A long Covid, or Over the Wall — Saturday 5th September 2020
By: Who Is Andrew Beattie
Tags: Journaling, Lockdown 2020, Journal, Diary, Lockdown Diary

I’m sat on the chair in the bedroom. The cats are fighting somewhere behind me and Max is lying in my bed. It’s bedtime for him and so I’ve put on a bedtime story podcast. He’ll be asleep in 5-minutes.

And then I’ll head downstairs to make sure everything is cleaned down and the house is set for the weekend.

Tomorrow morning, my Dad, Max and I are off to York for a couple of days and my Mum is coming here to spend the weekend with the kittens.

I’m excited to set off in the morning. At about 11 am, we’ll be somewhere else. A somewhere else with a Viking museum and little old streets and quaint things and new things and a shop that sells nice homewares that I saw on the internet earlier. And I can’t wait to be somewhere else.

I wish that somewhere else was Boston. I’ve checked online every day for news about the USA changing its travel restrictions from the UK, but there hasn’t been any. One day there will be and then I’ll write about my impending trip to somewhere else and that somewhere else will be Boston.

If it’s anytime between now and next April, and I sincerely hope it will be, I’ll post it here.

But for now, I’ll post a picture of Max stood by the window with Nina behind him, and then an entry from my diary written (almost) this time last year.

My boy and one of my kittens.

Saturday 5th September 2020

I have a reasonably busy weekend ahead. In 30 minutes' time, at 9:30, I have a call with someone to discuss an article for Ethos, and 30 minutes after that I have my monthly Awesome Liverpool meeting to decide a winner of this month's grant. Tomorrow I have a community clean-up on the Rezzy.

Most of all, I’m excited to chat with Anna, to watch a film together later, to spend time with Max and play Mario Lego with him, and to play Outer Worlds on my Nintendo Switch. I’m hopeful of recapturing that feeling of contentment from last weekend. I could get addicted to that feeling. The joy of leisure time and a bit of peace of mind.

The Lego Mario set is one of a number of things Max has received this week. A new football kit, a new Pokemon rucksack and pencil case, a Transformers voice changing mask and Toy and a football. He has football boots coming, too. I feel a little bad for spoiling him, although the football boots were bought for him by my Dad and the bag by my Mum.

I intend to spoil Max with love and attention only between now and his Birthday and Christmas.

I had a good counselling session yesterday morning with Jeff and we spoke about a chapter closing and another starting. It feels like I’m at that stage of life now, almost at the turning of a page and the beginning of something new.

If I look back I can say that the start of this chapter started about five years ago. Fiona and I had just started working together and Max was due in December of that year. Amy and I decided that the amount of money that we’d need to live as a family and Fiona and I agreed to it. It was the moment I began earning a regular wage again after working for myself for a few years and existing mainly hand to mouth.

Max arrived in that December and so began the bit of my life where I am someone's Dad. At that stage, Fiona and I had started working on the work that would lead to the work we do today. If you’d have told me five years ago that we’d be working together on the projects we’re working on now, I’d have been delighted at that prospect.

A couple of years back, Fiona and I and a client, Erika, were sat discussing a idea for a project called Build Your Own Economy. We imagined a city-region-sized cooperative made up of socially-minded businesses and a pooled resource of money that they owned and could invest into one another. We also imagined that there might be events and projects in the different boroughs of the region that would stimulate new socially trading businesses — projects just like one we’re working on in Bootle at the moment, ‘the Festival of Ideas’ — and grow the base and potential membership to the cooperative. We also imagined a festival and a destination event that would celebrate the values of good and responsible business and would put Liverpool on the map as a destination for this stuff.

And here we are, two years on and working on the things. Things that by March next year will be alive and ongoing. A new festival done, a social business investment project launched and a project in Bootle finished, new businesses and projects started there, and a similar project launched somewhere else in the region, no doubt.

In the past five years, Amy and I got married and then divorced. We moved into this house and Max went to nursery. By March next year Max will have started school and I’ll be in a new home. A new start for him, and a new start for me.

Almost five years ago, I started going to see Jeff, my counsellor, every month. Once I started taking it seriously, I got more of an understanding of who I am and how I think. Of the type of values that I have, hold dear and respect in myself and other people. I’m a work in progress still, and that’s okay.

All of this has left me feeling wondering what comes next. If I sat down today and plotted the next five years, what might I want that to look like? What would I start tomorrow, or in March, and where might that get me?

What have I learned from the past five years? How do other people perceive me? What value do I bring to things?

All things to ponder, but not today. Today is for work and for Max and for Anna. And I’m not quite finished with this chapter yet, anyway.

This is part of a series of diary entries I wrote from April 2020 to April 2021. I’m posting them a year out from when I first wrote them. You can read the other ones I’ve posted here