Falling Hyacinths and It’s Still January

So here I am at the end of another week.  Here we are.  I said to Andrew (my husband) that it feels like such a long time since we’ve seen our daughter and we were astonished to discover, when we looked at the calendar, that’s it’s only been three weeks since she went back to her shared house in London after staying with us at Christmas.  It feels like the old joke about January being the longest year has grown even longer.

There are only four more poets to post at my poetry site, And Other Poems, before I take a break from posting.  The site had gone to bed for 20 months but I opened it up to submissions in November, while waiting for the US election results.  It was a means of distracting myself from feeling dreadfully tense and was also a gesture of support to the poetry community I belong to at the start of another UK lockdown. Now, as the final poems selected from the open submissions window are posted, Joe Biden has been inaugurated into the White House.  So I know that time has moved on, even though time feels the same. I watched snippets of the ceremony on Wednesday and was moved to tears more than once.  Lady Gaga made me cry, actually, with her sincerity and beauty, as did Jennifer Lopez speaking a line from the Woody Guthrie song ‘This Land is Your Land’ in Spanish.  What a time in history we have been through and are still living through, some people more painfully and at greater cost than others. And a global pandemic on top of everything.  As I’ve told various people this year, and last year, it’s good to cry sometimes, even if you’re only crying because of feeling some kind of hesitant relief.

I’m almost at the end of a six week online course in playwriting run by the Papatango Theatre Company.  It is the only thing I’ve regularly attended on Zoom and I feel worn out every Thursday after a two hour session.  This is why I choose not to attend many Zoom events.  I know I’m lucky/privileged to be in a position of  not having to spend hours on Zoom every day but that is mostly to do with my time of life, my lack of paid work, and my possessiveness about my free time.  Anyway, regardless of this, the course has been brilliant, and I don’t say that lightly, even though I know the expression is overused.  I am not a novice playwright but I am a rusty playwright and it’s been fantastic to think about writing scripts again. I recommend heartily.   Also, Thursday nights (the night of the course) has been Andrew’s turn to cook and this has been a delight.  He works full time so I tend to cook most nights but he often takes over at weekends.  There’s been something so enjoyable for both of us with me being behind the closed door of my writing room playwriting, and him doing what the hell he wants for a few hours, in between cooking.  Not for the first time in the past year we have thanked our lucky stars that we just get on well.  What a blessing.

Not much else to write this week.  These are still strange times, aren’t they?  I think that days are growing a little longer and I definitely heard loud birdsong after 5pm only the other day.  Keep going, everyone.