Turning to coffee to wring creativity out of my brain
Holocaust Memorial Day goes online
NEW year’s resolutions appear to have gone out the window this year, earlier than ever. Normally I’ll be about a couple of weeks into February before I admit defeat and realise no, I’m never going to be able to run a marathon or even just be more productive. This year though, it feels a bit like ‘What’s the point?’
No-one I know has committed to a resolution and I can’t fault them for it. It feels like a year of our lives has been stolen from us and the thought of forcing ourselves to be fitter better versions of ourselves, to sit about the house, just seems a bit like self-flagellation.
I have thought, on occasion, that I’d love to exit lockdown like an Adonis, having packed on about four stone of muscle and gained superhuman levels of fitness as a result of having nothing else to do. Show the world that I’ve used all the spare time wisely. Instead I’ve grown ever more unfit and ever more unproductive.
To achieve a new year’s resolution, it often makes you miserable – in my own experience anyway. I wish they were a bit more exciting.
Look at Celtic, for example. Their resolution appears to be to try and wind up the fans as much as possible. As wound-up as I am, I can’t help but think the board are probably having some laugh at our expense and on some level I think I respect it.
I imagine that while I’m watching the games on my laptop through my virtual season ticket, Peter Lawwell can see me through the camera and he roars with laughter as I pace about the living room, pulling my hair out and screaming at the players.
A common resolution among writers is to try and drink less coffee.
In my opinion, we should try and drink more. It’s seven in the morning as I write this and I’ve downed two coffees in the last half an hour to try and wring some creativity out of my brain.
You can be the judge of whether that’s worked or not. As I’m writing this, I’m trying to conceive of a way to hook some coffee up intravenously to see if it makes me write more.
If I have too much, it feels like my bones start to vibrate. It’s class. The more I drink, the more productive I become but it also causes me to become more stressed.
Smoke comes off my fingers as they dance around the keyboard but then I start to panic for no reason which is not so class.
Drinking more coffee should lead to me completing a very real resolution I have, the same one I’ve made for the last three years, which is to finish writing my new book.
In the process, I’ll also find out how much coffee a human being can consume before they spontaneously combust, die on the toilet pan, turn inside out or a combination of all three.
A very earnest suggestion I have for a new year’s resolution for us all is to try and be less bored. We’re all stuck inside, socialising is illegal and there’s only so much of our own company we can stand.
If you went back in time and told someone from, say, the 1960s that in the future we have a device in our pocket which can access the entire history of the human race and all the knowledge we’ve accumulated over millennia as well as tellies that have access to every programme and film ever made without even mentioning the almost infinite supply of content on YouTube but somehow we still quite often get bored, they’d think we were at it.
They’d also think we were at the wind-up if we told them about the current pandemic and how it’s been handled by those in charge but that’s another column for another day.
I’m generally fine when left to my own devices but recently I’ve definitely been feeling the effects of lockdown boredom.
It’s hard to relax now, I’ll stick on one of my favourite films and find myself drawn to my phone to read stats about the pandemic or something equally grim.
A lot of my pals find themselves feeling restless but also tired, stuck in a limbo where there’s nothing you can do to make yourself feel more at peace.
Boredom can be a killer, but there is always something you can do to make yourself feel better and alleviate it, at least a wee bit, it can just be difficult to figure out what it is.
With everything that’s happened over the last year, with everything you might have been through, all you really have to do is keep getting by.
There’s no point punishing yourself with demanding resolutions and beating yourself up when they fall by the wayside. You’ve made it this far and you know what? You deserve to spoil yourself.
Make it your resolution to look after yourself and say well done, because you’ve earned it.
AUSCHWITZ survivor Tova Friedman had hoped to mark Holocaust Memorial Day by taking her eight grandchildren to the site of the former Nazi death camp in Poland, but the coronavirus pandemic prevented the trip.
At the young age of six, she was instructed by her mother to lie absolutely still in a bed at a camp hospital, next to the body of a young woman who had just died.
As German forces went from bed to bed shooting anyone still alive, she barely breathed under a blanket and went unnoticed.
Days later, on January 27, 1945, she was among the thousands of prisoners who survived to greet the Soviet troops who liberated the camp.
While commemorations moved online for the first time, one constant is the drive of survivors to tell their stories as words of caution.
Friedman’s warning about the rise of hatred was part of a virtual observance organised by the World Jewish Congress.
Other institutions around the world, including the AuschwitzBirkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, Yad Vashem in Israel and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States, also had events online.
Across Europe, the victims were remembered and honoured in various ways.
In Austria and Slovakia, hundreds of survivors were offered their first doses of a vaccine against coronavirus in a gesture both symbolic and truly lifesaving given the threat of the virus to older adults. Meanwhile, Luxembourg signed a deal agreeing to pay reparations and to give back looted art to Holocaust survivors.
The presidents of Israel, Germany and Poland also delivered messages of remembrance.