I never really imagined being self-employed, I definitely didn’t imagine owning and running multiple businesses: working primarily as a freelance writer and then having a side hustle.

What we don’t see behind the magician’s curtain is the huge, poorly built factories, where garment workers for Primark are forced to work eighty hour weeks for way below minimum wage. This may not be news to you and you may walk out of the high street shop with a big bag of “bargains” and have a slight edge of guilt, but has this changed our perception of the value and cost of a piece of clothing?

When someone passes away you don’t lose them, they are taken from you. They aren’t wandering around Tesco, or milling about a shopping centre, they are gone. Before this year I hadn’t ‘lost’ anyone for around ten years and the more recent years I have had a pit in my stomach knowing that my next loss would be substantial and potentially life altering. Safe to say I was right.

Ageing is crossing a threshold into another land where life goes on but it is forever altered. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who said we have “nothing to fear but fear itself”. At 25 I worried over being a quarter of a century old, at 30 I cried over my frown lines and lack of success. I spent my late 30s in paroxysms of anxiety about turning 40. And don’t get me started on turning 50.

This is the tale of how I tested the waters of the gender spectrum from agender to transgender, settling subsequently at cis female: gender nonconforming (or gender-variant). Confusing? It doesn’t have to be.

I always was the one known for doing about 563726468382 things at once alongside school. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t forced to do them, I’d adopt the hobby because I liked it, and luckily, my parents sang the tune with me.

In September 2020, over 150 artists from around the world painted 50 plus large-scale walls across the capital; bringing art to the people in a legal way. The work of London Mural Festival was classified as construction and was therefore allowed under the pandemic rules.

You can always spot the Hackney tourist. In my experience, they are always the ones willingly queueing at The Good Egg, happy to pay £10 for what is essentially expensive organic eggs, maybe avocado and bread – a meal you could make for a respectable £4 if you got the ingredients from Ridley Road market.

To afford to continue renting into our 70s, and without a pension to draw on, we will need to continue working until the day we die - we’ll never retire. It’s grim, but it’s our reality and I think there are others in the same boat as us.

Regardless of ethnicity, many elderly people have suffered because of COVID 19, whether that be illness or the loneliness they have had to face.