Trying to eke out some of the positives from a wearying year

It’s not been an easy task, and maybe it’s case of the ‘whistling past the graveyard’ syndrome, but over recent days, I’ve been desperately scratching my head to come up with just 10 positive things that have arisen since ‘the plague’ descended upon us.                                            Maybe it has been the number of times over recent weeks that I’ve experienced spontaneous confessions from normally very stable colleagues that in the throes of what I could only describe as mild depression. Some aren’t sleeping properly . . . others are mildly hallucinating about just a few pints with friends in the locals . . . and others just want to go somewhere – anywhere.

So, my list of 10 positives out of Covid, is predicated on something of a myth. Like the rest of the population, I’m at my wits end to keep my conscious mind above the sanity survival level, but over the course of five or six hundred words, the aim is to somehow pretend, or even trick ourselves into believing, that there are some good things to be extracted from the pit of Covid despair. I’ll even try to ignore any mention of recent AstraZeneca problems.

1. We are tending to have money in our pockets

Yes, the reality has hit home for most of us who enjoy a couple of pints in the local, that it is quite an expensive little pastime even if we can’t put a price on its therapeutic value. The overdraft limit in the days before pay-day now hasn’t been threatened with a breach for the best part of a year, but again I feel that I may be tempting fate. New furniture is arriving and a tractor clutch has decided to pack up as if to say to me, ‘that it you don’t spend the lucre one way, then you’ll spend it another’. But yes, there’s a lot less been spent on items like booze, diesel, the odd restaurant sojourn, shoes and clothes. As for the need for cash in your pocket, it seems to be a thing of the past.

1. Less traffic and shorter journey times to work

I’m still one of those commuters making the daily trip into the city for work but instead of the normal 40 to 50 minutes, to complete the journey, this has now slipped down to almost half. This doesn’t mean I’m driving any faster – in fact the opposite – I’ve slowed down a lot. But the traffic snarl-ups are now few and far between, and there’s also a realisation that the ‘old road option’ – as distinct from the motorway – is a lot shorter and far more efficient as far as fuel consumption is concerned.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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