Finding my funny bone

Phil: It’s very strange at the moment isn’t it?

Like most people, my mood has been very up and down recently. Every so often a wave of “the fear” comes over me and I’m pretty much useless.

(I will be ignoring any comments Nolan)

I’m worried about people I know becoming ill, or even worse. I worry that I might get ill. I worry about my job. I worry about the future – will there be any sort of economy left after all this? I worry how long it will be before things get back to something approaching normality. I worry that they might not.

Add into this worries about the day to day essentials of life such as buying milk and teabags and it’s not surprising that I’ve been struggling to find the enthusiasm to write anything.

Humans are adaptable though. The longer a situation persists, the more we find ways to work with it and make the best of things.

Panic buying in shops for example. The supermarkets have started to adapt. Shorter hours, desperately recruiting more staff to stack the shelves and deliver goods have removed the “all the shops are empty” story that most of the media have been running with. Heck, I even bought a pack of the rare toilet roll a couple of days ago, and I could have done the same yesterday.

(Yes, I know this makes me an ace hunter-gatherer and all the women looking at this are wondering if they should ignore my gormless photo at the top of this blog, instead forming an orderly queue…)

All being well, we’ll one day look back on these times with nostalgia and remember what we were doing during the great bog roll drought of 2020. I’m sure some rose-tinted spectacles will be donned by some.

However, I’m now finding it easier to write. I still worry, but perhaps not in such a paralysing way. Not so often anyway. The optimist in me looks for the promising news stories the media do their level best to hide in the scaremongering. I’m starting to see some chance to get back to writing stuff in the book, and that stuff being funny.

Fingers are crossed, but legs don’t need to be anymore.