January to December 2021
This piece gathers a run of posts from 2021. The year began with lockdown, furlough, doubt and another attempt to find focus. It ended with a new home, a new job, night shifts, and a quieter attempt to make family life work.
Emergency deep
2021 began with more lockdowns and more Covid dodging.
Before Christmas, Rhona had been placed on furlough again. The little driving work I had arranged evaporated. Once more, like most of the country, we were told to remain indoors and only leave for food, medicine, work, or exercise.
So I did what any sensible person would do.
I went online and tried to book supermarket delivery slots.
Most had already gone.
Eventually, I found a few. We had already bought enough food and supplies for Christmas, so this was only about the regular shop. Still, it felt like a warning. Life could shrink very quickly.
I began to think seriously about whether I should leave the house at all. I was in my fifties and overweight. By most accounts, that put me at higher risk if I caught the virus.
Rhona and I talked about how to stay safe under the new lockdown. Even on reduced earnings, we found a way to pay the bills. For years, we had taken a spend-less approach to money. We could not control how much things cost, but we could control what we bought.
That became the rule again.
Buy what we need.
Spend less.
Stay home.
Ride it out.
It was not glamorous.
It was practical.
Format adjustment
The second lockdown affected me differently from the first.
Maybe it was the winter.
Maybe it was the hangover from Christmas.
Maybe I was just tired.
For the first time in a while, I felt lost and out of sorts. A couple of client projects had kept me occupied. They were creative enough to absorb me and push me into that useful flow state where time slows down.
Then they ended.
In the gaps, I filled my time with writing, films, reading, and small creative projects. I kept coming back to the same conclusion.
Writing keeps me sane.
That has always been true, but in 2021 it became clearer again. Writing was not only a pastime. It was how I processed life. It was how I noticed the shape of things.
So I decided to bring the newsletter back to a weekly rhythm.
Cars. Bikes. Films. TV. Music. Travel. Food. Random observations. Whatever held my attention.
That might sound scattered, but it was also honest.
I did not need another grand project.
I needed a place to write.
What’s the point?
By February, the old doubt had returned.
I was having another crisis about what I should do next. Not a dramatic crisis. More of a foggy, familiar one. The kind that asks the same questions in different clothes.
What am I good at?
What do I have the right to write about?
What can I turn into something useful?
Motor racing was the obvious example. I had written about it before and had become reasonably good at it because I immersed myself in it. But I had also felt like an impostor. An interloper. Someone who did not belong among people who seemed more qualified, more connected, and more certain.
That held me back.
It made me hesitant.
It made me second-guess everything.
The truth was simpler.
I needed to narrow my focus.
Too many projects had left me stretched thin. Too many ideas had created noise. I was not short of interests. I was short of direction.
My new normal
Then Rhona made a change.
She decided she could no longer continue in a job with few prospects, so she began moving towards a new career in telecommunications.
That was a significant shift.
Making that kind of career change in your late forties takes courage. It forced her to think carefully about her life and me to consider what the change would mean for all of us.
For the first time in months, I found myself alone at home.
So what did I do with that freedom?
I cleaned the house, listened to music, watched a few YouTube videos, then sat down to write.
That felt about right.
The first few weeks of Rhona’s new path were going to be strange. There would be training, adjustment, travel, and a new rhythm for the family. Karta and I would be together more often. Home education would continue. The house would still need to function.
Everything shifted slightly.
Not enough to break us.
Enough to make us pay attention.
Being apart
When Rhona went away for an orientation course, I realised how much I missed her.
She had only been gone a day, but the house felt wrong without her.
When I go away, I do not feel the separation in quite the same way. That is the daft thing. But being the one left behind felt different.
So it was just Karta and me for the week.
Mainstream schools were approaching the end of term, and Karta was finishing another round of home education. I hoped to make plans, meet friends, get into the woods, and find some fresh air.
Lockdown restrictions were beginning to ease.
The world was opening a crack.
We were not rushing through it, but we could finally see a little more light.
The great job hunt
By April, I knew I needed a day job.
I looked into a few options. At the top of the list was fruit picking at the large berry farm in the next village.
It sounded simple enough.
Local. Physical. Useful. Seasonal.
I liked the thought of doing something real. Something away from screens. Something that ended with tired legs rather than a tired mind.
At the same time, I was still leaning back towards freelance work, public relations, web development, blogs, and helping Rhona with Pumpkin Cakes.
I was also deep into the website for the rebranded football club, where I was still secretary. That alone needed weeks of work.
Then there was Karta.
He remained the most important person on my list.
He and I needed to get out more. We both needed exercise. Fresh air. Time away from screens.
That was the real work.
The Yeti and the transporter
The MotoYeti project kept circling, too.
I wanted to build something around motorcycle racing, but I could not decide what shape it should take. A blog? A newsletter? A rough and ready race-going digest? Something with writing, photography, audio, video and travel notes?
There was an idea in there somewhere.
I just could not quite make it stand up.
Then came another practical idea.
Delivery driving.
Just call me Frank Martin.
I hoped to start freelance delivery work in my postcode area. A few hours a day, job and finish. I had already done motorcycle delivery work, dropping premium motorcycles around the UK, so it was not unfamiliar territory.
Regular income from a few different gigs sounded attractive. It might give me enough flexibility to keep writing and taking photographs.
That was the theory.
Then Rhona and I crunched the numbers.
Fuel. Wear and tear. Time.
Once everything was counted properly, the hourly rate came in below £5.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist to work out what happened next.
The transporter went into the rear-view mirror.
Raison d’être
Around this time, I reached the 700th post on my tiny, insignificant blog.
That felt like something.
For a few days, I pondered life and my place in the world. I read. Watched videos. Meditated. Tried to make sense of old thoughts that kept bubbling up.
The conclusion was simple.
The past had to stay behind me.
There was nothing useful in dragging up old mistakes every day. I could learn from them, but I could not keep reliving them.
So I decided to give my energy to the people who needed me.
Family first.
Be present for Rhona and Karta.
Help where I could.
Keep doing the voluntary work that mattered, but stop letting it consume everything.
Support Rhona’s cake business.
Look after my mental and physical health.
Find a way to satisfy the creative part of myself without letting it turn into another pressure point.
I did not have all the answers.
That was becoming less of a problem.
One day at a time was enough.
Time waits for no man
By June, I could feel the days accelerating.
Life seemed to be slipping past too quickly. I needed a strategy to get more from the day. Exercise and something meaningful had to become priorities.
I thought about the summer solstice.
Monday 21 June 2021. Sunrise. Feet in the sea. A symbolic restart.
The plan was to take Rhona and Karta to a nearby beach just before dawn, stand in the water, and reconnect with the world.
A clean start.
There would be work to do.
Relationships first.
Family and friends.
Fitness and health.
Food.
Technology.
Social media.
Writing by hand.
Stepping away from organisations that had become time vampires.
Then came the more direct version.
Thirty minutes of meditation a day.
One meal a day.
Five miles of walking a day.
No calorie counting.
No complicated rules.
Just a routine that might help me lose weight, improve fitness, and increase my chances of staying alive long enough to enjoy the rest of my life.
I had made bold plans before.
This one felt different.
Of course, they always do at the start.
The Section 21
Then came the housing trouble.
A neighbour said something that made me realise disruption might be heading our way.
A while later, the horizon arrived.
We rent our home. We have always been reasonably happy renting. We owned a home when Karta was a baby, but the financial crash of 2008 put paid to that experiment. Since then, we had rented a succession of houses, most of them good homes in one way or another.
But two of the previous three had been sold out from under us.
The dreaded Section 21.
A document that allows a landlord to ask you to leave even if you have done nothing wrong.
It fucking stings.
Once again, we were being turfed out of our rented home.
Our position was precarious. Poor credit history, sporadic freelance income, and no savings made it almost impossible to walk into a letting agent and choose a normal rental home.
We had to be careful.
The next move needed to be more stable.
The last five years had been hard.
I was not willing to let the next five be the same.
So we began boxing up our belongings again.
Movement
By September, things had moved.
After weeks of trying to find a new home, we found somewhere not too far from our current house. We met the agents and the landlords, and they agreed to take us on as tenants.
This time, the house was a cottage.
A proper cottage.
Large garden. Quiet neighbours. Very quiet, in fact, with a graveyard on two sides.
It felt as if my midnight conversations with the universe had finally paid off.
Thank you, universe.
At the same time, I was close to walking away from the football club. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as the old saying goes.
I also reconnected with one of my oldest friends. We spent time together, visited record shops, and talked about the past, present and future.
With luck, he might even be able to get me a job where he worked.
The job was at night. Twelve-hour shifts. Four on, four off. Plenty of overtime. Decent money.
The downside was simple.
It was around ninety miles from home.
That meant staying with my friend while working, then driving back to my family on days off.
Not ideal.
But money changes the shape of what is possible.
And by then, possibility mattered.
Shifting
I began the new job in September.
The pay was good. The company seemed decent. The downsides were the distance and the night shifts.
Seven in the evening to seven in the morning.
Four on, four off.
The work was hard, and I knew it would take a softy like me a few weeks to adapt.
But adapt I would.
Sometimes life does not offer the perfect option.
It offers the workable one.
Country life
By November, I had moved home and started the new job.
I worked away from home on a four-on, four-off rotation, doing twelve-hour night shifts. I stayed with my friend, who worked with me, so the rhythm was basic.
Eat.
Sleep.
Work.
Repeat.
Then I drove home to my family and our beautiful new home deep in the Kent countryside, south-east of Canterbury.
That feeling of getting home to Rhona and Karta was hard to describe.
Love. Relief. Joy.
Once home, there was little expectation for me to do other than rest and recover.
That mattered because the work was physical and tiring. We had two twenty-minute breaks and one thirty-minute lunch across the shift. After work, there was a small cup of herbal tea, a short decompression, then bed.
Earplugs and an eye mask blocked out the daylight.
Sleep came easily through exhaustion.
Having a regular income again felt good.
I wanted to avoid overtime if possible, which meant careful planning. I would continue with freelance work, but only on carefully chosen projects that did not damage my downtime.
The blog had been neglected, and that bothered me.
But things were settling.
I would have time to write again.
The simplicity protocol
By December, the strain of being away from home had settled into something more complicated.
I was finding it hard.
Only four days away each time, then back to the loving embrace of my wife, my son, and the Kent countryside.
But four days is still four days.
I began thinking hard about money again.
The cost of living had risen sharply over the previous year. We were one of the many families feeling it. Rhona and I did not drink or go to pubs, cinemas, or restaurants. That saved money. But we ran two cars because we needed to. I worked away from home, and Karta had to get to college in Broadstairs, around fifteen miles from Adisham.
Fuel was a problem.
Food was a problem.
Everything seemed to cost more.
The obvious answer would be to work more overtime.
But that came with a cost, too.
More time away.
More tiredness.
Less home life.
Less writing.
Less of the very thing I was trying to protect.
So the better answer was to simplify.
Spend less.
Want less.
Plan better.
Cook simply.
Keep Christmas modest.
Protect rest.
Protect family time.
The goal was not to become rich.
The goal was to make the life we already had feel less fragile.
What 2021 changed
Looking back, 2021 was not one clean story.
It was a year of pivots.
Lockdown.
Furlough.
Home education.
Rhona’s career change.
Freelance doubts.
Delivery work.
Health plans.
Section 21.
Another move.
A new job.
Night shifts.
Country life.
Another attempt to simplify.
The old pattern was still there, of course.
Plans.
Resets.
Lists.
Doubt.
Fresh starts.
More lists.
But something practical entered the frame.
A job.
A wage.
A cottage.
A route through.
It was not perfect.
It was tiring, imperfect and awkward. I was away from home more than I wanted to be. The shifts were hard. The finances still needed care. The future still felt uncertain.
But we had moved.
Literally and otherwise.
After years of drifting, talking, planning, worrying and hoping, life had finally shifted under its own weight.
The work now was simple.
Hold on to what mattered.
Rhona.
Karta.
Home.
Health.
Quiet.
Writing.
Enough money.
Fewer distractions.
Not everything had been solved.
But the direction had changed.
And for that year, that was enough.
Until next time,
adieu.