In all my walking years, I cannot recall a Dark Season which has passed as rapidly as this last one did, seemingly come and gone in about half the time that they'd normally take, and that has to be in part due to effectively going to ground completely after the end of 2021's open season, taking a well earned rest that rapidly turned into an extended period of isolation - hibernation as the risks posed by the Omicron wave of the Covid pandemic washed over ahead of Christmas, when all focus fell upon having a normal sort of Festive Season before we embarked on 2022's journey. I can't place how we managed to get January to shift through so quickly though, as it's always the month of the year that feels like it's over six weeks long, but this one has flushed through in no time too, come and gone rapidly after getting in our necessary weekend of social interaction at its start while toiling through a busy month at the hospital which never gave me the opportunity to feel bored, with the sunshine returning in the evenings with almost indecent haste, all combining to make our passage from Samhain to Imbolc, via the festivities of Yule, almost bizarrely short. Maybe it helps to find distractions to pass the time away, and becoming a moon watcher in 2022 has helped with that, as I've never quite been familiar with its phases and location in the sky through its orbits, and this has been a particularly good month for watching it wax and wane, awhile taking an interest in seeing it in its crescent and gibbous forms, revealing it cratered features and many mares when contrasted in shadow, around the appearance of January's full moon, the Wolf Moon, which I can only hope every howled at on the evening of the 17th. Now having a decent idea of where to look for it in the mornings and evenings, that can be fitted in around a renewed engagement with a bit of astronomy, an interest of mine that has become very minor over the the last decade, and the month has also been spent spying Jupiter in the evenings during the early going, while chasing Venus in the dawning skies later on, both repeating the reality-altering experiences of my youth when I first regarded them with binoculars, namely spotting the former's system of Galilean moons across the vastness of space, and seeing the latter resolve as a crescent showing it as a planet, and not just a bright star in the morning sky.
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| The Wolf Moon, from Leeds Station, 17/01 |
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| Jupiter and the Galilean Moons, 07/01 |
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| The Crescent of Venus, 21/01 |
So what are we looking forwards to with the coming year, is the other obvious thing to ponder as we face down our eleventh season of walking, due to open up for 2022 next weekend, not quite in the grip of the pandemic conditions which slowed the start of 2021, but still in the air as we start out, thinking of how to moderate our behaviour for the remainder of the winter months at the very least, before we open things out as we head into Spring and Summer, looking for somewhere to put down miles away from the shadow of the Pennines, where the last three years have regularly dwelt. I can at least report that I haven't come up lame yet, as walking with a stick at all times has now become a feature of my daily walking, though care will have to be taken through the coming year, as my right leg still isn't sitting right, with soreness and stiffness in my knee being something to work around now after 12 weeks of relative inactivity, and all future wandering will have to be weighed against the risk of general wear and tear worsening, or coming up against a sudden breakdown, meaning that easier trails will be a must. I can consider myself adequately prepared, having dug out my knee support for where I'd buried it, acquired a new pair of medium-weight trainers for general use to allow my other pair to go back into exclusive walking use, and having also gotten some new gear to add to the pile, new Cragghoppers trews and Berghaus vest in a new style after a decade of almost exclusive use of the venerable Tech Tee 2.0, coming my way this Christmas from My Sister and her family, for which I'm insanely grateful. And finally, there's this thing, this blog that has stopped being a fun way of recounting my travels and became my creative albatross as a desire for ever-more detailed descriptions gotten snarled up with poor time management and a diminishing mental focus, resulting in me needing to shed something from my activity pile, and thus found itself sacrificed as being too great a pressure on my time, but not completely cast aside, for now, as I've promised to see it through to the end of my fifth decade, by which time I'll have attained all of my 5,000 miles walking targets, and good few beyond them, and might well start thinking up some new things to do during my 50s.
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| also, New Gear for 2022! |
So where will we be travelling, you might ask, now that we can hopefully look forward to a year that isn't partially constrained by covid lockdowns or restrictions, where we might be as free to travel as we were back in 2019, fleet of foot and fancy free once more, and I think I might have dropped enough hints by now, either obliquely or directly, as the absent direction of travel from my experience field ought to be obvious to even the casual reader after considering where I've spent my days over the bulk of the last five seasons:
- The seasonal intent is to focus my attention to the east and south, across the bulk of Wakefield district, which hasn't been visited in detail since 2015.
- Early Season will feature the trails to the south and east of Leeds, east of Wakefield and around the Five Towns, as we create a framework to hang the year on.
- Beyond that, trails will be chosen as our focus tightens, knowing that there's a lot to see in the lowermost Aire valley, and along the reach of the Don valley.
- That means looking to extend the experience field in a long arc that extends, east from Selby to Goole, southeast to Doncaster via Thorne and Hadfield, and moving on south through South Yorkshire to plausibly include include Conisborough and Swinton, or even getting as far as Rotherham and Sheffield.
- Spring hopefully will allow us some Jollies, and I've still got two circular trails in the Pennines on my to do list, both cast to the wind during 2021.
- Travel to Leicestershire should allow for some free roaming in the county, unbound by marked trails or planned treks for the first time since 2018.
- Travel to Lancashire looks likely again, to hopefully lay down a route or two with My Sister and her increasingly teen-aged family, for the first time in three years.
- and finally, there's the reminder to revive the social aspect to my world that I always seem to neglect, to make use of the support bubble that I still have in Calderdale, rekindle a few local relationships that have gone to seed over the last couple of years, and to make some plans to step out into the wider sociable whirl that hasn't been seen since 2019 (indeed, my first nights out in an absolute age already planned for April and I am really looking forward to them).
2022 Total: 0.0 miles
Up Country Total: 4821.7 miles
Solo Total: 4953.1 miles
5,000 in my 40s Total: 3878.5 miles
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Pandemic Thoughts: January 2022
We transition into the fourth(!) calendar year to be blighted by the spread of the Coronavirus and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and it looks like thing have no intention of settling down or getting boring any time soon, as 2022 starts with a month that seems insanely full of activity, almost to the point of not knowing where to start when it comes to recounting it all, and thus the best place to start must surely be the beginning, as a week's cover at the LGI site has me experiencing exactly what Covid surge planning involves in the Leeds Teaching Hospitals trust. To get two extra wards prepared means several clerical departments have to be shooed out of the old wards they've been occupying for a while, which induces a special king of chaos as two groups of clerks have to be evacuated at very short notice and end up as the MRL's temporary squatters as a result, with the understanding attached that they'll be around for a while as even if the bed space isn't needed for Covid patients, the absolute best efforts will be made to retain it in order to treat the 6 million elective cases that have backlogged in the NHS system. As the Omicron wave continues to surge in the wake of Christmas, it doesn't feel like the best time to be doing a week of our ward paperwork collections, especially when there's a New Year to be celebrated with My Good Friends in Calderdale, with them having returned from a psychologically necessary break away from home in Florida for the festive season, but we all feel secure enough having kept our social whirls otherwise limited so that we might enjoy our two nights of eating, drinking and social activity, and setting the world to rights as they look to work their way to their third school year that has been irredeemably blighted by Pandemic conditions. I've said before that I do not envy them in their choice of profession, as schooling has become even more fraught thanks to Covid than even hospital work, as testing and herding kids is an even more complex matter than trying to get adults to engage in self protection, as infection rates have risen by far the highest among children, leaving teachers more exposed in many ways than nursing staff, amply demonstrating why they needed to be far away from it all, and in a wholly different climate, for Christmas, a need that I understand completely.
Returning to work on St James's site, after being away for the two post-festive weeks, has me realising that all sorts of fun and games have been missed, as the system of regular Lateral Flow testing recommended to the staff, couple to everyone's seasonable business, has resulted in many staff across our four offices to be found to be Covid positive, after having had an extraordinary run of not having had anyone get sick, to the point of losing 15 total to infection, enforced isolation or to other winter ailments by the middle of the month, making it feel like bullets have honestly been dodged. It feels to me like everyone's guards being dropped across late December had exactly the consequences that could have been predicted, to the point that the trust reports that it has lost almost a thousand staff to illness and isolation, nearly breaching the 10% marker that would leave the hospitals dangerously close to the point where there isn't enough staff to provide functional service, the other half of the pandemic problem that doesn't get the attention that deaths from disease gets, as health care struggles because there aren't sufficient people available to administer it (This had been noticed during the closing weeks of last month elsewhere, as TPE suffered a shortage of train crew die to infection and isolation, coupled to an ongoing labour dispute, which resulted in the cancellation of many of its services, including mine on the commuter run). The overall effect seems to have been to make it feel like it's only going to be a matter of time before everyone gets ill, though repeated testing still shows me up as continually negative, despite feeling like I ought to be getting sick, with the apparent manifestation of Omicron closely resembling a January cold, and I've no idea at all why the DoH seems to keep trying to reduce the isolation period in these circumstance, as it's unnecessarily confusing (personally witnessed) and it's not like disease can be negotiated with, to become un-infectious after only 5 days (down from 14!). The constant testing does its thing though, getting people out of circulation before they get ill (which they do, in most cases), though the looming shortage of testing kits makes you worry about ongoing personal safety for the future, even if the Omicron variant seems to be the weakest of all the Covid variants so far, as it still has the capacity to adversely affect people with multiple co-morbidities even when vaccinated (encompassing such mundane conditions as obesity, pregnancy, diabetes or being a smoker), meaning alertness has to be kept in the front of the mind, for all the remaining winter months at least.
I do find myself wondering if the folks who got themselves the contact for providing testing kits now regret having acquired it, thinking they were onto a nice little earner for a few months back in the day and now finding themselves saddled with the need to provide an essential service that multiple sectors are absolutely reliant on, a thought that rings truer when you find that they aren't even going to be bulk supplied to the NHS for much longer, meaning testing will either become a free for all, or will be tragically neglected going forwards. You can only hope that the crest of the Omicron wave, and its relatively low fatality rate are going to prove to be the last emphatic point of the pandemic, as it seems like normality seems to be resuming in many parts of the world, but not in good ways, as sabres are rattled internationally over a perceived threat of Russia planning to invade Ukraine, or watching those who would govern us arguing over a £12 billion tax rise to fund shortfall in NHS care funding, when a cost of living crisis is on the horizon due to the rise in wholesale gas prices. Clearly a time for dynamic leadership, which arrives when our own Prime Minister is embroiled in controversy about regular parties being held by the Downing Street staff, all across the periods when Lockdown and social distancing rules where in place over the last two years, as if the rules dispensed form on high didn't actually apply to those in power, which makes you think he's either passively ignorant or actively malicious, as other start to park their metaphorical tanks on his lawn. He's not going anywhere yet through, despite an official investigation being launched and the police getting involved, as when the anger seems to be reaching a crescendo, his immediate response is to announce the ending of the so called Plan B restrictions, meaning an end to mandatory mask-wearing again as well as limited legally-enforced working from home, as if he were hijacking the news agenda with a popular action that might mollify those who might attempt to force him from power, and to distract those who might regard his apparent dereliction of duty as matter worthy of his resignation, having acted in such a fashion in the face of a crisis that has killed in excess of 160,000 people.
February 1st EDIT: And this is why you don't share your monthly thoughts a day early, as we reach another berserk crescendo on the 31st as the initial findings of the official report were published, condemning "a serious failure" in the standards of leadership, while also stating that a string of gatherings were "difficult to justify" in the circumstances, which did not provoke a resignation or meaningful act of contrition from the PM, as he instead took it upon himself to announce a review of the NHS's Vaccination as a condition of employment scheme. >sigh< I'm sure this is going to run and run, just like everything does these days, as the fallout of the pandemic lasts longer than the spread of a novel disease ever could, confirming that the stupidity unleashed over the last few years is going to just keep on going, deflecting attention from the matters that need it and inflating the amount of stupid bullshit floating around, probably rendering 2022 no better than the one that preceded it, regardless of what we might do to involve or distract ourselves across the coming months.
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