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My Coronavirus Diary - December: A Merry Christmas to all!

12/31/2020

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My last video diary for the year. And probably for always. Thank you for listening. Go well and stay safe.
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Music I listened to in 2020

12/29/2020

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This is not a definitive list and it's not in any particular order, but these are the tracks I kept coming back to all year.  I also listen to a lot of "wallpaper" YouTube channels and have listed my three favourite ones.  The Blade Runner soundtrack turns up on every list I'll ever do.  I've probably listened to it more than any other piece of music.  It helps me to get through those boiling hot summers that lay waste to my soul.
If you want to listen to any of these, just copy and paste into YouTube.  Or Google.  Or Spotify.  Or whatever.  I mean, you know, it's not rocket science and all that.
If I had to pick one, it would be Rebel Heart.  I had the misfortune to suffer a fangirl crush at the start of the year and this song glued itself to my synapses, particularly the line "Why do I keep dreaming of you."  (Because you're super sexy and gorgeous, perchance?!)  The pandemic pretty much killed off any romantic dreamings but the memory of it is still very sweet.

  1. Rebel Heart by First Aid Kit
  2.  The Sound of Silence by Disturbed
  3.  Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
  4.  Yulunga (Spirit Dance) sung by Lisa Gerrard
  5.  On the nature of daylight by Max Richter (used in “Arrival”)
  6.  Long, long time ago from “Pan’s Labyrinth”
  7.  Extreme Ways by Moby (from “Jason Bourne”)
  8.  PotatOS Lament from Portal 2 OST Volume 2 (game)
  9.  Soothing Relaxation (YouTube channel)
  10.  Nature Healing Society (YouTube channel)
  11.  Aura Relax (YouTube channel)
  12.  Blade Runner OST
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Small moments of joy in 2020

12/28/2020

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  1.  Birds singing on St George’s Gardens
  2.  My daughter passing her resit
  3.  Walking down to the river at dawn
  4.  Discovering Dark
  5.  Discovering The Mandalorian
  6.  Re-reading old favourites
  7.  Reading Sue Grafton’s alphabet books in order
  8.  Compiling a new collection of short stories
  9.  Forgetting that I’d already done a huge edit on my Very Big Novel at the start of the year and that I didn’t have much more work to do to hammer it into shape
  10.  Drinking coffee
  11.  Having at least one person to hug
  12.  Great Tits eating peanuts from my hand
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Learning how to daydream all over again
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​This year has been less of a wash-up than I thought

12/5/2020

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Today I begin the brand new edit of a gigantic novel I have edited several times.  I’ve written about this novel here many, many times.  In another blog, I might even go and have a look at all those old posts to see what I’ve written!
 
But today I want to pat myself on the back – not because I’m starting a major piece of work, but because I’ve done more this year than I’d thought.  I’d quite forgotten that at the start of the year, I did a HUGE edit of this novel.  I chopped and chopped and pared down and whittled and rewrote bits and rethought Part 3 and gave it more life and really, really worked my arse off.  I even made notes for what was to be the last edit – not a proofreading-type edit, but an actual rewrite-type edit, in which I sit down and rewrite the whole novel (with the most recent draft open next to me) so that the words feel fresh and new on the page as they come out my fingers, so to speak.  I even made notes.  I made pages of notes.  I told myself what to do. 
 
I even gave it a name:  The Killer Edit.
 
And then I did what I needed to do:  I walked away from the novel so that when I came back to this killer edit, I’d feel fresh and raring to go.  Which, amazingly, is just how I feel!  This is a HUGE project.  I’ve been working on this novel, on and off, for bloody years.  After the year I’ve had with writing failures, I feel ready for this enormous challenge.  I want to be consumed by its problems and find ways of fixing it up!
 
What gets me is when I last worked on this novel:  it was March.  Yep.  March this year.  Just as Covid19 began to raise its head.  Just as this new word was added to our vocabulary.  I last modified the notes for my Killer Edit on the 6th of March.  It doesn’t seem that long ago.  But it also feels like a whole lifetime.
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