was already there.
The digital noise was already there.
The need for quieter work was already there.
The desire to be more present for Rhona and Karta was already there.
Covid simply removed the usual hiding places.
The early months of lockdown were frightening, strange, and sometimes oddly peaceful. There were queues outside supermarkets, fresh bread from the bakery, walks through orchards, anxious car journeys, cake ideas, health fears, and another attempt to reclaim attention from the internet.
It was not a clean reset.
Life rarely offers those.
But it did force a question I could not keep avoiding.
What actually matters when the world stops moving?
The answer was not complicated.
Home.
Family.
Health.
Work that can survive contact with reality.
A quieter mind.
A smaller digital life.
A body less likely to betray me.
That was the adjustment.
Not lockdown as an escape.
Lockdown as a mirror.
Until next time,
adieu.