If we can take a brief moment to appreciate my mother’s baking skills – and my photography skills -before I rattle on with the post, that’d be grand.

Just under a couple of weeks ago I completed my twenty-sixth turn around the sun, leaving behind the tenuous middle-ground of ‘mid-twenties’ and coming to terms, once and for all, with the dreaded 3-0 that is drawing ever closer.

I’m sure a lot of you will remember my pretentious, maudlin blogpost from 12 months ago where I lamented (well, whined) about how hard twenty-five hit me, with a side of COVID anxiety, career anxiety, world anxiety and general anxiety anxiety served up for good measure. Indeed, this is my third birthday since my chronic pain started, with the last two birthdays being also defined quite obliquely by the pandemic. This year was fairly low-key too; I’m not big on huge gatherings anymore, and so soon after a family bereavement a fuck-off party wouldn’t have felt right. But it was fine. We had fun.

And as I’m fairly sure I remarked last year, so much has changed, while so much has remained the same.

I’m physically able to do more… mostly. There are things out in the world I can do which I couldn’t do in 2020, or even 2021. There is still a great deal more I can’t, but there is progress. I’m also working in a full-time job once again, something that I wasn’t doing over 2020 and 2021, and something I didn’t think I’d be able to do.

I’m also out in the world a bit more. A bit. I’m seeing friends in the world a bit more often than in 2021, and this summer I’m even going to be in another play again, something I haven’t done or even countenanced since pre-pandemic.

Which makes what happened last week all the more ironic.

That’s right. Two and a half years, four jabs and a handful of false alarms later, the dreaded ‘Rona has finally got me. All things considered, I’ve been lucky; At the peak of the symptoms (right before I tested positive), the worst I felt were oppressive head-cold symptoms (plus one night of mild feverishness that paracetamol was able to blunt). The particular cocktail of fatigue, congestion and throat-rawness has thankfully diminished in the days since then, while never feeling any more severe than a nasty winter cold. I’m due to finish isolating very soon (fingers crossed for some negative LFT results finally) and then, fingers crossed, life can continue as normal as it was before.

Well. As normal as anything these days really is.

So, in conclusion, the pandemic is still in full flow, no matter how badly the government and media pretends it isn’t. (For real though, why have they stopped updating the figures on the BBC website? Can they just not be bothered anymore?) And I am yet another year closer to my thirties.

And I’ve done three fairly in-depth blogposts this month, with another two or three planned for June, so frankly I can’t really be arsed to say anything more.