It's time for change

 Until last week I hadn’t even opened the Blogger App on my computer this year. So, it was a bit of a shock to see that the last time I posted was 26 July 2020 – some fourteen months ago. It’s quite depressing to realise that Covid is still with us and, whilst we’ve been double-jabbed, we still live pretty much like hermits on a day-to-day basis. Yes, we’re the ones still wearing masks on the rare occasions that we venture to the shops. It was brought home to me by the most recent Google monthly Timeline email. In the last few years I could see that I’d travelled to locations ranging from the Algarve to Stockholm, but in August I only managed 100 miles. Apparently, the highlight of the month was a trip to Harwich. (It was actually!). Most of our journeys in the last year and a half have been to the vets’ surgery two miles away, but we’ve only ever been allowed inside once.

What to do? I love writing and I love my blogs, even if no one reads them! I really didn’t want to throw away the effort of writing 185 blog posts, so I’ve decided it’s time for another reinvention. Since I started blogging back in 2014, my Blogger site has undergone a few metamorphoses. It started life as ‘Totally Technical’ as I recorded my journey towards minimalism. The next stage was ‘My Little Orange Notebook’ so-called because, well, I had a bit of a thing about orange-coloured notebook covers at the time. By December 2018, however, we were fully committed to the vegan lifestyle and this became the focus of the majority of my writings. Hence, in time for the new year, and the best year on record which recorded a post almost every week, in 2019 Vivez Vegan was born.

Just before Covid struck, I went back to the UK to help look after my in-laws. As my mother would have said, ‘Don’t air your dirty washing in public’. Suffice it to say, it became pretty clear early on that it wasn’t going to work. [Tip: if you ever have the urge to move in with your in-laws, don’t!] Happily, I’m now on the countdown to a new life back in France. As we always say, the ship sails both ways.

Now, I’m slowly getting my writing mojo back and rebuilding parts of my previous life. For many reasons, not least that the black dog was hiding round the corner, I’d shut down everything: business in France, hobby websites, vegan interests, social media sites; I even let my domain name go … I blame Covid. As I’m sure many people have found, the first lockdowns weren’t too bad. It was a blazing hot summer in 2020 and we spent a lot of time outside. I did yoga every day; we walked a lot and got quite fit. Come 2021 and nothing seemed to have changed, except the weather. Of course, eventually we would get our jabs, and travelling back to France became a possibility, if a very complicated and expensive one.

But, now it’s time to announce a new beginning. Vivez Vegan is back; as I said back in 2018, ‘we’re still vegan and we’re still here’. I’ve redesigned my information website that aims to help English-speaking vegans in France: www.vivez-vegan.com (I’ve just had to add a little hyphen for the new domain name) and my personal blog is back, with a new name ‘Vegan in the vines’. It marks a new beginning in a slightly different area of France, where we can indeed watch the sun set over the vineyards from our window. First on the list for research must be checking out some of those local vineyards for vegan offerings.