I’d love to start this editor’s note with some pithy anecdote or amusing tale from my week. But alas, like most of us my weeks don’t stretch far beyond my laptop anymore. Frequent trips to the kitchen to make cups of tea that I eventually leave to go cold, and the occasional venture to co-op to buy milk for said tea, is as far as my journeying goes.
We’ve hit week 5 of the term and boredom has truly settled in. I’m not proud to admit that I spend a large amount of my time now assessing my neighbours’ roof insulation based on how much snow is left on their house by midday (number 19, is haemorrhaging heat).
I’m clearly losing the plot. And the true extent of my lockdown induced delirium, can be measured by the fact that in a recent zoom call I began counting how many times the other people on the call were blinking per minute.
A fascinating scientific pursuit that led to me to conclude that I must blink less than the average person. A discovery that has in turn made me so self-aware that since I’ve been blinking more than ever (I’m sorry if all this talk of blinking, has made you hyper-aware of your eyes now too).
Luckily however, when I’m not judging other people’s insulation systems or tallying their eye movements, I have Muse to keep me busy. Working with our wonderful team to create this week’s TWN has been a welcome distraction and resulted in an edition we can all be really proud of.
February is LGBTQ+ history month (if you haven’t read Matt’s editor’s note on this, I recommend you do) so across TWN we have articles inspired by this, including Matt’s own Film & TV piece about the Channel 4 hit series It’s a Sin, set during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the UK.
This week also sees Muse BNOC Alex Thompson, grace us with another instalment of his ‘Conversations’ series, this time speaking with drug dealers about how COVID-19 has affected their business. Alongside some rom-com inspired fashion, the team’s favourite on-screen kisses and many other great pieces, each of which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and hope you will too.
The spring term is always a tough one; It’s bitterly cold and deadlines are getting closer. And now we’ve got the added strain of a pandemic, it’s not even like you can drown your sorrows on a night out and partake in the time-honoured tradition of freezing at a bus stop in the early hours of a February morning with no coat.
But still we carry on, with that same spirit that used to keep us going on the long trek from Stones to Salvos, with no tights in minus temperatures.
I hope that you find something in this TWN to distract you from the Spring Term sorrows. That you learn something new about the LGBTQ+ community, or find some entertainment in our valentine’s musings and that you enjoy reading our work as much as we enjoyed creating it.
