The Adventure of the Ongoing Lockdown

Previously on The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan: I finally moved into my own flat and the UK entered yet another national lockdown.

The last few weeks have felt like a real rollercoaster. I've faced boredom, stress, frustration and elation from one day to the next. Working through lockdown has provided all sorts of challenges I wouldn't have foreseen and sometimes it can feel overwhelming when staffing is affected by a Covid-outbreak and I head off to work whilst most people I know remain at home. There's a certain pride in being there for our students though, a feeling of purpose that I didn't really feel during the first lockdown.

 

Life in the new flat is, on the whole, excellent. There's a sense of freedom that I've never had in my life before which is so lovely. Whether it was at home with Mum and Dad or at uni with my various housemates I'd always shared kitchens and bathrooms and suddenly I have my own space that I use freely. I can go to bed and get up whenever I feel like and don't have to worry about the sleep patterns of the other members of the household. I also think that there's something restricted about living in your childhood home with your parents that as much as I was an adult and was no longer treated like a child I still felt like there were strict rules of what I could and couldn't do.

 

Living within five minutes drive of work is also a revelation. I've now worked at the same school for over six years and until the last month I was commuting through a heavily congested area. The journey was only about twelve miles but it would take at least forty minutes, often longer. I know that's not long compared to many people's commutes but I found it ever more soul-destroying. I spent a year before I could drive going by bus which took about 90 minutes when the bus actually bothered to show up, was cadging lifts off whoever was going in the right direction when I crashed my car and spent two years of sitting in huge traffic jams due to major roadworks. Now in a little over five minutes my journey is complete and it's just fantastic.

 

The short commute is great for my mental health. For one thing it means that I can actually get an extra half an hour in bed if I need it meaning my sleep is the best it's been during my adult life. I arrive at work feeling ready to go instead of stressed from worrying if I'll make it on time or already drained from having to concentrate through adverse weather conditions. It also allows me the opportunity to walk to work if I want to which feels so weird but fantastic to me. My walk takes me less time than my old driving time and every time I've arrived at work feeling so good.

 

The one negative point remains the lack of internet connection in my flat, an issue caused by the incompetency of BT. After waiting for a month to hear about a second engineer visit I was inexplicably told that my order had been cancelled and that they wanted my router back. It turned out that this was a computer error so I spent an hour and forty minutes on the phone to get things back on track. There is a little chance of a holiday in the near future but BT offer the next best thing- one phone call to fix a problem which is their fault led me to speaking to six operators across two continents, three countries and five cities, by the end of which I felt like I'd been on a short cruise trip. I think I'll probably be getting a Christmas card from the team at the Doncaster call centre, I felt like I knew them that well by the end.

Anyway, the upshot of it was that I may actually get internet connection within the next week, though frankly I'm not holding my breath. Being without internet access during lockdown is especially odd because it's my main connection to my friends and family in a time when I can't see most of them. It also means I've very little idea what is going on in the world outside my own bubble of my classroom and my flat which is a mixed blessing. I certainly feel less concern over Covid when I'm not reading about it online but at the same time I miss the fun stuff (I've heard something about a zoom council meeting that went viral for instance but I have literally no clue why). All I get is a few notifications when I briefly turn on my very limited data and a few minutes connected to the world when I walk to a coffee shop and sit on a handily positioned bench which is in range of their free Wi-Fi signal (someday I may actually buy a coffee from them).

 

During this lockdown I've been really thinking about the concept of being happy and made that my main goal. There's always so many things to worry about and Covid has led to many new worries (I've had the blog post title The Adventure of the Covid-19 Infection ready to go for the best part of a year now but fortunately it has yet to have an airing). I had planned to concentrate on getting healthier in the new year but in the end I decided to put that back for a while and just concentrate on being mentally healthy through this challenging time so whether it's a beautiful walk, a long lie-in or a unnecessarily large Domino's pizza, that's what I'm doing. I also know being happy gives me the best chance of creating happiness in other people which in turn eventually comes back to me. Society is constantly badgering us to be healthy, look good, work hard and achieve goals but all of that stuff is meaningless if you're not happy.

 

That seems like a suitable place to end. Sometimes I just ramble on and suddenly find I've made an important point. Thanks for reading and I'll be back soon, possibly even from the comfort of my own sofa.