Simplicity

Throughout most of 2020 I’d been very aware that I was living through a time that would go down in history. It had been a year of change and uncertainty. December crawled to a close as did Commando’s job. For the first time in his life, he was unemployed. For us, Christmas had been a low key affair since our boys grew up. My mother was born on Christmas Day. Once she’d gone, some of the joy of the season went with her. Christmas 2020 would have been her 100th birthday, had she lived to see it. This year we made a conscious decision to forgo the decorations, cards and presents completely. It wasn’t about money. It was about simplifying. We’d had a trying few months and it was surprisingly liberating not to have all the dashing around, the shopping, the overeating and the strange emptiness when the decorations come down. It was peaceful, almost blissfully so.

The new year came in cold and frosty. The garden was festooned with fairy cobwebs and the tree in the front garden looked as if it had been dipped in icing sugar. There was joy in these simple things. Would 2021 bring better times? Maybe it would if we worked hard to look for them. Simplicity seemed to be the key.

New year’s resolutions have never been my thing. I’ve never seen the point in making those kind of promises, knowing they will just become failures in a month or two. If 2021 really was going to bring better times though, it was down to us to make them happen. We couldn’t control the virus. We couldn’t control the discord all around. We couldn’t control the decisions the government made about lockdowns and restrictions. All we could control was us and how we reacted to these things.

For the first time in our lives we had time, the most precious commodity of all. One of the things that I decided to do with all this extra time, was read. From the moment I first learned to decipher the strange black squiggles on white paper I’d loved reading. My childhood can be measured in trips to the library and the long list of books I read. In the last couple of years though, all of my reading had been research based. A lot of it was very interesting but I realised I needed to get back to reading for the joy of it, at least some of the time. It was a brilliant decision. At first I re read some classics, Orwell, Osborne, Salinger, Harper and even Dickens. Then there were a few recommendations, the best of which was Lynda Rutledge’s West With Giraffes.

Of course, I was still working on my second big writing project so there was still lots of research. That was how I discovered the amazing work of Marina Amaral. This talented young lady is in her twenties. She comes from Brazil and is a self taught colouriser of old black and white photos, using painstaking research and photoshop. Her work really does bring the past to life. She collaborated with Dan Jones on his book The Colour of Time and worked with the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum on Faces of Auschwitz. She also has a wicked sense of humour and a slight obsession with Tzar Nicholas.

One of the photographs she shared on Twitter was of a young boy sitting beside a bombed out building. It was a photograph full of emotion. It could easily have been my lovely father in law, who got bombed out countless times and would have been about that age. That sad little face looked very familiar. It took me a while to work out why. Then I remembered the title sequence of the 1970’s documentary series World at War . . .

Obviously, amid all this reading, research and simplifying, there were walks. Sometimes, Commando came with me. Quite often I didn’t even bother to take my phone. Time, distance and photographs didn’t seem relevant. There were still a few though. On a walk though the Old Cemetery towards the end of the month I couldn’t resist the grave of Sarah and Lt Colonel William Hewett. Imagine the last survivor of the English officers who took part in the battle of Waterloo being buried there!

Then, on the very last day of January I took a stroll along the boardwalk and discovered the rusty cast iron sculptures by the bench had undergone a transformation. I’m fairly sure a local ‘artist’ had also had a go at them but, overall, I quite liked the change. Perhaps there is a lesson there. Change can be unexpected. It might not always be what you’d choose, but you can choose what you make of it and how you deal with it.