A second a day 2020

This year I decided to hop on the trend of these ‘one second a day’ videos. The idea is to record a one second video clip for every day of the year and compile them altogether.

It's an incredible luxury that we have nowadays, being able to take a high quality pocket camera in the form of a phone everywhere we go. I've enjoyed documenting my life over the past few years by taking plenty of photos with my phone, but I don't often take videos. It's partly due to memory space issues, and partly because I never felt the need to. However, when I dig up old photos and videos from my childhood, it's the videos that are the most fun and interesting to look at. Especially in the last few years, the quantity of video clips has been severely lacking. The challenge of just taking a one second video each day is a good solution - it doesn't take up far too much space on my phone and incentivises me to take the videos.

I managed to not miss any days with the aid of the daily reminders the app sent me at 8pm (I used the app 'Leap Second'). But after a while, I didn't need any reminders and it become a habit. There were a few days of still pictures instead when I forgot to video the most interesting moment of the day, but most days do have a video clip. I did also bend the rules slightly by using two clips on a few days here and there, but I dramatically reduced the number of days like this to what I had originally! Sometimes it feels like I'm always on high alert for the perfect one second clip to summarise the day, but I do still try to live in the moment and put my phone away once I've got a good shot. And I have really enjoyed the process of picking the best 1 second out of 86400 seconds to capture a feeling or interesting moment during each day.

I was imagining an interesting and fun year: university, holidays with family and friends, perhaps with a bit of travel abroad during the summer. But as we all know, this year did not turn out quite how anyone expected. However, in some ways, this year was an extremely interesting one to document, with the sudden shift in March of attending live ceilidhs one week, to being locked down and told not to go outside the next week. In decades to come, my children and grandchildren will be able to see what living through 2020 was like.

After recovering from the inevitable yearly January cold, I had a pretty good semester until March. I was finally enjoying having a busy life in February and March with university work, karate and social outings, whizzing round Edinburgh on my bike. So it was a bit of a shock to the system at first when I returned home and the pace of life slowed right down. I soon adjusted to the change, but I do still find it a bit unfortunate that I was just starting to really take full advantage of my university life with my good health, friends and sports clubs.

A recurring feature of the clips this year were lots of lockdown walks and runs. I was fortunate to be in a country where I didn't need a special form every time I set a single foot outdoors, and we took advantage of that with my family. With not being allowed to go further away than a 5 mile radius around the house, we started exploring our local area much more. I've had lots of lovely walks with my mum and runs by myself adventuring in the hills and forests behind the house. Pierre and I also had an adventure camping on the little hill behind our house one night in July.

In March I gifted myself a Garmin watch to record the GPS trace of my runs. Orienteers have been using these for years, but I was yet to jump on this trend. With the help of Strava and Garmin, I really got into running this year. I've orienteered my whole life but I always used to find running without a map too boring. I'm not sure exactly what changed, but the seeing all the data on the watch helped. Plus it was the only sport I could really do by myself in lockdown. And once I got a hang of it and my fitness started to improve I really enjoyed myself. Fortunately we had lovely weather in Scotland during spring and summer this year, and my runs every 2-3 days kept me sane through uni revision, exams and my summer job all from my bedroom desk.

As restrictions eased, we also enjoyed a few little outings and holidays around the country: Oban for walks and climbing Ben Nevis; Lllangollen in Wales with Jennifer to see her friends; wild swimming in Loch Ard.

After an arduous search for a flat and flatmates for the next semester in Edinburgh, I found a lovely flat and flatmates (on the same street as last year...!). I'm glad I found somewhere nice to live. It was especially important this year since I would be spending most of my time inside it studying or relaxing.

Despite the vision of 'hybrid learning' at university, the reality was mostly online university. I did not really enjoy the one in-person tutorial I went to, and I did adjust to my new digital university. The days and weeks did become rather mundane and repetitive, and learning now required a higher level of self-motivation and self-teaching. I kept myself busy in between all the lecture recordings, though, with baking, cooking, Youtube, Bake-off & Strictly, movies, running and karate. Karate is one of the main things keeping me sane this semester. I'm very glad I found a new sport to get really involved in, and a club where I have now made lots of friends. It's also been great to be part of the committee this year so far, and helping to keep karate going amidst all the restrictions. Fortunately outdoor non-contact organised sport has been allowed, so with some adaptations we've been able to train all semester. It did become slightly harder as the cold autumn/ winter weather and darkness started to encroach, but I still managed to make it to 3-4 sessions every week.

Day to day it may have seemed that the videos were boring, and nothing very eventful happened, but I think it's just as important to remember the filler days as the most memorable days of the year. This year in particular, days have blurred together, and it's easy to forget all the special moments in between the highlights and lowlights.

I'm going to keep going with the one second a day video project, though I think I'll film in landscape this year. Here's to a better 2021 - at least I'm not ill and sleeping through the start of the new year like the previous 2 years. Not seeing anyone to catch any viruses from does have its advantages sometimes.

We'll see what adventures 2021 brings...