Covid Blues

Sunday and the thirty-first Covid blog. 🍁

Tomorrow is the start of the ‘Half Term Holidays’ and a time to recharge batteries. It has been a tough half term with new rules and less time. Sanitising each student’s hands and desks before and after each lesson cuts into learning and lesson plans, making everything that much harder, as well as various restrictions to enable a safer working environment.

Although an absolutely vital and important necessity, the sight of pupils in masks still makes everything look sinister and unfathomable. A whole new way of life, one we didn’t want nor ask for.

In as much as I have been looking forward to this week, everything feels strange. We knew that the next seasons would bring new challenges but the easing of rules towards the end of summer gave us a little insight to our previous world.

This has now made the return of tighter measures feel a little darker and our lives once more seem heavy and burdensome.

It took me a while to realise I have the Covid Blues. I am fed up with the remoteness of our world. I am again missing the people I love and the things that fill my heart with happiness.

More importantly, further lives are being lost, each soul a person, one who was valued and loved.

It is true that you do not realise just how much you so deeply feel, until it is gone. It seems poignant then with this being Black History Month, that perhaps we can understand a tiny fraction of how it must have felt (and ashamed to say, still feels) to have pieces of your liberty taken away.

I would rejoice in being bold enough to proclaim that perhaps lessons will be learned but with Blighty feeling very much like a Dickensian novel this week, I fear it will not. Instead I thank heaven for the caring and understanding Mr Brownlow’s of our world;

Master Rashford, local councils, the willing kindness of schools, businesses and community .

As an educator I have seen this with my own eyes the harsh reality and of friends that unbeknown, have used food banks in the past. This despite being hard working and in employment. Calling this a ‘Godsend’ that without, at that time, they did not know how they would have fed their children.

I think we all have a touch of the Covid Blues and I did not expect as I read the words of Dickens to my class this week that it would feel so very poignant today:

“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” — Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

As always I will search for the flowers and towards the end of next week a kindness will see me doing something I once loved so very much.

Through this offer, I have been sent another chance to share in the majesty of nature and life. Another moment to remember; flowers will always find a way of blooming, even in the darkest of moments.

Stay Safe,

Joy xxx