What is the point of text blogs any more? No one does them. They're all doing vlogs instead. Vlogs, on YouTube, which, for some people, net them millions of people watching their things on an almost daily basis.
I can't do that. I look awful on camera. Yeah, yeah, Countdown and all that, but it's true what they say about the camera, and it really does add 10lb.
I knew that from the moment my interview on Zoom started yesterday. Dear god, I looked fat. I looked so ugly. And I knew that the moment the interview started.
I felt that interview went well, and having already made it through two rounds of selection processes, I almost felt it was in the bag. Rejections hurt more the closer you are to making it.
...
OK, OK, I should probably back up a little bit.
I'm currently re-watching Sex Education on Netflix at 1am. It's only my brother and I alone in the house this week; my parents have gone on holiday.
Yeah... I still live with my parents.
It seems to me that life has been a sequence of 12-month periods, each more shitty and worse than the last. This is a sequence that has gone on for, well, 7 years or so now. Mistakes that I made in 2014, 2015, 2016 have created irreparable damage to my life, and I feel like I'm going round in a circle with whatever I write here, almost like I cannot put my thoughts into words adequately.
I'm also not afraid to admit I'm a very proud person. I like to portray the parts of me that I want others to see. And that's a double-edged sword. Because you can create an image of yourself, and someone else gets to know that version of you, the version you want them to see, and one day, you will let your guard down, and when that happens, people won't want to know you any more.
I am, however, a very honourable person, so I'm not about to name names or spill any juice about people individually. Not in, despite the limited numbers that will actually read this, is still publicly available, so no, I'm not going to be Coleen Rooney. Or whoever it was that exposed Rebekah Vardy. I'm not really a tabloid soap opera guy.
But I do need to rant. I do need to vent. Each period of 12 months gets worse and worse.
So, here goes.
...
March 2020.
In the space of about 3 weeks, my circumstances perhaps matched those of the entire country. From normality, to worry, to pure chaos, to optimism, to wartime spirit...
... to pessimism and a sense it will never end.
My uni life was pretty good. Solid, if unspectacular, I'll admit. It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one who knew me from school that I had no friends that wanted me to live with them. Cue years of piggybacking off Facebook ads, and in the 18-19 and 19-20 years living in the 10th and spare room of a house. I was probably paying too much for what it was. The spare room, which I'm 90% sure used to be a cupboard. It was a nice house, I felt, although perhaps could do with a full refurbishment. The carpets were getting old, and given the house was ex-flats, it was a house whose capacity was very much vertical rather than in any of the other two directions. Being ex-flats, each room had an en suite bathroom. As I was in a cupboard, the en suite had not moved, so "my" bathroom was in the living room, or off the living room, or whatever the correct description is, I've never seen Grand Designs. That meant I was always cleaning up the bathroom that everyone - including numerous house parties - would use.
But despite all its many shortcomings, it was, in my mind anyway, my home. My place where I could shut off, let my guard down, away from pressures of family, from university, from politics, from cricket, from housing, from rent, from... everything.
The events of March 2020 are burnt into my brain for that reason. My uni life post-election was cricket, academia, and relaxation. It was almost like the pieces of my life were starting to fall into place, owning my own destiny, for once, and perhaps, just perhaps... things were going well?
7 March 2020. University of Sussex Cricket Club Alumni Day. Two games of indoor cricket against some of the recent leavers, many of whom I knew as they had only just left, two wonderfully crazy periods of scoring and spectating. Then we went out afterwards. Oh, what a night. £60 spent, amazingly. Drunk as tits. Might have fallen over on the 100-yard walk back to my house... it was the last time that I perhaps experienced normality, without any mention, in normal life, of coronavirus.
Monday 9 March 2020. I noticed a couple of paranoid people, wiping down surfaces in the entire seminar room. There was also a rumour that someone couldn't attend as he had coronavirus - oh, but not to worry, he'd just come back from Italy.
Friday 13 March 2020. Had the memorial service of a very distant relative. Probably best if I don't get into the details, but given we were relatives of my aunt's first husband, someone commented it was a little odd that we were invited to attend the memorial of my aunt's second husband. It wasn't really that odd, when we thought about it at the time. Because we had always been so close together to an aunt who has not been related to us for 20 years. In hindsight, this was a bit of a superspreader event for Covid, but I tend not to think about that too much. The cancelling of football that day was perhaps the first sign that this wasn't going to just go away in a hurry.
Saturday 14 March 2020. Cricket training. Saturday lunchtimes, September to April. 12pm-2pm. Varsity due in one week's time. For once I was not disappointed to not be selected for a cricket game: indoor cricket is really not my skillset as it is like T20 on steroids. All defensive, no attack with the ball. And my style of batting (Cook meets Burns meets Sibley meets Gillespie) has no place in a one day game, let alone a 10-over indoor game. So I was looking forward to, for the first time in ages, going into scoring a match without yearning to be on the field. On the hall. In the hall...? But I sat down in the changing room, joked about elbow bumping a bit (in hindsight, laughing my way through this crisis was probably my way of dealing with it), but I did say one thing to someone. I had/have a huge crush on this guy, which isn't necessarily helpful when you're friends with them, but at least he knew that and (unlike previous crushes) hadn't run a mile, which is always a good sign. But I just said to him... "I don't think we're going to be here this time next week."
Monday 16 March 2020. For once, this term, I didn't have a Monday 9am seminar, which was good, as I'm not a morning person. At all. But at about 9:40am the email I had been dreading came through: due to coronavirus, all teaching had been suspended. But surely this wouldn't last long, right? Maybe a couple of weeks, I'd be back, I'd get a couple of good contact hours in April or maybe even May (although that's cutting it fine) so I could sit through with my tutors and actually work out what the fuck I was going to do with my dissertations... right?
Wednesday 18 March 2020. Playing cricket is banned for the foreseeable future by the ECB. So with no cricket and no University for now, I'll go and stay with my parents for a bit. One reason for this: it's just cheaper. I don't have to pay for food, I don't have to pay for travel...
Other than the one day I would move out, little did I know I would never see my house in Brighton again.
Monday 23 March 2020. I am connected. I am plugged into the Matrix. I know my sources. My Twitter feed is, actually, pretty well laid out. So I knew what Boris Johnson was going to say at 8pm. We were getting the worst thing, the worst option available. Lockdown. But it's fine. It'll only be a few weeks. And we'll come out in one go, we'll be straight back to normal in 3 or 4 weeks time.
...
And look at where we are now. In those 2-3 weeks I lost everything I had in my life. Between 16 March 2020 and my dissertation deadlines in May/June (I honestly forget now exactly when they were) my contact hours were... 5 minutes over the phone. We didn't have Zoom classes yet. 5 minutes. That was it. I am proud of what I got in my dissertations all things considered, but Covid ruined my degree. I should have done better.
I have, to this day, never had a formal graduation. But since the results came through in June 2020, I have not had a job. And I don't think that is for lack of trying. I have lost count of the amount of job applications I have sent off. In all walks of life. In all honesty, I could probably open my sent items folder and have a count, but why would I want to do that? It's just so depressing for me to sit there, go through 13 months of applications, and... count them. But we're talking at least 100, I would have thought.
Sidenote: it's 2:35am now and I am running out of energy. Basically, need job, need money, need validation in my life and sympathy when I need it. And in my opinion, Covid took that all away from me.
