Happy New Year

The year of all years crawls to a welcome end tonight. Sadly nothing will be much different when the sun rises tomorrow, and it is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Still, a new year brings new dreams and hopes of better times ahead.

We have a Chinese guy in our office, and after he returned to Bermuda from being back in China at the beginning of January he was made to stay at home. When he did come back to the office he wore a mask. It was odd to see him walk around with a mask and no one quite knew how to act around him.

Fast forward 12 months and the entire world has been heavily inflicted by Covid-19. This silent terror of a virus has literally changed the world we live in, a film set only previously in the minds of story tellers.

Our office shut in early March, and for the first time ever I worked from home and I found it impossible to separate work from home life. This coincided with one of the busiest work years I had known, and I really struggled.

We were back in the office in the autumn, almost to capacity, but that changed in early December with spikes of positive cases, and we were all sent back home.

The one positive being home 24/7 was the bond I felt with my family. It made me realize how much time I spent away from the house, and the three of us are as tight as we’ve ever been.

This was all bolstered by the fact that we moved house just before lockdown, and funnily back then I had that logged as the worst week of the year, but we had found a lovely happy home, and much closer to town, so when we were allowed out for our half mile radius of exercise, we had so much more on our doorstep. Oh and we added a cuddly and entertaining chocolate labrador pup 🐶 to the mix as well!

Yet, although our daughter, myself and my-magnanimous-other-half got to spend every waking hour with each other…. pretty sure she loved every minute…. the downside is I have not seen my son, my parents, or my brother for well over a year, which eats away at my heart. I miss them all massively.

As for those Addicks, well what an upside down year that has been, all the while, whilst not being able to get to games. We began last new year with what turned out to be a total false dawn as it became quickly apparent the club we love was invaded by crooks and charlatans. Yet Addicks got to work, no one was to take away our football club, and then in what still seems too good to be true, we were rescued by a Dane in shining armour.

Charlton suffered a last day relegation and we landed with a bump back in League One. However, at least now thank heavens, we can just entertain ourselves with outbursts on formations, rotations, and playing players out of position! Feels good to be ‘just’ football fans once more first and foremost, but inside it was fantastic to feel that Addicks’ togetherness again. They chose the wrong football club, didn’t they.

We enter the new year with aspirations and hopes that Lee Bowyer and Johnnie Jackson write another glorious chapter. It will be a long and frentic ride to May, and we need Covid and the footballing gods to play ball.

Finally a big thank you to each one of you that stops by here regularly to read my musings. I had a record number of visits this year which inspires me to keep tapping away at the keyboard, and gives me a more than ever much needed distraction.

We are lucky enough to be able to go out tonight for an early dinner before curfew. We are going to meet some friends and their kids at a favourite restaurant before coming home and opening a bottle of something to watch 2021 arrive on the box.

I’d like to wish you and your loved ones a healthy and safe 2021, and look forward to the return to life as we knew it.

CA