It’s been a while since my last post. Life got in the way. It’s certainly been a mixed bag of experiences and emotions over the last few months.

I spent most of the autumn frantically searching for a job. Day after day online searching, speaking to recruiters, feeling lost and undervalued. This was one of the hardest periods of my life. One week I had 7 interviews and got nothing it was heart breaking. All that time spent applying, prepping, going through the emotional rollercoaster that is interviewing! I broke down more than once during the September to November period. I couldn’t understand why no one wanted me. Of course this wasn’t just happening to me. The UK was and still is going through one of its worst periods of unemployment.

I was lucky enough that at the end of October after I was officially made unemployed an old boss of mine threw me a rope, a few hours of work a week to create new tour product. It gave me a sense of purpose again after being on furlough between April & October. I got to use my brain, got those creative juices flowing and made me realise how much I missed the ease of travel we all took for granted.

This sparked some luck on my part. I was offered a job in November with a start date of January. It was just a years contract but things were starting to look up.

Like many people who hadn’t seen their family for months, we saw a light at the end of the tunnel as we had been promised a lockdown break for four days over Christmas. As we creeped through November it was becoming more and more worrying as covid cases were rising and the government was loosing control. As we got to December things went from bad to worse, a new tier was added to the system, the Christmas break was cancelled and a new lockdown was on the horizon!

That afternoon as the press conference happened and the Christmas break cancellation was announced a wave of emotions over took me. I went from angry, to annoyed back to angry all while trying to stop myself from crying hysterically. I was gutted. The months of being stuck in the flat, frantic job searching and uncertainty, all I wanted was a couple of days of normality. A hug from my mum, the banter, the laughing, the excessive food! But alas that was not going to happen. Christmas as we knew it was cancelled.

Christmas 2020 is not one I want to repeat. My family scattered. All of us trying to keep it together and smile our way through the sadness. I’m lucky, I had Mr Life London Food, and we made the best of it. We powered through on champagne and far too much cheese. We splurged and bought excess amounts of everything to make up for such a rubbish year. There was a lot of FaceTime & WhatsApp calling to everyone all day, trying to keep alive the sense that we were all in it together.

Christmas and New Years came and went and that shiny promise of a new better year faded quickly as a new lockdown began.

Silver linings did begin to appear, I started my new job and vaccines suddenly started to appear. Being busy in the day with work & the odd trip to the office makes life in the tiny flat a bit more bearable. The times I’ve had to go to the office felt very strange. I always come back knackered. How the hell did we all used to commute five days a week and then go out afterwards?! We are all going to need to retrain our socialising stamina.

I think like many I am now waiting on tenterhooks to see whether this roadmap out of lockdown works. I hope with everything it does. I appreciate the slowness of it. I desperately want to see people, to sit in a favourite bar and pay far too much for a glass of wine, but I can wait. I do not want to enter the darkness of another lockdown anytime soon. Patience is not normally one of my greatest virtues but I am clinging onto it with dear life.

Keeping everything crossed for a positive easing of lockdown. From the 29th March we are allowed to venture beyond the immediate area we live in. I cannot wait to walk somewhere different, see something different and breath!