Turn On Your Lights And Be Damned

Guys, 2020 . . .

This Halloween I didn’t see a single trick or treater. Not one. In fact, for wont of a phrase, you could say that where I lived that night it was a ghost town.

My family are supporters of a local non-League club. This season started two months late, and we have managed to get to four matches before it has been suspended again. On Tuesday we had the chance of one final match before this pause, fighting the elements to get the game on, but then we received the message that we’d lost the other fight:

one of the player’s family members had tested positive for Covid-19 and now some of the players and coaching staff were also showing symptoms.

Everyone that attended last Saturday’s game were advised that if they’d had any contact with any players or staff members and began to experience symptoms then they should isolate and take a test. Straight off I remembered that one of the players had shook my hand before kick off, and also my lad James had his photograph taken with his favourite player.

With all of the publicity about distancing measures and the like I should have known better, but, being the social animals that we are, it’s sometimes difficult to avoid our long-established instinctive acts when greeting each other.

At the moment everything is fine, we all appear symptom free.

Tomorrow we enter our second national lockdown, provisionally set for a month. On the cancellation of our game I bid my fellow fans farewell until December, possibly even 2021, as our club was mothballed again.

The lights are going out:

Regular City Jackdaw followers may recall that every Remembrance Sunday I attend a service and place a cross at the foot of a memorial on which family members are named, and also another on the site of my Gt Grandfather’s unmarked grave. Well, I’ve just heard that the services are beginning to be cancelled for this year. You could have put money on it.

I will remember in my own individual way this year.

We lost Easter and now Christmas is under threat. Normally I’m not an advocate of Christmas decorations going up before December, but this year is not a normal year. I think if people need to then they should put up their trees and decorations whenever they want. Whatever it takes to lift their spirits.

This year more than ever, though it will be a different kind of Christmas, it is still the light in the darkness, the hope in despair.

And I do think that by then that the end will be in sight.