Jacqui Merrington on Friday

A year that brought sorrow and value

Read Jacqui’s column every week in the Western Morning News

DEAR 2020, I just wanted to write you a little note to say thank you. You’re not likely to get very many of these, so I thought it was especially important to say a few words before you disappear off on December 31, cackling to yourself about the mayhem you’ve left behind.

You’ve brought a year of death, destruction and sadness. You’ve brought fear and introspection. You’ve been a year most of us would like to forget for so many reasons that I don’t want to talk about here. Covid has taken our friends, our families, our livelihoods and it has changed many our lives beyond recognition. But you’ve also made life smaller and quieter, and for that I want to say thank you.

Thank you for forcing us all to slow down and reset our lives. The week before lockdown, I travelled 2,000 miles, leaving home at 3am to drive to the airport, jump on a plane, spend three days in conferences and training rooms and get back at midnight three days later. I got hardly any sleep, no exercise and saw very little of my children.

And then everything stopped. For the first time in our lives, the country went into lockdown and for months we barely left our homes except for our one hour of allocated exercise time each day.

Thank you for the chance to homeschool my children. I may not have been the best teacher. Juggling 12 meetings a day while home-working with maths lessons and science experiments was more than a little challenging, but I loved that time with my girls, and mum’s failed science experiments have become legendary.

Thanks for reinforcing a sense of community. Our lockdown started by making and delivering cards offering help to all our neighbours. We’ve become friends with people on our street. I’ve become part of a community that I never had time to really get to know.

I’m now a mum who casually strolls to the school gate in the morning, instead of racing down to breakfast club or running to the childminder’s, late and frazzled. And I’m a mum who loves taking kids to after-school clubs – because I can.

Thank you for our daily exercise. Lockdown 1 was defined by our family walks in the sunshine. Every day we’d go out for an hour for a walk, because that’s all we were allowed to do.

We found trails and tracks and caves and woods and rope swings and streams we never knew existed. Every day was a new adventure.

Lockdown 2 was a contrast. The evenings were dark, the air was cold and it was often wet and miserable.

And, yet after minimising life in lockdown, I had the energy and the motivation to get outside. I started running again and braved the cold river for what has now become a daily wild swim. Never have I appreciated the changing colours, nature, our environment and space as much as I have this winter. And I no longer care if it’s cold or if it’s wet. It’s not bad weather, it’s just different.

Thank you for the food. Where once Friday night might have been spent at the pub or a restaurant, now a curry night at home has become as much of a treat, often with a takeaway from one of the brilliant industrial estate chefs who have adapted to a completely new food market in lockdown. Saturday morning is baker day and my daughter now insists on making a cake every weekend. It’s a highlight of her week – and ours.

Thank you for a holiday that we’ll always remember. We didn’t get to go abroad but we had the best socially distanced little holiday we could have had, driving a camper van round Cornwall.

And, finally, thank you for my family. Despite spending almost every single day in our house, with no outdoor space, juggling work and life, we’ve loved this time together.

You’ve taught us that, when the crap hits the fan, we can not only survive it but thrive in relative isolation. And I’m so lucky to live in the same county as my mum and my sister so I can see them too, when bubbles allow.

2020, you may have tried to create chaos, but you actually created some calm too. You’ve given us time. You’ve taught us the value of many things we took for granted for far too long. You’ve replaced life’s extremes with a more stable contentment – at least for those of us lucky enough to not have been directly impacted by Covid-19. You’ve made life smaller – and in many ways, better.

All in all, you’ve given us a year to remember – for good and bad. And, while we’ll look back on this year with sadness in years to come, we’ll also have the memories of a year that was remarkable in positive ways too – and the stories to tell.

Nevertheless, I look forward to raising a toast to see you off at the end of the month, on what will presumably be the quietest New Year’s Eve in living memory.

And while I hope your successor will be a whole lot kinder, I also hope we’ll hang on to the quiet and small things that made 2020 special.

We’ve become friends with people on our street. I’ve become part of a community that I never had time to really get to know