A YEAR IN THE BLINK OF A TWELVE-DAY WEEK.

Not to go all Solomon Grundy on you, but time flies when you’re having a Pandemic Attack.
   For the convenience of rhyme, Solomon Grundy was born on a Monday. He didn’t last long. And 2020 didn’t last long, either. It’s been a twelve-day week instead of a twelve-month year. And what a week it’s not been.
   Festina Lente isn’t Elon Musk’s babysitter or his new electrical perambulator. Latin is a universal language in the sense that every single phrase in Latin offers up the same universal truth: Latin is dead. You are not. Remember this.
   Make haste slowly. If there’s one thing to make a speeded-up year of not doing awfully much zoom in like a Zoom meeting on LSD, why, it’s not one thing but many things. The Pandemic was (and remains) many things.
   When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in raging flaming clouds of fleets of swarms of zillions of fucking battalions.
   I quote loosely from the general text. Hamlet is the go-to manual for studying the effects of Covid-19 on just about everything. To be. We would have a proper year. Alas, turns out it was more in the line of…
   Not to be.
   Much happened on a personal level that I will not relate here. So what else is there to talk about? Plans that slid sideways from under me, making way for new plans, seem as though from another world.
   On the reading front, I no longer know and no longer care how many books I’ve read this year. It was a short reading year, and felt like twelve days. The last time I read a book, I read it in a sitting. But it’s all a blur, at this end of the short year.
   Everything dragged, and suddenly it was Christmas.
   Books came into the house. A few books were read by someone who may have been me. My plan to keep score of the overall gain or loss on the bookshelf front…that went utterly nowhere. Did I buy in nineteen books and read twenty? Well, I’m ahead of the game by one book, right?
   No clue. Kept score. Lost score. I could sift through electronic receipts, but what’s the point? Does reading an old book again count for anything? For the experience I gained in revisiting a story, yes. But I gave up the arithmetical quirks of what to add to and what to leave out of the mystical calculations.
   I ran my YouTube channel for two years and managed an average of a little over one video per week. Life under the pandemic got to me, and I took a fucking break. Had to. Other priorities. But I will return to video production.
   Life is what happened to Allen Saunders while he was making other plans.
   The reading of books was a thing in 2020. My solid stainless steel plan to note how I was doing on that front? That plan stood out in the rain, softened, split, and then…only half of it sagged into the leaf-strewn street. Even fragmenting plans, it seems, cannot fall apart in a regular way.
   If I misremember rightly, I read three short books in one day. They didn’t count, being really short. But they were books. I have them on my shelves. Somewhere. So maybe they did count. We all did stuff in 2020. But finding those handy bookmarks in the compressed diary of a twelve-day week, telling me what I did, is proving difficult.
   The bookshelves themselves came into play once more. I had a crushing need for space downstairs. This led to the return of furniture to this floor. The office floor. And that forced me to hack a farm-fresh clearing from the jungle of bookcases.
   This was a mighty feat. I accomplished the task by wriggling bookshelves across the floor, in a dance that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a barn. Generally, my bookshelves line the walls and also project deep into the room. In this latest bookcase case, I found a way to rearrange the puzzle pieces. At one end of one room I’ve created an area in which the bookcases line the walls.
   Mostly.
   It’s been a year of hurry up and wait. What a fast week it has been. The year is a has-been of a year, all right. Delivery drivers played chap-door-run-away with parcels the size of televisions.
   Out shopping, those who didn’t queue in masks queued in scarves. With gloves. Autumn-wear came early. We were counted into supermarkets as we shuffled through the airlocks, and we were counted back out as we fled with prized loot.
   Toilet roll.
   No one can explain the scarcity of toilet roll to me. Covid-19 is a shitty disease, not the shitting disease. I left a supermarket with a pack of 24 paper nuggets, each more precious than gold. You could wipe your arse with gold toilet paper, but then you’d be King Midas. Sitting on a golden throne.
   There will be signs of the coming Apocalypse. A well-worn idea. In our case, the signs asked us to wear a face-covering and to wash our hands. Please don’t touch your face. Or anyone else’s face. We should add more signs.
   Change your underwear frequently.
   Rattling pots and pans at night in support of people isn’t in support of those people if they are trying to sleep come mid-evening.
   Being in government and sticking to rules is a thing people in government should stick to. This last item simply exposes people in government as never sticking to any rules during the working day. Covid-19 merely unveiled an entire approach to living. It’s not as though the official in charge of that thing decided, spontaneously, that it would be okay to break the new rule for reasons of no reason at all. No. That fucker was clearly breaking all the rules every live-fucking-long day.
   I feel as though it were only yesterday, a million years ago, when young idiotic Americans (with names reminiscent of models of electrically-driven cars) were determined to have their spring break and damn the fatal consequences.
   It has taken me this long on my wayward journey to realise that spring break means the Easter fucking Holidays. But that is a mere aside. It is of little or no consequence. An electron microscope could provide a sturdy result on a scientific point, but…
   This is December and there are no flying fucks left to give. Those vanished in the first wave of toilet roll hoarding. Flying fucks were rationed at the rate of two per customer, and soon ran out. That was late in March.
   The march of the mood of the year was a slow one, to the tune of a popular little ditty by Chopin. Covid-19 turned the speed up to 11. Even Chopin’s Funeral March gets the squeaky squirrel treatment, played fast during a Pandemic Attack.
   When I watch videos on YouTube, I almost always hit double speed. With rare exceptions, everyone’s a squeaky squirrel. Unless I watch a video featuring a voice that starts out squeaky or fast-paced. Increase the speed in those cases, and only bats hear the results.
   I am a very patient person, I am here to tell you. Yet I find myself listening to videos that are 40-minute rambles to start with. At double the speed, a rambling video leaves me twenty minutes to go and stare out at the empty streets during a Pandemic. Priorities, right.
   Last blog post of the year. School’s out for Christmas. I’ve resisted the Covid-19 waffle that the world’s been indulging in all year/twelve-day week. So I know I am not adding anything to the talk. Except talk of vaccine today.
   Jam tomorrow, then.
   And what of tomorrow? New plans? Old plans, dusted down. I scrapped my notions of keeping score. How many books will I read next year? And how many will I buy? (I am awaiting a parcel of many books as I type.)
   The real question is how many books will I enjoy? How many are going to be useful? The tally, the score, is not important. It never was. And that’s no secret. You’d think I’d have spent the year hunkered in the bunker, all Covid-proofed and high on coffee, rattling through a book a day.
   And each day, a book on a wildly different topic at that.
   Fuck. I’ve just remembered there’s a pizza in the oven. I’m five minutes away from that meeting. Prompt. I will remain prompt as long as I can. In anticipation of sleeping in, I set the alarm and I climbed out of bed just as the alarm decided to warn me of its existence. Prompt today. For once, no hurrying.
   And only a wait of a few minutes for food. Not exactly waiting. Hurry up and wait. It is still a thing. Just as the virus is still a thing. And it will remain a thing, even as the first waves of vaccines hit the veins.
   This is not the fucking time to go fucking daft. Unless it is time to go daft…for pizza. It is socially distanced, being on a separate floor. I will mask the flavour of the pizza with sauce. That’s the only mask I can use, when devouring food.