Defeating The Lockdown Blues And Clinging To Hope.. One Step At A Time

Waddling like a drunk penguin along the icy pavements right now seems like the perfect metaphor for how precarious our world feels.

- Annie Brown

Clinging to lamp posts and fences, scared of the smallest hill, we are all trying to stay upright as the ground slips from beneath us.

The alternative is to remain in, surrounded by the same walls we have grown to resent since March, the cupboards left untidy, the novels unread, the flat-pack still flat.

So we have to unlock the door of lockdown, just for an hour, to remind us what a gift it is to be breathing.

My 5k app, downloaded in a moment of enthusiastic delusion, reminds me that it’s time to run – and when I do, the American voice prompt is so upbeat, she’s clearly never lived through a pandemic.

“You can do this, you are almost done,” she enthuses, as I run through the same bloody park, up the same bloody steps, overlooking the same bloody skyline.

But she is not wrong, I think, as the endorphins pump through the lard – we are almost done.

That’s the pandemic for you, moods turning on a dime.

Come on Beast from the East, dump your snow on this heap of crock. If there is one thing Scots can handle, it’s cruel weather.