Written for the weekly editorial column in the 30th of October 2020 edition of Penguin News by Nicholas Roberts.

Last weekend was, to me, a reminder of just how lucky we’ve been in the Falklands during the coronavirus pandemic. On Friday and Saturday I performed as one of the cast in FIODA’s production of Agatha Christie’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ (see the centre spread for more on that), and on Saturday morning I went to the Park Run (more on page 9) to take some pictures and talk to the kind of people who follow through on the promises they make to themselves to do things like run or eat healthy foods. It didn’t really hit me until the play was complete and the adrenaline had worn off that the Falklands are one of the few places to be able to hold these kinds of events. It’s no bad thing, of course. Safely having social, cultural and sporting events during a pandemic is certainly something to be celebrated – especially when it’s been made possible through significant work by FIG, businesses, and the public at large. This brought me to a thought, however.

I’m an optimistic person, and so when something worries me I often force myself into the mind-set of “it’ll work out eventually” so I don’t curl up into a ball and cry about the state of the world. Thankfully, luckily, it has (so far) worked out. That good fortune is entirely the ‘it’s lucky I had insurance for my phone when I dropped it in a puddle’ kind of luck, where you made the right decision beforehand and it paid off rather than the ‘it’s lucky a wrecking ball happened to swing overhead and hit the piano which was about to crush me without my even realising’ kind of luck. Which is in no way through your own efforts and is, in the truest sense, luck. We have been lucky through our own efforts this year, not through mysticism - as superstitious as I may be.

The coronavirus was here, and as of the time of writing this it’s not, so we’re able to go and visit local businesses, family, friends, see sights and attend events; the reward for our hard work. Now we’ve seen that hard work pays off, even if the connection between the work you did and the rewards you reap sometimes seems a bit holistic, we should take the lesson on board and work hard on some other issues.

Is it hard work to research what products aren’t going to destroy your environment and purchase those ones, voting with your wallet by supporting environmentally responsible companies? To separate out your rubbish so tins and glass can be recycled? To drive a little bit further out of town so you don’t have to rip up the ground where rare and unique plants grow while off-roading? I would argue that these three actions go in descending order of difficulty, but because of them tourists may continue coming to the Falklands to see our wildlife, and so we’ll all have a bit more disposable income so we can have nice things. How about telling someone that it’s not alright when they make a racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful comment? To speak to people who experience hate or prejudice directly and learn how this can affect their entire lives? Or to do both and dig into your own conscious and unconscious prejudices and try to make a change so you don’t perpetuate them? Ascending difficulty for those ones, I would personally say.

We’ve already made some progress for the environment and to making prejudicial actions unwelcome but there’s still a lot to do, and things won’t ‘work out eventually.’ There’s not going to be a wrecking ball to come and knock away the piano which is barrelling towards us, extraterrestrials almost certainly won’t come and show us how to save the planet and teach us how to love one another. Insurance is expensive, and if you need to make a claim then it always feels like an uphill battle to get anything out – but in the end, if you made the right choices beforehand, it pays off.