It has been a while. I’m not going to count the days but I’m going to explain why I haven’t been posting lately and it is going to involve the C word – for which I apologies, but it’s kind of necessary.

When the C@*?! pandemic hit, I’d just left a job and was thinking of having a couple of weeks/months writing before finding another one. Ha! It soon became clear that there weren’t going to be many job opportunities around in a world where everyone was talking about furlough schemes. I wondered how I was going to survive.

One of the best things I learned during the last two years, is I am more adaptable to change than I thought. I set up online creativity classes, online writing retreats, I wrote a non- fiction – a creative writing manual. I schemed and I hustled and I also set myself a target – once the world returned to normal (if anyone can remember what that is) – a proper job.

Whilst I don’t want to appear to be delighting in others’ misfortunes – I got lucky. The pandemic meant some people couldn’t work and I was taken on as a temporary lecturer (on zero hours contracts) at four different universities. This involved a lot of ‘can you cover a lecture on [speech therapy/postcolonial literature/academic skills for sports students] at 9am tomorrow morning?‘ type emails, which have been hair-raising on more than one occasion. Just call me Jack.

Throughout C@*?! I balanced four lecturing roles with running my own business, a part-time admin job and private work editing other writers’ manuscripts. When, last month, I was offered a full-time job as a lecturer in creative writing, I had to compile a list of all the people to whom I had to write a letter of resignation, in order to make sure I didn’t forget anyone.

The Holy Grail? It is to me – because it includes the one thing I didn’t get much of these last two years – writing time. I’ve fallen back into the novel I was working on before everything went pear-shaped and it feels the same way it does when you get that first day of luke-warm sun after a long winter.