One of the themes I've heard people talk about all year is how we all have more time to do stuff now because we've been locked down at home. I kind of see what they've meant, but it oddly hasn't felt like that to me because I've been working steadily all year - if you're meant to be working, that still only leaves the evening hours and weekends to catch up on TV shows and music and books.
Nevertheless, I have been watching and enjoying stuff all year long, despite my worry early in the lockdown that the isolation would get to me. Below are some of the things that have helped - in addition, of course, to my girlfriend, who I've effectively been living with since around August and without whom I'd probably have gone crazy:
Football podcasts
The thing that made the pandemic's early stages feel particularly apocalyptic was the way sports shut down completely at the same time that we all went into lockdown. And as the European soccer leagues went on hiatus from one week to the next, for the first time since World War II, the football podcasts found themselves without content - since they're obviously based on dissecting what's just happened and what's about to happen.
So I have to praise Football Weekly, from the Guardian, and Totally Football for how they dealt with the lack of games. Football Weekly spent a few weeks introducing the regular correspondents, like Spain correspondent Sid Lowe and polymath Philippe Auclair, all while trading in the usual nonsense between hosts Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning.
Totally Football, meanwhile, added two nice sections to their regular and European-focused shows. One was a football trivia tournament among the correspondents, while the other was a segment looking back at each season of the Champions League from its start in 1992. The latter was particularly fun, since some of my early football memories are of Champions League finals from the late 90s, so it was good to hear (for example) the 1998-99 season, where Manchester United won, re-evaluated with two decades' hindsight.
It's a shame that both shows stopped doing these segments when the games started up again, but a related plus was the fact that Football Weekly started doing its live shows online, which meant I was finally able to catch them. After years of hearing the hosts talking about them, I'm glad I got to log in and listen to the silliness live.
German football
When the football did finally start up again, the first league to come back was the Bundesliga, so I duly took this opportunity to catch up on the league all the hipsters love. The matches in those early days were pretty surreal, with rules against celebrating too closely and a ban on fans in the stadia. That latter meant that you could hear every kick and every swear, a state that I oddly miss. Playing without fan noise may have been odd but I appreciated the novelty.
YouTube
It feels a little weird to praise a whole big corporation, especially one that's so devoted to spreading misinformation without repercussion. But YouTube brought me a lot that I needed during the first few months of the pandemic, and so I have to thank them and their weird, weird algorithm for helping me exercise, take tours of London and solve fiendishly difficult sudoku.
The first thing I discovered, like a great many people inside and outside Britain, was Joe Wicks, the Body Coach. I started hearing about his PE with Joe sessions, but instead of doing those I started following along with his HIIT workouts, especially the low-impact, low-noise workouts he'd record in hotels (this is because I live on the top floor of my building and don't want to pound on my neighbors' ceiling; just too bad they're not as considerate and constantly make noise running around and slamming doors). Following Joe's workouts helped me stay fit when the gyms closed, and also helped add some structure to my Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The next was Joolz Guides, a series of guided walks around London that helped ease my homesickness for the city. As you can imagine I focused on the areas that I know well, like Hampstead, Shoreditch and the like - it really was the next best thing to being able to walk around (well, not quite - but I had no choice!)
The final thing I want to flag here is the Cracking the Cryptic channel, which features two British nerds doing brutally hard sudoku puzzles. The algorithm threw it up for me at random one day, so I checked it out and basically spent the next three months watching it whenever I needed to wind down. I'd even watch a short video before bed, because it was so satisfying.
Books on Kindle
Another big corporation, but I have to hand it to Amazon for making so many books so easily available. I bought about twenty books all year, most because they were heavily discounted, and read them voraciously. Many were of series I was already reading, others were new suggestions from people I follow on Twitter, but it all made me happy, especially because in the early days the bookstores and libraries were all closed.
Some notable favorites this year were The Mortal Word, book 4 of the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman; Das Reboot, a discussion of how the German national team worked to win the 2014 World Cup, as written by Totally Football correspondent Rafael Honigstein; as well as The Mixer and Zonal Marking, both by Totally Football correspondent Michael Cox on the evolution of tactics in the Premier League and in Europe. But there were a lot more good ones that I read in addition to those.
Uber Eats
Another one I feel a little uncomfortable praising, but I can't deny that it's been nice to get food delivered to me this year, particularly as cases surged and it became more risky to physically go to restaurants. My friend got me a voucher to Uber Eats for my birthday, and I took the opportunity to order in a bunch of stuff every week, whenever I got sick of the taste of my own cooking. My girlfriend also grew to appreciate it, so now we alternate between orders on different services when we feel lazy or just in the mood for some Shake Shack.
The MCU
I wrote about this earlier in the year, but I also took advantage of being on my own to watch (almost) all of the MCU movies again, in order. I appreciated some of them more on the second go, others less than before, but once again, it's hard not to appreciate how well the studio managed such a long, sustained streak of decent films over more than a decade. And it was just reassuring to come back each night to catch up on what Captain America or Iron Man or whoever was doing.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Another great discovery for the year, this time thanks to Netflix. It fit into the trend of recent years where I've found older cartoons that are layered enough for adults to enjoy, like the Bruce Timm DC shows of the 90s. And because its voice director was Andrea Romano, it became a thing for me every episode to pause and see how many big names lent their voices to the show (like, um, Serena Williams). I also recently went back to watch the emotional "Tale of Iroh" from second-season episode, Tales of Ba Sing Se, and it nearly broke me. I've moved on to Legend of Korra, which isn't quite the same, but it's nice to explore that world again.
Mario Kart Tour
Another one I've written about, but playing Mario Kart has been a nice way to spend time with my honey that wasn't just watching Netflix. It's a little later than the others, since I only started it in October, when we shifted to my place from hers, but I've had fun building up my karts and drivers, and learning the various courses. It's worth saying, as well, that my initial assessment still stands: the game personifies the dog-eat-dog nature of modern capitalism quite well...
Foothills Park
The final entry on this list is my local open air zone. It was actually closed for a while early in the pandemic, and when it did open, it did so only on weekdays, so that the first time I went was on an afternoon off in May. I've gone a few more times since it fully reopened, and it's just been so nice to walk in nature, feeling far from my house and the path I've beaten into the suburban streets around my neighborhood.
There are, of course, other places to walk, but it's the closest, so that I can take just a couple of hours to drive up and enjoy the scenery all to myself.
You'd think solitude is the last thing I'd want after this year, but more than anything I've appreciated all these items above for how well they took me away from my own four walls - even the YouTube exercise videos. I've been very lucky that I've been able to work from home and acquire everything I needed, without having to worry about finding childcare or entertainment for my kids, so my only concern (other than staying healthy) has been staying sane.
With luck, the vaccines trickling into society mean we won't have to do this much longer, but I hope you've all found things that similarly helped you through...
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