There’s much chatter about how lockdown is a great opportunity to expand your knowledge - learn to code, take up knitting, memorise the complete London Underground map - but unless you live alone and/or aren’t working at the moment, these ideas do little besides make you feel you have in some way failed to make the best of a bad situation.
Learning a language is not for me, unless someone is offering a dictionary that translates what children actually want to know when they come over and say things like ‘Where’s that round thing with the pointy bits on that was red but then wasn’t?’
And I have only read about three books in the last year since a) I started working from home and stopped commuting and b) the combination of what I assume is age and having a(nother) baby means I now average two sentences a night before I’m asleep.
However, even if you’ve not started studying for an MBA this month, goals are still really important, however small. As a rule I’m just happy to get to the bottom of the ironing pile, but we have been setting more targets than usual recently.
At the start of this I said I wanted to teach Bella to read. We’re doing ok, but I’m no Tiger Mum. I’m quickly remembering how painful it was getting Henry through those first few months of reading.
Me: “C-a-t spells….?”
Him: “Bad?”
Me: “No, try again.”
Him: “Bat?”
Me: Noooo… Ok, it’s not a dog it’s a….?”
Him: “Kitten?”
Me: “Oh God forget it, it says cat.”
As far as Henry’s education is concerned, I am focused solely on him still being able to read (which, thanks exclusively to his excellent class teachers, he can now do competently) and have vaguely legible handwriting by the time he goes back to school. Anything else is a bonus.
Day-to-day we set a rule that everyone had to get washed and dressed before 9am. That’s working most of the time, plus by not enforcing it at the weekend it makes those two days seem a little more relaxed than Monday to Friday.
Henry has started learning chess on the suggestion of a friend of ours who teaches school-age children to play. We signed him up for Chess Kid, a website that teaches small people chess (did I need to spell that out?) and Andy and I have joined in. We now both understand the rules and play games online, which is fun but is also giving us unwanted glimpses into our personalities at the same time.
I am reminded that I’m completely unsuited to games of strategy and patience. I excel at neither. And am therefore crap at chess. Andy is taking a far more male approach to it (on account of how he is a man) and is on the verge of becoming obsessive about beating the computer. No matter how many times I remind him it’s a computer and he is a beginner, the muttering and sweary sighing is showing no signs of letting up.
So that's chess.
I also tapped into Andy’s single-minded refusal to be beaten by suggesting that he not only get back into running - he was once a regular at half marathons and is one of those annoying people who can go out for the first time in a year and breeze through 5km without breaking a sweat - but challenged him to 100 runs in 100 days. Day 5 and he’s on track. If you'll excuse the pun.
Of course that means I have had to show willing, so have also committed to some form of daily exercise for the next 100 days. More than once I have found myself musing on whether a tummy tuck might just be easier.
Finally - and this will make you laugh - after discovering that two friends in the village are flautists, I’ve talked myself into taking up my flute - some 20 years after I last played - and seeing how badly I can humiliate myself as the weak link in some kind of band camp trio. (You have no idea how many times I have re-written that sentence so it didn’t invite puerile comments from certain quarters. You know who you are.)
And then of course the blog itself is a goal. Or a self-made millstone around my neck. It’s probably blindingly obvious that I do struggle to find stuff to talk about here and there. Yet I know I’d just be annoyed if I didn’t keep it up.
So whatever your goal - be it learning Hungarian, achieving a three minute plank, or completing 1,000 hours of Zoom calls by the end of lockdown - keep going. By setting yourself targets - however small - your mental health will thank you for it.
I, for one, will not let anyone take away my dream of toned arms, beating the chess bots and not being fired from a voluntary music group.
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