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So here we are, halfway through the first year of the 21st Century’s third decade and heading towards Christmas – and yet it feels to me like the year might as well be over.

Even with the UK relaxing the lockdown restrictions somewhat, along with hundreds of thousands of others, it still feels like being in a strange/weird open detention centre…

One in which you’re allowed to exercise and purchase essential goods (if you don’t mind standing in a queue which stretches around the block), but where you can’t take a ‘break’ or go away on any decent kind of holiday, and can only get up close and personal with limited numbers of family members or friends.

Looking for a ‘positive’ in all of this is difficult, to say the least.

Especially as the media is still up to its old tricks of reporting news and figures inaccurately, combined with the fact that data is often days or weeks old and the information is changing so fast, it’s impossible to believe that anything you might read, listen to or see is actually up to date or, to an extent, relevant to the “now”.

Then there’s the Black Lives Matter issue, which is incorporating multiple other issues as it grows each day.

And all this in three months!

Insert sigh here.

We’re all in the same boat, albeit rowing with different types of oars, in a range of directions.

I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess, living and working as I do – alone – and not having to commute (except for chocolate, biscuits, coffee and milk!), so the car stays parked, the “office” is a few steps away, the canteen likewise and the local small supermarkets a 15 minute round walking trip.

I try to imagine how it must be for parents handling children in lockdown mode, or going to school part-time, along with workers who are furloughed or, worse still, have lost their jobs.

But it’s almost impossible.

Having said that, I do try to put myself in a mindset removed from the way I work and live, in an endeavour to have empathy with those less fortunate or who simply through ‘fate’, have so many issues to deal with day to day, week after week, having experienced “Covid-19” these past few months.

And then I feel depressed!

And THEN I realise that I’m grateful – to my parents – for enabling me, genetically at the very least, to have this amazing gift of a voice, by which I earn a living, not to mention for bringing me up with a decent sense of morals, ethics and such virtues as politeness, courtesy, manners and respect.

Both Mum and Dad would have been 100 this year.

I wonder why many of us never really discover what significant/relevant things our parents instilled in us until they’re gone – and yes, maybe not all those things were good!

However and whatever, it’s different for all of us, and I’m fortunate and grateful for the good – and even the not so good – I inherited or was taught from age zero to leaving home, at 19 and beyond.

So, for this blog, thanks Mum and Dad – and Happy Birthday, with love, your third son…