July 12, 2021

Twenty Twenty (and half of Twenty One)

A late letter

This letter is to my boys, Roop and Jasp. I’ve started writing this half an hour after England lost the 2021 Euros and I’m upset. Me and your Mum have loved the last month watching the Euros. England have been brilliant and it’s given us some cheer after the awful covid situation. The last 18 months have been absolutely terrible because the whole world has been inflicted with Covid, the worst thing to happen in our lifetime. You 2 won’t really know a lot about it, Roop because you were 3 when it all started and J cause you were only born 3.5 months ago.

I’ve written a few letters so far for Rupert since he was born, and I promised that each year around Christmas time I would write another letter talking about what had happened over the last year. The holidays we’d been on, the progress Roop had been making, the music I’d been listening to, the movies I’d watched, the game’s I’d played. I.e. all the great things in life. The thing was Covid happened and even though I had some massive positives about the time, I was just so tired of talking and hearing about Covid that the thought of spending an hour writing a letter about it to you just put me off. I started the letter a few times, but after a few paragraphs gave up as I didn’t have it in me.

Bloody Covid, and Bloody Boris Johnson

I don’t know even now if I want to tell you about it, but I should tell you a bit about what I think and what we all did. The thing is, my opinions on Covid are very mixed. A lot of people have died in this country from it, but it’s very hard to understand the truth of what’s happened because the government have told a lot of lies. A good example of this is the fact that for the first half of the pandemic they counted Covid deaths as anyone who had died within a month of having a positive covid test. So if you died of a car crash a month after having covid you counted as death. This is obviously total nonsense. When they reduced it to 2 weeks they knocked 20 thousand off the deaths. How can you trust this behavior? Even without that, I’m split right down the middle in my opinion. Half of me thinks, “Well, vulnerable people are dying so of course we should try and help them”, but the other half thinks, “Why should people not be able to work and feed their families because some people who are already very ill/old might get an illness when they would likely die already?”. The way I think about this is: If my Grandad Ralph, my best and oldest friend, would have still been alive but still suffering from cancer, I would have been frothing at the mouth and shouting that people should be social distancing, self isolating etc. But if I was a guy with a young family and self employed and had no other income I would screaming that I needed to work and I didn’t give care about anyones Grandad, I just needed a house and food for my family. I have absolutely no idea what the future will say about Covid. The future basically says whatever the people at time think about it, but for me who has lived it, it has been total shades of gray with no right or wrong answers.

One thing I do know is that I absolutely hate the people in charge of our country: Boris Johnson / Priti Patel/ Dominic Raab. They are bad people. Priti Patel in particular is a really horrid woman who uses asylum seekers as a way to distract the masses from what her incompetent and ruthless Prime Minister is up to. Anyone I know who votes for the Tories will no longer be a friend of mine as I think it makes them a bigot and an ignorant pig. I really hope Labour replace Keir Starmer as their leader as they have no chance with him in charge. British politics is in a really depressing state right now, as it is in much of the world. For some reason (most likely the global recession in the late 2000’s and the immigration crisis a few years ago due to the Syrian war), the world has seen the rise of some really bad men in charge of big countries. Bolsenaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, Trump in the US, and at one point it even looked like the super racist far-right politician Marine La Pen was going to gain some power in France. Boris Johnson rode the back of this populist wave and even though he’s not as obviously evil as Trump / Bolsenaro, he is still a really scummy human being who cares nothing for the people of this country. He just wants power for himself.

Enough of politics though, I did say that I had some massive positives from the Covid situation. One of these was getting to spend all my time at home. I used to have to go into Manchester a few days a weel for work and I really didn’t like the commute. I had to leave very early for the train and I got back just in time to put Rupert to bed. I was then shattered and ended up going straight to bed. Commuting like that is no life, and when Covid hit I initially was really enjoying it. The first lockdown that happened is looked back by everyone as ‘the good lockdown’. That’s because the weather was amazing and everyone was trying to be positive even though they couldn’t see each other. Every day when I finished work we all used to go down to West Bradford bridge and play in the sand by the river. Rupert loved it, making sand castles and playing with his knights in the sand. I got really into running again and did a good run almost every day. I actually got my best ever 10k time of 48 minutes during the first lockdown. After that first lockdown everything opened back up for a while and it was surreal at first going to places. I remember the first time we went out for a meal at the Coach and Horses in Bolton-By-Bowland and it was so exciting but also strange to actually be in a place with other people. You can’t imagine what it was like in those first few months, to not go anywhere in all that time, and to not even see our family. It seems silly looking back on it but we were genuinely scared of the virus, because we didn’t really know much about it, or how badly it affected people. As time went on it became obvious that anyone under the age of 60 who had no health issues had nothing to worry about. I got it later in the year and it wasn’t too bad, I was a bit short of breath for a couple of days then I felt tired and a bit confused for a couple of weeks then I was fine. During the second and third lockdowns, we pretty much ignored the rules around not seeing people and started going to families houses etc. The reason for that was because the first lockdown really affected Rupert badly. Being such a social little kid who loved seeing grandparents, cousins, and aunties and uncles, suddenly not seeing anybody else for such a long time had a really bad impact. There were actually days when you would just wake up crying in the morning for no reason. It was obviously just affecting you’re mental health in quite a severe way. At the time me and your mum didn’t really clock what was going on we just thought you were going through an awkward phase. Looking back on it though now we should have realised. This is why during the second lockdown we ignored the rules the government set out and started visiting both sets of grandparents and all your aunty and uncles houses. In fact everybody we knew was ignoring the rules, and it was strange because on TV etc everyone was acting like the 2nd and 3rd lockdowns were just the same as the others, but then in reality everyone we spoke to who we knew and people I worked with just admitted that they were doing whatever they wanted. This doesn’t surprise me though considering how out of touch with reality the mainstream media and the government are.

[some pics of the first covid lockdown]

Baby Jasper

Anyway enough of that depressing stuff. Another great thing that came out of the pandemic was your Mum getting pregnant. We had been trying for a long time and it finally happened during Summer in 2020. Your Mum had a really hard pregnancy as she got this horrible thing called SPD and she also put a lot of weight on, but it was worth it when on the 1st April 2021 we got our little star Jasper Thomas Ormisher. And what a little star you are. Only 3 and a half months old and I’m absolutely fit to bursting with love for you. I don’t think there’s ever been a more lovely baby. All you ever do is smile. We wake you up in the morning and the first thing you do is give us a big grin. You’re also so pretty. Whenever anyone sees you they talk about your gorgeous eyes and then you crack your usual cheeky dimple grin and everyone melts. I think you are probably the best baby of all time and I can’t wait to see what you’re like when you grow up.

[pic of newborn jasper]

Also Roop, me and you are close. We are best buds. I’ll be honest, at 4 yrs old you are really hard work. We think you are ready for school because you are at that age where you constantly fight us and try to test boundaries. You spend most of your time shouting at me and your mum and we spend most of our time trying to be calm with you. However, when you aren’t being silly we see that you are a bright, confident, little leader. I have high expectations for you and I have a feeling that you’re going to do good things when you’re older. You have a big personality and a big confidence and those 2 things can get you a long way. You are starting school in 2 months and no matter how good you are school I’m pretty sure that whatever path you go down you’ll do well and I’ll try to help you along it.

[pic of me and Roop]

Stuff I did

As usual, I’ll tell you about some of the big things that happened for me and some of the things I was interested in over 2020 and a bit beyond.

My main thing from last year was I was able to massively get back into gaming. Due to me commuting a lot, since Rupert was born I didn’t have time to sit in front of the TV and play games a lot. I tended to play most things handheld on the Switch, and even though I played some great games over that time, I had missed out on loads of the big epics on the PlayStation. I realised early on in the pandemic that I could actually start playing some of these games and I caught up on a bunch of games such as Resident Evil 2 Remake, Sekiro, Last of Us 2, Spiderman, and many others. This newfound love of the PS4 also meant I was seriously excited about the new PS5 which was coming out. I saved up some money over the course of 2020 and I was really lucky to snag a launch day PS5. November 12th was a truly exciting day, my first console launch day since 9/9/99 when I got a launch day Dreamcast. I got the Demon’s Souls remake for it and I spent the next month completely obsessed and lost in that world. As well as getting the PS5 I also started collecting old consoles and games. These are all the consoles I bought since the pandemic started:

These are all my old favourite consoles that I have owned over the years, but sold to buy upgrades. These days I do like to replay old games and I’ve had some fun replaying Shenmue, Silent Hill 2, and a few others. As you can tell it has been a time of great gaming for me, so I haven’t really read a huge amount or watched a huge amount of movies. I think with all the horrible news around Covid I needed gaming and it’s ultimate form of escapism.

Holiday

One cool thing we managed to do during 2020, and a thing that eluded most people, was going abroad on holiday. We had 2 holidays cancelled due to lockdowns but during the space between 2 of the lockdowns we managed to go to Kos in Greece. It was October but the weather there was absolutely lovely. We had lots of fun playing in the pool and sitting in the sun round the pool. Rupert you had loads of inflatables and just wanted to constantly go in the pool even though the water was cold and your lips kept going blue. We really needed that holiday and this year we are going again at the same time to Majorca so fingers crossed that one is just as fun. Here are some pictures of us on the holiday:

[pics of kos]

Till the next letter

I’m really glad I finally wrote this letter after putting it off for so long. I’m going to try and do these a bit more frequently now as they are quite difficult to write when you’re summarising a whole year. I’ll maybe do one after a holiday, one after a birthday, etc etc.

Love you both
Dad

About this Post

This post was written by Daniel Ormisher.