I did, tilting at windmills so quickly I prevented myself from sitting still and really thinking.
The pandemic forced me to stop and as the year dragged on I had little or no choice but to think and really decide what is important and what I am really passionate about.
It's interesting because I don't have family. I never had children, I taught those who were just a child allowance number on the gyro each week. I was their Aunt, confidant and disciplinarian. It was a hard job and with a nine form entry ( minimum 270 pupils in each year and 180 pupils in the sixth form), it was large too. They were my family and the house, Battle, was my close family where pupils and staff all worked to be the top house each year.
So now, I am solo.
Please, I am not looking for a "poor you" response, being an only child in a single parent family, I learned from a very early age to entertain and please myself.
Now I have returned to those early years; I have my equivalent of my old playroom now transformed into arts and crafts, I have Spotify to gently play jazz as I work and a house I call home.
But my house is not my passion, nor the arts and crafts; they are a pleasure, a delight, a wonderful distraction when the weather outside is miserable and uninviting.
My passions haven't really changed from childhood.
When I was very young I listened to a nature program and they talked about cross pollination using a feather to transfer the pollen.
Fascinated I pulled a feather from my pillow and proceeded to discover just how many colours I could get from bluebells. My mother ended up with every shade of pink, purple and sky blue you can think of as well as pure white ones.
Now it's my greenhouse and discovering the fun of creating a permaculture garden.
So the pandemic gave me that time to reconnect and work hard on changing paths, borders and planting, adding composting areas and flooding the place with really good compost I imported by the ton.
But I still missed travel and it became more and more clear, my second passion is travelling.
I have photos pasted on the walls of my house showing a selection of the places I visited during that heady year of 2019 and itchy feet want to do and see more and more.
Within that passion is exploring; that, "what's round the corner" syndrome which spurs me forward sometimes resulting in ludicrously long walks. Scratching that itch of nosiness and my impulsive tendency of 'why not?' Its the thrill of finding hidden gems up alleyways and along the seafront, past the end of the path and round the headland, past where most people will stop.
In Lanzarote the desire lead me to walk 18 km in flip flops one day. I can tell you, my feet were on fire when I got back and I sat with my feet in the swimming pool whilst drinking a large glass of water with ice and a coffee. Much needed.
I do have a third passion, that of the natural world and the changes we, as a species are putting it under.
As our numbers increase and our demands for food, shelter and water increase, that natural canopy which has sustained us and everything else living, seems to be disintegrating before my eyes and I know something is going to have to give.
As a young girl I remember standing on the top of a ridge looking down over the local farm whilst Mr Shaw turned the stubble into the ground. He was accompanied by flocks of birds eager to pick the freshly turned roots and find the grubs they deemed a delicacy.
Today I watch and the soil is dead, sustained only by the chemicals we plough in each year. That natural ecology is broken and our desire to produce more and more of the same crops year on year produces a toxic mix that flushes its waste into the streams, lakes and rivers. We seem deaf to the information we are slowly poisoning the very water we drink. Instead? We rely on plastic bottles full of water whose structure leeches its chemicals into the very water we drink.
So sad and still we do not listen even after this world pandemic.
Bats are known to harbour many diseases none of which we need. Whilst they had their forests and we left them their habitat we rubbed along fine. People travelled to watch the bats roosting, feeding, bringing up their babies. But demands for more land means we creep ever closer, robbing them of their habitats and they enter our world in search of food.
How can we blame them for their stress and their shedding of viruses into our lungs?
I realise there is nothing but change; nothing stands still unless its inanimate and even then it is changing as it degrades, but we really are like locusts, devouring everything in our path.
So, I have probably 20 or 30 years left in me and the road travelled is far longer than that road around the corner, but it's still exciting, and between loving the garden, enjoying cold days in the craft room and travelling wherever and when I can, it'll be a great climax to my ever changing journey.
