Obligatory 2020 Year In Review Post
I’ve always enjoyed the obligatory look back at the last year whether writing a public blog or a private journal. It’s often fun to look back and see just how much has happened in twelve short months. Fun or at least surprising. And it can also focus the mind to the future: what have we learnt from the last year and what will we do differently from January 1st?
However this year I go into the exercise conscious of two things. Firstly, that the past few years have seen the general consensus of “worst year ever - I can’t wait to see the back of it” only for the next twelve months to be even worse (with 2020 being the banner year for confounding hopeful new year expectations), and secondly that if 2020 taught us anything it’s that planning for the future can be futile if circumstances make that planned future impossible. So I guess I’m happy to say that despite 2020 being the obvious poster child for an awful year, I don’t look back on it as the worst year ever. 2010 already wins that honour for me. The year my dad died unexpectedly and I became a teacher at the price of all my freedom. Or maybe 2012, the year my mom got her terminal cancer diagnosis? Or 2013, the year that she finally died? There have been worse years on a personal level and even on a global level, though I wasn’t around to experience them, I imagine the years between 1939-1945 were worse than 2020 has been? Stuck in the deadly mire of global war with bombs dropping on your home, children sent far away, husbands and sons shipped off to die? The World War One years would have been no picnic either, but the indignity of having to live through a Second World War so soon after the first and seemingly learning nothing would surely make the subsequent years of WWII sting more? And even the years of the Spanish Flu, deadlier than COVID and none of the home comforts to make isolation and lockdown bearable? There have been worse years globally than 2020 too.
Not that any of that helps when it’s actually hurting. Right now, tail end of 2020, in the last days of December, both my wife and I actually have COVID 19 after months of being forced on the frontline of the government’s obsessive and unnecessary drive to have all students in school. Schools were unsafe from day one in September but we did all we could to keep this wolf from our door. Masks, sanitising until our hands were red raw, keeping as much space as was possible in crowded Victorian classrooms not designed for space, freezing in Winter winds as we fought to keep windows open and at least ventilate the rooms unfit for COVID-safety... Yet the first weekend of the Christmas break I started feeling tired and weird, and by the first Monday I had a fever. One COVID test later and I’m officially ill with the boogeyman virus we’d spent the last nine months trying to outrun. Although we did our best to keep apart as was mentally possible in our shared home over Christmas, my wife started coughing a few days later. Her positive test came through on Boxing Day.
COVID is not nice. The worst cold/flu I’ve had - lingering and exhausting, and coupled with that horrible underlying idea that no one really knows how this thing works, people have died from it, I have asthma, and either of us could take a turn for the worse any day now and die...or at least have a really rough time. Not to mention the fear that we could bring that misery onto others with a misplaced breath or touch. For instance, tonight I have to put the bins out...hoping I don’t do so at the same time the neighbours are doing theirs, or someone is walking down the street! Even walking around in our back garden to get some fresh air I’m conscious of every breath floating away on the wind and it’s potential to ruin a stranger’s life.
Social media and the news bring no comfort when bed-bound with COVID either. Just endless stories of hospitalisation and death; beds full to capacity and a general national nightmare you hope only to avoid being part of while simultaneously fearing that you already are. It’s horrible. And not a nice way to end the year, trapped in a snotty fug all day and feeling a constant sense of dread whilst simultaneously unable to smell or taste properly. But at the same time we are trying to count our blessings - that so far we are not experiencing anything worse than a very bad flu. That we will hopefully get better soon. That it happened during a time we had two weeks off anyway so we can just lean into being ill and not worry about planning lessons and the demands of work, etc. Our plague weeks have meant watching Harry Potter films, making Lego and playing Nintendo. Again - World War II would have been worse.
But this is a year in review, not just the last week in review. There was life before we got COVID. That said, September to December 2020 was pretty awful, and if I were to judge the last year it would be as follows: January to March was pretty grim but I got through with the adrenaline and excitement of new possibilities that every new year brings with it. Then March to September was amazing as the whole world transformed and radical possibilities were out on display. September to now was then like the months before March again, only without any of the hope to get me through.
I’ll explain.
Going into 2020 I wanted it to be a transformative year. I’ve been in my current job for nearly a decade and was getting itchy for a change. I started looking at what was out there and considering my options. When the year began I believed it might be my final year working where I work and therefore the nuisances of those first three months were tempered with that sense of excitement that those nuisances may at least be my last. But COVID obviously destroyed the job market and made those of us with any job security at all cling to whatever we had as the world fell apart around us. I had been dabbling with the idea of getting out of teaching all together but even a move from one school to another seemed foolhardy with no telling what the situation would be come September. So I was forced by circumstance to stay put.
But March’s lockdown brought with it the change of pace I was looking for: work without the bullshit. Locked out of school physically and having to teach online, work felt new and innovating again. Pared back of all the draining box ticking admin the worst and most pointless aspects of the job were stripped away and it became about teaching and teaching only. The job could no longer claim more of my life than it needed to. I would wake up late after a good night’s sleep, teach only what was needed, mark only what was needed, and already be home when the day ended at 3:35pm. I could teach in jeans and a t-shirt instead of a stupid suit. I could play guitar during my lunch break. I had time to read and think in the afternoons and evenings. I could see my wife whenever I wanted. I could teach lessons in the garden if the weather was good. Didn’t have to hold in the need for the toilet for hours because of a killer six period day. Could eat when I was hungry. Teaching online was fantastic.
During the lockdown, with school no longer so life-consuming, I was at last able to return to the academic research I’ve been yearning to get back to for a while now, writing an article for the journal Anarchist Studies which will be published in 2021. And obviously my first book, Authentic Democracy, was released too in May. Furthermore I wrote and recorded the Strangely Shaped By Fathers EP, Finding Me, and follow up single, Stay Alert. Lockdown was intellectually and creatively fulfilling and made me realise just how much the day-to-day job of teaching at my current school did not fulfil me or fill my life with the sort of stimulation it once did.
March - August 2020 I felt for the first time in a longtime like I was finally living the sort of life I wanted to live. Sure, it didn’t involve any people besides my wife and cat...but my wife and cat are pretty much all I need, and via Zoom we actually saw and spoke to more people than our busy teaching lifestyle usually allows for anyway. And while we missed things like theatre, music, comedy, restaurants and coffee shops, we learned to make good food and coffee at home and enjoyed a wide range of strange and wonderful livestreams of culture we normally wouldn’t be able to access in the old world. We had nice walks, we spent time in our garden, we improved the home we live in. We lived a life free from most of the normal distractions and it was wonderful.
September sucked because not only did it mean a return to work, but if remote teaching during lockdown had stripped away all the job’s crap and made it pure again, physical teaching during COVID did the exact opposite. The fun and easy stuff of the classroom was replaced with rigid safety protocols, straining my voice through a hot mask just to be heard, and the focus became entirely about the ludicrous notion of “catching up” or ensuring learning wasn’t “missed” for utterly unnecessary future examinations that the British educational establishment can’t seem to imagine a world without. While fearing for our lives everyday with lax and sloppy COVID measures, inconsistent across my own school and my wife’s despite them being members of the same multi-academy trust, the teaching itself was rendered into nothing more than shovelling content into people’s heads in the rare weeks students were in before the next bout of whole year self-isolation. Meanwhile our teaching unions, fearing prolonged school closures might perhaps expose the profession as being less essential than we’d like it to be in an age of online connectivity, provided only toothless tweets in opposition to the government’s railroading of us all into knowingly unsafe classrooms. Previously happy to strike for a few more pounds a year in our pay cheques, on the question of sending us into unsafe schools that all the science showed would - and did - lead to massive community spread our unions merely grumbled on social media while acquiescing to every unreasonable government demand.
Work, bad before, became frankly unbearable. The last few months have been mentally draining, as well as once more making having any kind of intellectual or creative life outside of the school week untenable as it sucks away any moment of spare time with its incessant and usually unnecessary demands. On top of that we had our boss die, adding grief, confusion, and further weirdness into the mix. It has been a bleak time since September and getting COVID at the end of it is just the soured icing on the whole rotten cake.
But despite all that, 2020 will be remembered as the year we got to glimpse another world. The year that work was largely deemed inessential and we saw it was possible for a living to be given instead of earned. Where we were made to see how our actions affected others and shown how it was possible to live responsibly and harm-free if the support was there to do so. Where old ways of doing things were innovated and transformed into something better. Where mutual aid and community support showed up the failings of the state time and time again. Where against all odds we got the best minds in medicine to come up with a range of vaccines way ahead of any predicted schedule and where, also against all odds, Donald Trump actually lost an election.
For me personally, 2020 is the year that my first book was published and I got my first peer-reviewed academic article accepted for publication. Where I recorded some of the music I am most proud of, started this personal website, and continued the success of Philosophy Unleashed into its second year. The year I listened to so much good music and read so many amazing books. The year I at last became an Irish citizen. The year I got a few more tattoos. It’s the year that the contentment I’ve always known and believed to be in my marriage was truly put to the test and reconfirmed as my wife and I enjoyed a blissful lockdown together and wanted for nothing but each others company when it came to an end. The year of gratitude regarding the choices I have made that, when forced to live in the consequence of those choices for month after month of lockdown, found I couldn’t be happier. It was a year of finding myself - as the SSBF EP was all about - and not letting them bury me alive again, despite the world’s best efforts. And it is a year that will inform 2021 because, while I am not stupid enough to believe a new year has any magical powers of transformation or that anything will become suddenly different at the stroke of midnight January 1st, if 2020 taught me anything it is that life is too short to wait to do the things you love. If you’re healthy enough to do something now you should go for it. That if you put everything off until the holiday you may find yourself bed-ridden or dealing with the unexpected grief of someone you know dying, delaying the good stuff ever further. Better to do it now, while you can, than put it off.
In 2021, therefore, I am going to focus on academic research. I am not going to wait until 2021 in fact. I am already starting now. A big research project brewing since the summer that I haven’t had time to pursue since September but refuse to put off any longer. I am deeply excited about it, as well as another non-academic writing project I’ve started. School will have to work around me rather than the other way round in 2021. I am looking forward to seeing where that attitude takes me, even if it ends in unemployment. You can’t stay somewhere that makes you unhappy, even if it’s the sensible thing to do.
In 2021 there will be a higher calling of what is sensible, and it doesn’t involve putting my health, or the health of my family, at risk to get people through a series of pointless exams.
Happy new year.