At a work meeting via Teams on 31st December, a colleague asked who had achieved their 2020 resolutions. While there was the usual mumbling about getting fit and losing weight, most people felt just getting from January to December in 2020 had been enough of a challenge and had long since forgotten what they’d vowed to achieve.

Naturally this included me, so I looked back on the resolutions I recorded here. 

The plan:

1. Publish two books
2. Learn to crochet
3. Maybe join a choir
4. Live more sustainably
5. Be more spiritually aware
6. Get on with clearing attic

The reality:

1. Despite the odds, I published two books and got into an anthology. The Wrong Sort to Die came out in June. I have a story in Wartime Christmas Tales and Liz Hedgecock asked if I fancied writing a short Christmas Caster & Fleet resulting in The Case of the Peculiar Pantomime in December.
2. I learned to crochet enough to produce an indescribable thing. However, despite watching tuition videos, I never feel like I had enough hands to make the magic circle I needed to create anything interesting. I’m not sure I could even make a coaster.
3. I joined a choir, then Mum got ill, then Covid-19 happened so… Maybe another year.
4. The best I can say about sustainable living is that due to Covid-19, my husband and I have both been working from home and not using the cars (and in my case, train); we haven’t driven about much in our leisure time; we didn’t fly to Spain as planned in September.
5. I enjoyed some aspects of the first lock-down. The skies were clearer, you could hear nature better, it was so peaceful. I liked having weekends when I didn’t feel I ought to be somewhere else and fortunately everyone in my household got on. On the other hand, while I’m lucky to live in a pretty country town, doing the same walk every day gets on my nerves sometimes. Also, my husband treats every walk like a route-march so I take to occasionally going on my own, ambling along the river, absorbing the sounds and sights. I think generally my head was buzzing so much with so many conflicting and stressful things in 2020 that I found both creativity and spiritual awareness extremely hard. Learning to be still is something I find hard naturally but I’ll keep trying.
6. No chance on clearing the attic whatsoever. As we weren’t furloughed (which I’m glad about of course) we didn’t have the time in the week. At weekends, there was nowhere to take any stuff: the dump was shut and so were the charity shops. To add to everything already in the attic, when the country locked-down my daughter came home from university bringing all her stuff and then a couple of months later, my son came home after graduating, bringing all his stuff. I’m now worried that the odd creaking sounds in the attic are not the friendly household ghost, but the ceiling about to give way.

I note that I wished for you:

• Space and time for creativity in whatever form that works for you
• Space and time to connect with the world around you and maybe beyond you
• Feeling loved and able to give love
• The chance to wave goodbye to the things that dragged you down in 2019 and find things that lift you up in 2020
• That your joys might outnumber your worries and if not, you might find comfort through the worry
• That you might realise that your very existence is part of the jigsaw which makes the world tick even if that sometimes doesn’t feel blindingly obvious

I hope that somehow those came true despite everything, but I doubt I’m the only one who felt a greater than usual pleasure taking down my 2020 calendars marking a year which seemed simultaneously to go on forever and yet somehow not quite happen.

We have several calendars. 

The appointments one in the kitchen has a column for each person and we block out the weeks when we’re going on holiday. After March, all the blocked out weeks which should have been holidays mocked us. From January to August 2020 almost all the appointments were in my column and worried me sick. They were either reminders for me to take Mum to hospital or reminders that I needed to be taken to hospital myself.

Meanwhile, my writing calendar had writing goals and deadlines mapped out. I failed to meet every single one.

But… I’m tempted to keep both calendars, to remind me of worries which turned out to be manageable and that though plans went awry, the world is still turning. 

My 2021 writing goals calendar is a Moomin one, because if there’s a fictional world I wouldn’t mind moving to, it’s theirs. Moominmama, regardless of comets, floods, Moominpapa’s midlife crisis or Moomintroll’s adolescent moodiness remains perfectly turned out. She knows that if coffee and cake can’t solve the problem immediately, then waiting for a bit then offering coffee and cake probably will. She reminds me very much of my paternal grandmother.

So, I’m not making 2021 resolutions, I’m simply going to try and follow my grandmother’s (and perhaps Moominmama’s) philosophy: 

1. If everyone puts other people and the common good first, then no-one will ever come second. 
2. Only worry about things you can control and even then, don’t worry but plan.
3. If your plans go to pot, adapt. The world will not end. Go with the flow and you may end up somewhere even more exciting than you’d expected and if not – refer to no. 2 and 5.
4. Whenever you can, do something creative just for fun without necessarily judging the result.
5. If you can do it without breaking no. 1, treat yourself from time to time without guilt. Life is too short not to.

Happy New Year!

(And if you’re reading this between 4th & 11th January 2021, just to let you know that Murder Britannica will be on Countdown Deal on Amazon UK & US as hopefully the third in the series is on the way.)

Words and photograph copyright 2021 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.