Week 38 - we hear from a new Storyteller in England

Edited BY

G P Kennedy

Olivia - Liverpool, England

I’m Olivia. I’m 25 and from Liverpool, England, which is where I grew up and now live with my family.

Since graduating in 2016 and returning home, I have fallen in love with the city and its people because of their sense of humor and fierce loyalty. I can usually be found escaping from reality with my head in a fiction book. 

 I studied History at the University of Leeds and love writing; something that I’ve been able to do more of over lockdown.

I’m especially interested in finding out about Black British history due to my mixed Nigerian and British heritage. For the past few years, I have worked in marketing jobs across a range of different industries.

I love to travel and before lockdown had embarked on solo trips to Thailand, Texas and the Canadian Rockies.

By the end of 2021, I’m hopeful that things will be better than they are at the present moment. 

 Here in the UK, we're all hoping that a large number of the population will have been vaccinated by the end of the year.

We hope that infection rates will fall from their current peak and that we won't be gearing up to spend another New Year's Eve in pajamas!

 It's easy to get swept away in a tide of optimism as we all look to the future at this time of year. Covid-19 will sadly still be around by the end of 2021, but hopefully, we’ll have a better grip on it by then.

 By the end of 2021, I hope that we’ll be able to hug our friends and family members. Hug them in the way that we used to, without pausing to think about how the worst possible outcomes could result from such a simple gesture of kindness.

 I hope that we’ll have celebrated a ‘proper’ Christmas with our loved ones. We’ll be all the more grateful for them and their company next year.

By the end of 2021, I hope that Boris Johnson’s numerous lockdown announcements are a thing of the past.

  I hope I’ll have less of an inclination to throw my TV out of the window every time the rules change again, and that I’ll be able to see an end to the fluctuating levels of uncertainty and despair that have punctuated 2020.

 On a more personal level, I’m hoping for freedom of travel and movement around the country by the end of 2021.

 By the end of 2021, I hope that a night out with my friends won’t just mean sitting politely at a table in a restaurant. I want to rediscover the freedom and joy of dancing amongst lots of people at a club or feel the excited buzz at a festival on a warm summer night.

 Being in a long-distance relationship over lockdown has been both difficult and frustrating. UK laws have banned the mixing of separate households for the majority of the year. As my boyfriend lives in London with his family, our time together this year was very limited. I did save a lot of money on train fare though.

But it’s not all doom and gloom while we are safe home. There are, in fact, quite a few things that I would like to take into the next year with me. 

By the end of 2021, I hope that we’ll continue to see the value in a slower pace of life.

I hope that downtime and rest can still be factored into life, as I do not want to go back to feeling overworked and frazzled by the daily grind.

In 2020 I’ve loved the time spent outdoors, and the evenings huddled in the living room with family rather than being in separate rooms on our phones and devices. 

I hope that friends, neighbors, and even strangers will continue to pull together and support each other, having now realized that everyone is struggling in their own way.