Zappa liked the cooling, crumbling concrete

Actually I am not ‘the’ gardener, don’t have a green thumb nor the required patience…usually! 2020 was different. I discovered the joy of having flowers around and to take interest in rose slugs (sawfly) who were determined to eat all the roses I had planted. The little green patch in my yard had been a mess for years, waiting to be transformed. Well, this summer I finally had some extra time on my hands — thank you COVID-19 — and raised the motivation and energy together with my partner and we started buying plants, rose bushes, oleanders, lavender, hibiscus, bougainvillea, and others that I can’t remember the names. Continue reading →

I pride myself with being an early 2020 adopter as my 2020 suddenly turned to poo at the end of January.

As pretty much the rest of the world I spent a lot of this year indoors. I baked sourdough bread and pizza, looked outside the window, checked out the weekly fox fight, envied the small balconies in the building opposite to mine and admired the persistence of the second floor lady sitting in one of the aforementioned balconies, working on her suntan, 9 to 6, Mon to Sun, April to September. In the UK. Talk about optimism…
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My days of uncertainty began a bit earlier than the pandemic. In the May of 2019, my husband and I decided to move out of India, packed up our home in Mumbai, and started what turned out to be a very very long journey to Europe. We were initially hoping to move to Vienna, but encountered a lot of obstacles with the visa application and long story short, after spending five months, figured that wasn’t going to be possible after all. Finally in January of 2020 we decided to relocate to Berlin instead and Rob was able to get a visa in just two days! This seemed fantastic and we assumed we would be in Berlin by April, but little did we know… Continue reading →

Around this time last year, I accidentally got really involved in US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s unprecedentedly large texting program. When he suspended his campaign, 30,000 volunteers had sent 259 million texts, and among them were tens of volunteers, including me, who’d been spending tens of hours a week to help run the program: making materials, training new texters, answering questions on Slack in real time, double checking texts on the backend. And on that day in April, all of those people suddenly had a lot more free time. Continue reading →

A nearly full calendar year of mandatory work from home has been a mixed bag for me. I’m good at working from home, and have a long freelance career behind me, so that wasn’t really the tough part. Working at an agency, but from home, was a bit harder. In the typical office setting you’re collaborating, and you’re sharing a lot of the small stuff, the stuff that makes the work better in hard-to-measure ways. But at some point this year, I did start to try and measure those ways.

And what I found was, sure, the lockdowns and social anxieties are not helping my general mood, but there was something else that was eating at me. It took me a while to realise that, in the transition from a 50-colleagues office to a one-dog-on-my-lap office, I lost the little moments of education. The sharing of arcane design tool knowledge, the brief can-you-come-have-a-look sparring… the education. The teaching that we do, back and forth, while we work to answer design questions together. And suddenly a lot of my frustration made sense. I wanted to teach more than I could. Continue reading →

Something particularly cruel about this pandemic was being separated from people we love during the time when we needed it the most. But paradoxically, this isolation itself was something we have shared collectively, a communal experience.

What got me through this year were the moments of community that reminded me that, although we are isolated, we are not alone. I have selected three, in chronological order.
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