Diary Entries

After another week of lockdown, we are still in pretty good spirits. The kids only drove me insane for one day this week, which I thought was pretty good, considering I’ve been keeping them in our house and not letting them roam the streets with their friends. The freezer is stocked with both healthy and unhealthy lunchbox treats for whenever school goes back face to face - that is super exciting. Kids missing their friends and I miss mine too. My house has always had an open door policy - seems very empty without my friends 😢 luckily my husband will drink with me 😂

One week into our third lockdown and the kids are still in good spirits. I’m coping much better this time around, having eventually learned my lesson: let things go, because every minute of every day does not need to be utilised. Sometimes it’s ok just to sit back, relax, and do nothing. Hope you are all coping well….

My mantra this past year is ,I am fortunate , I am lucky, I have what I need, Work and a home and the ability to live alone, To enjoy being alone and enjoy routine, which is what has kept me going mentally and physically I told myself I was fine , I was fine for a long time, I had a spell of being unwell and that gave me a wobble , just a small one but pride prevented me from saying I am not fine just this week but I knew it would pass and it did The hard bit was Jan 2021 , my brother a very vulnerable person died of covid in the UK, to be away from family was hard , to sit alone late at night watching a live stream of a funeral with just a bottle of wine for company and then to switch off and go to bed, was odd to say the least But one goes on as there is always some joy in each day to find , to smile about So now I hope that as we see a light a small light at the end of this tunnel of darkness, we can dare to hope to be filled with joy to enjoy the sun, the picnic , I know I am and I will and I will see family again Embrace

Honestly, I’m really nervous to get my covid shot. Both my parents have had theirs, and they have just opened it up to my age group. They way my parents’ bodies reacted after receiving the vaccine varied. I can’t really remember what happened with the first round; it feels so long ago when it really wasn’t. With the second time, mum had became a bit unwell; she was sleeping a lot of the time for the first few days after and we didn’t see much of her. Whereas with my dad his arm has been aching since he received it. He recently went to the doctors office to get it looked at; he thought that he pulled a muscle. I don’t actually know what they said; I don’t like to pay much attention to the outer world (I believe I was listening to music through my headphones. When I do that I pretty much ignore everything but the music). To conclude, I’m pretty nervous about getting my covid vaccine.

By the end of last year, I had sort of came to peace with covid. I was fine with it, used to it I guess. But then I had thought that it had all settled down, that we wouldn’t have to go back into isolation. Last year, we were in lockdown for about 3 months or so. We recently got out of lockdown again, for the first time this year. It was a lot shorter than last time, but it felt like forever to me. I missed my friends, who I haven’t know for a long time. I only met them this year when I sort of left my old friends. It was a difficult time, but that’s over now and it’s ok I guess. Things have changed so much, for best and for worst. That’s all for now, I guess.

Bubble In this purplish blue bruise-like bubble palpable and depressing there is no connection  no exchange of energy no empowerment  nothing is me just my voicemail  and the census  to remind me who I am once everything was me simple and knowable breath to breath nothing was wasted stacked in life’s  Tupperware containers free of barcodes bound tight with elastic-band embraces today, I saw a little boy blowing rainbow bubbles in the park, he was laughing at me with such childish glee that I found myself laughing back and suddenly it was a Banksy moment if only graffiti wasn’t banned

I am writing this as a Mum living, working and homeschooling in rural/remote NSW. As I sit and write this in lockdown, I still find it hard to fathom that a virus that originated on the other side of the world, is now affecting MY community. This is the community that I have grown up in. This is the community that I have chosen to live in and raise a family. I chose this place because I felt safe here. I feel like I belong here. I have red dust running through my blood. I can usually walk down the mainstreet and greet each person I meet by name, yet in lockdown I have never felt more lonely. I feel disconnected in my own community. At the beginning of this pandemic, I thought that our remoteness would be our best insurance policy against this virus, yet it is finally here. Covid has claimed the life of it's first victim in my town recently. All of a sudden the reality has hit close to home - it is here. It is real. I worry about my friends, my family, my community. The hardest thing of all is not having all the answers for my child. He asks: 'When will I go back to school?', 'When will I see my friends? When will we see our family again?'. It has been hard as a parent not to be able to provide a definitive answer, yet his questions are valid. When will life return to normal? And what will 'normal' look like in the future? I wish I knew. In the meantime, I just make sure I appreciate the small things. We are home together as a family more than ever. I can go outside and spend time in my garden. I can phone or Zoom family and friends. We are healthy and well. I try and focus on what I have, not what I don't have or can't at the moment. And ONE day....(hopefully soon)....life will return to 'normal'.

In March 2020 I was evacuated from Budapest before Hungary closed its border. Having spent 4 days in Budapest a city in a state of emergency I returned to 14 days of quarantine where I bemoaned the trauma of the experience and the outrageous cost. The failure of DFAT in issuing inadequate warnings as only 'unsafe for tourism'. This enabled travel companies to endanger consumers allowing them to travel into a pandemic knowing they would never complete their trip instead of being obliged to cancel. There was no concern for our safety by either the government or the travel industry. Our losses were refused by the insurance industry, not even a partial refund of the premium. Now more than two years after paying for a trip I never completed I remain out of pocket thousands. In the cruellest twist of fate, my partner broke his neck in an accident in April. So 2021 has been devoted to his survival, surgeries, rehabilitation and ongoing recovery which I am told will take up to two years. He will not be travelling and the costs of his recovery continue to roll in. The corporation holding our funds whilst in receipt of JobKeeper could announce a new multimillion-dollar corporate sporting sponsorship backed by a multibillion-dollar private equity firm is able to keep our money and deny a critically injured man money that would help his recovery just because they can. How good is corporate greed?

I’m very pleased to be invited to submit a summary of my Covid experience. I want to tell it from the perspective of being many years retired and long married to my husband David. Being already retired meant that many of the restrictions have impacted less on us than on young people to whom we feel very indebted. Covid has meant that we have spent more time together, just the two of us, than at any stage since we were married 51 years ago. And it has brought us even closer together. One of my mantras is that our marriage has survived over such a long time and having lived in several countries because of how different we are. United in our values and our devotion to our children and to community we look at the world through different lenses. David is an engineer. I was a teacher. He is much “bigger picture” than me. Through the lockdown experiences of Melbourne and Sydney (where we live) he has watched the daily press conferences and kept daily records of cases and deaths and trends. He has wanted to talk about The Virus, a lot. And we did. However, I came to the point where I could no longer talk about it at length. Some time back we came to the point of moderating our conversations to better honour the point of view of the other. At this stage as restrictions are due to be lifted (dangerously and prematurely, as we agree) I’m just wishing for “it all to be over”. Whatever that might mean, and as so many of us are saying. I have concentrated through a narrower gaze. Friends and family, our children and grandchildren who are scattered over our wide brown land. None of them in Sydney. Accepting not seeing people but revelling in the technology that allows lots of communication. Texting and emailing, sharing photos and articles, occasional phone calls and FaceTime etc, webinars and the like. “The world in the palm of my hand!” Counting our blessings and staying as positive as we can. During all this we had the privilege of helping a young Afghani friend get his wife and child out of Kabul. That has helped put everything into perspective. We did that jointly. There is much to be celebrated.

Things are moving, but in the wrong direction for me. I walked out of my casual High School teaching job at the end of June 28th and was met with a chorus of goodbyes on my way out " Thanks, See you next term, Happy Holidays! That night 1a 2 week lockdown began. I thought 2 weeks is OK. We can do this. It extended and got increasingly tighter and stricter. I started selling all my excess items online with great success. People were grateful I had something they couldn't buy since shops were closed. When school term began again, I got the total of only 1 full day and 1 half day teaching work via zoom for the whole term. Then I was told I needed to be fully vaccinated by November 8 or lose my job- A job I had done my whole life for decades, effectively teaching the children of my first students as a rookie teacher in the 1980s. None of that mattered. There's a desperate shortage of teachers like me who can manage the toughest students others couldn't. Who could teach all subjects and had done so since the 1980s. None of that mattered. I can't get vaccinated yet as I have several serious underlying health conditions, which is why I went to casual teaching. My boss asked me to please look into an exemption. I didn't qualify because the criteria is so narrow. The students will miss out as I know many other teachers who will also be out of work in the next few weeks. The shortage will force these students to be even further behind in their learning and to have to adjust to yet another new face and personality. The scars this year's lockdown will leave on us all will be long lasting.