Well, this is an interesting post to write. 2020 in review? How has the last year been? We know it’s been terrible. It’s been one crashing catastrophe after another and we’re finishing it with tier 4, international shunning and Brexit. But hey, we get blue passports so it’s not all bad!
Let’s start this year in review by looking back at my Travel & adventure plans for 2020.
Some definites:
I’m taking my Rangers to winter survival camp. I’m proud of how much they enjoyed being frozen last year.
Leaving aside the question of “definites” – yes! We did do this! In 2019 we were frozen and in 2020 we literally camped in Storm Ciara. Remember that? That was this year!
Iceland in May. I’m going to finally visit the (relatively) new Krauma spa at Deildartunguhver, I’m spending the day at the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport and I plan to spend at least two evenings at Sundhöllin.
No!
Iceland again at the end of June for another crack at the Laugavegur trail, this time for all four days of it. May I’ve booked. June I’ll do in the New Year.
No! Fortunately, I never got as far as booking this, so that was logistically easier.
I’m going to see Taylor Swift in Hyde Park and Queen at the o2.
No! Queen’s been rescheduled for June but we all know it won’t go ahead.
I’m going to do 500km of swimming, walking & maybe even a little running.
Yes! More than that – as of today (15th Dec), I’ve done 795km with 17 days still to do. Got a medal for it and everything.
I’m going to finish both my Russia 2019 and Russia 2002 scrapbooks. The 2002 one I started last year and haven’t actually touched this year. It’s time to sort that out.
I finished the 2019 one. It turned into two scrapbooks. I haven’t touched the 2002 one again, which is absurd.
And some indefinites:
I think I want to go somewhere cold in January or February.
Nope. I could have done because that would have been pre-plague but I booked for March, which turned out to be a mistake, and then spent an hour and seventeen minutes waiting on the phone because my particular ticket class didn’t have an online cancellation/postponement option. It had to be rebooked for November and when that rolled around, I filled in a form and an hour later, I had my next voucher.
I’m having a weekend in London in which I’ll swim in the Olympic pool again
I did go to London but I for some reason, I didn’t swim in the Olympic pool. Most likely the main pool wasn’t open. I miss it, it’s a glorious pool and it fills me with envy to see Ellie Simmonds is still allowed in. I mean, she’s a Paralympian champion swimmer but still.
I definitely want to do a monthly UK mini-adventure
No!
I want to pick up Project #BeforeItBurnsDown
That’s another way of saying I want to go to more English cathedrals. I did St Paul’s (and Westminster Cathedral) in January and Christ Church Oxford in March and I’ve briefly looked at Salisbury from the outside but that’s it.
The Iceland book
Yes and no. I did write a first draft but it’s so heavy and wooden and it doesn’t want to be written so still no second draft and definitely not finished. So that’s a kind of.
I want to write an entire album [songs] about Russia
No, I didn’t do this. Of course I didn’t. I’m not a songwriter. This was never going to happen.
I’d like to start feeling like [my blog] could be my job within five years
The first line of that was “I feel there’s a possibility my job won’t exist in a few years”. Well, I left that job, went full-time with the other job and got promoted. But also, being a travel blogger or even a travel writer in 2020 just wasn’t a thing. Even if I did get brave enough to start pitching, there are people out there whose actual job it is, who were out of work because of the plague. Maybe next year. Maybe.
I’m trying to start making travel vlogs
I really should let this one go. I physically cannot speak to a camera. I’ve tried. I’ve tried this year. It’s not going to happen. And yet I can’t quite let it go.
This is a maybe – I’m going to have another go at the lifestyle blog
Yes! I did this – at least, I kept it up for a couple of months twice. I’m still figuring it out. I need to stop looking to other lifestyle blogs for inspiration because I’m so not about the skincare and the makeup and the beige and that makes writing it incredibly difficult and forced, but I’m going to have another go in 2021 and try to make it more relaxed and more me.
I’m going to do Blogmas
I was so going to. I was planning it right from November last year and the first few posts were sitting in my drafts. But in a year when you don’t have enough travel/adventure material to cover your twice-weekly regular schedule, eighteen extra posts is madness.
So what did I do?
Travel
I got in a little travel. I spent New Year at Our Chalet in Switzerland, so I was abroad for three days of 2020. I managed a weekend in London in January, took my Rangers to winter camp in Storm Ciara in February and went to Pax Lodge for Thinking Day. I just squeezed in a weekend in Oxford in March, although that was so on the edge that I had to wait five minutes to check in to my industrial estate hotel while the manager assured a would-be customer that he entirely understood and sympathised with cancelling the booking and would sort the refund immediately.
In April and possibly July (I mean, I definitely did it twice, I’m just fuzzy on the dates), I set up my tent in the back garden and had a camping adventure at home, cooking pasta on a stove outside, whittling on the bench and startling next door’s cat who’s not used to me being in the garden at 7.30 in the morning.
In October, I got away from home for the first time. I had a weekend camping and hiking on Dartmoor, in a totally anti-social way which seemed completely covid-secure until I discovered – of course! – communal showers & toilets and washing-up shed at the campsite. In December I finally got my short break in a shepherd’s hut less than an hour from home, where the only people I saw for three days were the campsite owners and the campsite dog.
On the other hand I’ve cancelled/postponed two or three trips to Iceland, depending on how you count them, and a single night in a tree tent on an island which I was really excited about.
Me
For me personally, 2020 hasn’t gone too badly. I had two jobs at the beginning of the year and I only have one now… but that’s because the boss at one wanted me full time and to promote me. I’d still use the title researcher but my boss suggested “data analyst or even data scientist”. When we had a new person, we had a team catch up/introduction Zoom meeting in which we were all listed as guru (I guess it’s such a small company, we all rule our own corner of things) and I was “Research Guru”. And a pay rise! I was pretty happy with my last pay rise but that was “bribe me to come back pay” and it was four years ago. I don’t even have to spend this one on petrol.
I’ve been at this “new” job since April 2017 and for me, it’s always been remote working, since the company is based in south London and I’m very much not. Actually, I’ve always worked at my desk for my other job, since the one company is owned by the other and so I sat at the same desk all week doing two different jobs for two different companies, depending on the day, but the fact is that for three years before the plague hit, I’d never sat in the same room as my current boss or colleagues so in that way, my working life hasn’t changed.
Oh – I have an office and a desk now. I’ve done some IKEA ordering this year and I’m all set up to work properly, on my day job, my blog and my book-writing. I could still do with investing in some ink for my printer but it’s so expensive! I now have control over my own window and no lorries thundering past, two feet away from the glass at 40mph. No more Ed Sheeran every hour on the hour on the radio. No more Secret Santa. No more office banter. It’s bliss.
Between the promotion and the lack of ability to go anywhere or do anything, my bank balance is starting to whisper “you could buy a small house by the time you’re 40” and that’s very appealing. There’s still very little even within a ludicrously optimistic budget but with enough deposit, maybe I could afford the tiny house in the middle of nowhere which “needs modernisation”. The Rightmove pictures suggest the main problem is a luridly green wall in the living room so I can cope with that. It all means an unexpected upside to the Year of Hell and my view of my future turned upside down.
Other stuff I had planned: three lots of live music, of which one has been cancelled and two postponed. Lots of comedy being pushed back into autumn, then into winter and then back again into summer. I won’t need to buy any comedy tickets next year; I’ve still got all of 2020’s to get through. Got my first aid & safeguarding qualifications updated, so it hasn’t all been a loss.
Blog
I had vague ideas of trying to start earning a few pennies from my blog this year – well, I re-enabled ads somewhere around the beginning of November and I’ve earned £1.49 so far, so I don’t know how long I’ll bother keeping the ads up. What’s mostly happened in reality is I’ve spent the last six months having a minor crisis over whether a travel blogger, even a hobbyist one, can continue to be a travel blogger when travel is impossible.
I’ve still got old stories I’ve never told, old stories no one’s ever read and I can turn my experiences in Iceland into a lot more posts yet (see The A-Z of Iceland and the Icelandic Guidebook series). But I can’t hold out forever. Eventually I’ll run out of old stuff to retell and reconfigure and I’ll need new material.
But there’s always local travel. I’ve always meant to do more local content but you know what life’s like. Sometimes you just don’t get around to things and now I’ve got the time, opportunity and motivation. And then it’s not too big a leap from outdoors adventures in the far north to just plain outdoor adventures. I can slither from “travel & adventure” to “travel & outdoors”. So expect more content from hills and woods, more hiking, more castles, more days out on the water (I have to be a swan when the weather is nice again). And of course, there’ll be international travel content for as long as I can stretch it out.
Because I’m literally paid to be a data analyst, I have a huge spreadsheet tracking my blog statistics and last year, I made a “budget” in which I took my 2019 statistics and extrapolated to get my hoped-for/forecast 2020 statistics. Like most people, I then looked at March in horror as the bottom fell out of my numbers. It began to recover in July. I beat 2019, which means I beat my all-time highest views and visitors – and that’s quite an achievement during a plague and I was so happy about it! Then at the end of July, I watched Zac Efron in Iceland and I wrote a thing about it and… well, turns out people wanted to read it. August shot up to budget, September wasn’t far off and October exceeded it hugely. By mid-September, I’d beaten my 2019 total views and visitors and was into pure profit (viewing figures profit, not monetary!) by the end of the year. So thanks Zac, for keeping my little blog alive. November was down a bit but still around the level of July, which had reached unprecedented heights only a couple of months ago, so I can’t really complain about that.
As of 5pm on December 30th, I’m up 36.2% on views and up 39.9% on visitors compared to 2019. I’ve actually only dipped below last year’s figures once, which was June, although April came pretty close. I’ve hit 88% of my 2020 budget on both views and visitors. That’s pretty good; I’d like it to be better but that’s 2020. My blog survives another year and going from strength to strength.
The rest
Anything else to add in my 2020 review? Well, I enjoyed Twin Atlantic, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish this year. I’ve tried out S Club 7, A1 * B*Witched as if it’s still 1999. I finished watching Farscape, Voyager, Glow and Malory Towers, I’m up to date on Killing Eve, His Dark Materials, Sex Education & Life on Mars and I’m back on Spooks. I’ve read my entire Chalet School collection but not a whole lot else. I’ve had green, pink, purple and red hair. I can and do wear earrings again. I’m reunited with my favourite curry cookbook after thirteen years (it used to live in my uni kitchen and I’ve wished all this time that I’d stolen it. Finally have my own copy!). I bought a new phone after getting really tired of the battery in my old one which could last three hours or three minutes, depending on its moon.
I survived and kind of thrived. And I guess that’s my 2020.
Next year
My plans for 2021 are so nebulous that they’re non-existent. I’m not due to get the vaccine until anywhere between June and September at the earliest. I simply don’t see international travel being plausible for me in 2021, which I guess will at least be good from the point of view of that deposit on my house. If it was to be possible, I’d really like to spend Christmas in a cabin in the Arctic – I think real snow and real cold would be magical at Christmas. And… well, I’ll leave that thought there. But that’s very likely to not be possible.
I’m starting to see my Christmas 2021 wishlist already – I’d like to be looking semi-seriously for my house this time next year and hopefully reasonably settled in my own house the Christmas after, so I’d like some cutlery and glasses and a toaster, that sort of thing. Maybe a fridge. Furniture vouchers.
I want to do my night in a tree tent on an island. If that gets cancelled a second year, that’s when I’ll be properly livid. I’d like to do another long weekend in North Devon, maybe even go to Cornwall. I want to do a weekend or week in East Anglia, visiting Norwich, Peterborough and Ely Cathedrals and maybe get up to Cambridge for King’s. I want to do another two walking weekends on Dartmoor. I’d like to have a walking week in the Lake District for my “third area” logbook walks, although my Level 2 walking qualification will have to wait until at least 2022.
I want to get my kayaking Discover Award, which is roughly equivalent to the discontinued 1 Star Award. I read the syllabus for that; I think I’m up to that standard. I’d also like to do the Explore Award if I can squeeze that in too. It’s roughly equivalent to 2 Star. I’m not up to that standard but I don’t think it’s entirely unattainable.
I’m going to set myself a couple of SMART resolutions (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound).
- Two Duolingo sessions and one book session of Norwegian a week.
- Write in my shiny new five-year diary every day
- Write a second draft of the Iceland book. I’m not going to go so far as “finish the Iceland book”
Since 2021 looks like “2020 again only it’s lost the novelty factor and we’re throwing ourselves out of the EU”, I’m not going to demand too much of myself or expect too much. Of course it’s very pessimistic but on the other hand, if I’m not expecting anything, I’ll be delighted if I’m proved wrong and good stuff happens. So that’s going to be my philosophy for 2021: “everything is probably going to be awful”. Happy New Year.