Tags: mile

2020 was the year of the virus. 2021 was the year of the vaccine …and the virus, obviously, but still it felt like the year we fought back. With science!

Whenever someone writes and shares one of these year-end retrospectives the result is, by its very nature, personal. These last two years are different though. We all still have our own personal perspectives, but we also all share a collective experience of The Ongoing Situation.

Like, I can point to three pivotal events in 2021 and I bet you could point to the same three for you:

1. getting my first vaccine shot in March,
2. getting my second vaccine shot in June, and
3. getting my booster shot in December.

So while on the one hand we’re entering 2022 in a depressingly similar way to how we entered 2021 with COVID-19 running rampant, on the other hand, the odds have changed. We can calculate risk. We’ve got more information. And most of all, we’ve got these fantastic vaccines.

I summed up last year in terms of all the things I didn’t do. I could do the same for 2021, but there’s only one important thing that didn’t happen—I didn’t catch a novel coronavirus.

It’s not like I didn’t take some risks. While I was mostly a homebody, I did make excursions to Zürich and Lisbon. One long weekend in London was particurly risky.

At the end of the year, right as The Omicron Variant was ramping up, Jessica and I travelled to Ireland to see my mother, and then travelled to the States to see her family. We managed to dodge the Covid bullets both times, for which I am extremely grateful. My greatest fear throughout The Situation hasn’t been so much about catching Covid myself, but passing it on to others. If I were to give it to a family member or someone more vulnerable than me, I don’t think I could forgive myself.

Now that we’ve seen our families (after a two-year break!), I’m feeling more sanguine about this next stage. I’ll be hunkering down for the next while to ride out this wave, but if I still end up getting infected, at least I won’t have any travel plans to cancel.

But this is meant to be a look back at the year that’s just finished, not a battle plan for 2022.

There were some milestones in 2021:

1. I turned 50,
2. TheSession.org turned 20, and
3. Adactio.com also turned 20.

This means that my websites are ²/_5ths of my own age. In ten years time, my websites will be ¹/₂ of my own age.

Most of my work activities were necessarily online, though I did manage the aforementioned trips to Switzerland and Portugal to speak at honest-to-goodness real live in-person events. The major projects were:

1. Publishing season two of the Clearleft podcast in February,
2. Speaking at An Event Apart Online in April,
3. Hosting UX Fest in June,
4. Publishing season three of the Clearleft podcast in September, and
5. Writing a course on responsive design in November.

Outside of work, my highlights of 2021 mostly involved getting to play music with other people—something that didn’t happen much in 2020. Band practice with Salter Cane resumed in late 2021, as did some Irish music sessions. Both are now under an Omicron hiatus but this too shall pass.

Another 2021 highlight was a visit by Tantek in the summer. He was willing to undergo quarantine to get to Brighton, which I really appreciate. It was lovely hanging out with him, even if all our social activities were by necessity outdoors.

But, like I said, the main achievement in 2021 was not catching COVID-19, and more importantly, not passing it on to anyone else. Time will tell whether or not that winning streak will be sustainable in 2022. But at least I feel somewhat prepared for it now, thanks to those magnificent vaccines.

2021 was a shitty year for a lot of people. I feel fortunate that for me, it was merely uneventful. If my only complaint is that I didn’t get to travel and speak as much I’d like, well boo-fucking-hoo, I’ll take it. I’ve got my health. My family members have their health. I don’t take that for granted.

Maybe 2022 will turn out to be similar—shitty for a lot of people, and mostly unenventful for me. Or perhaps 2022 will be a year filled with joyful in-person activities, like conferences and musical gatherings. Either way, I’m ready.

I’ve spoken at quite a few events over the last few years (2014 was a particularly busy year). Many—in fact, most—of those events were overseas. Quite a few were across the atlantic ocean, so I’ve partaken of quite a few transatlantic flights.

Most of the time, I’d fly British Airways. They generally have direct flights to most of the US destinations where those speaking engagements were happening. This means that I racked up quite a lot of frequent-flyer miles, or as British Airways labels them, “avios.”

Frequent-flyer miles were doing gamification before gamification was even a thing. You’re lured into racking up your count, even though it’s basically a meaningless number. With BA, for example, after I’d accumulated a hefty balance of avios points, I figured I’d try to the use them to pay for an upcoming flight. No dice. You can increase your avios score all you like; when it actually comes to spending them, computer says “no.”

So my frequent-flyer miles were basically like bitcoins—in one sense, I had accumulated all this wealth, but in another sense, it was utterly worthless.

(I’m well aware of just how first-world-problemy this sounds: “Oh, it’s simply frightful how inconvenient it is for one to spend one’s air miles these days!”)

Early in 2014, I decided to flip it on its head. Instead of waiting until I needed to fly somewhere and then trying to spend my miles to get there (which never worked), I instead looked at where I could possibly get to, given my stash of avios points. The BA website was able to tell me, “hey, you can fly to Japan and back …if you travel in the off-season …in about eight months’ time.”

Alrighty, then. Let’s do that.

Now, even if you can book a flight using avios points, you still have to pay all the taxes and surcharges for the flight (death and taxes remain the only certainties). The taxes for two people to fly from London to Tokyo and back are not inconsiderable.

But here’s the interesting bit: the taxes are a fixed charge; they don’t vary according to what class you’re travelling. So when I was booking the flight, I was basically presented with the option to spend X amount of unspendable imaginary currency to fly economy, or more of unspendable imaginary currency to fly business class, or even more of the same unspendable imaginary currency to fly—get this—first class!

Hmmm …well, let me think about that decision for almost no discernible length of time. Of course I’m going to use as many of those avios points as I can! After all, what’s the point of holding on to them—it’s not like they’re of any use.

The end result is that tomorrow, myself and Jessica are going to fly from Heathrow to Narita …and we’re going to travel in the first class cabin! Squee!

Not only that, but it turns out that there are other things you can spend your avios points on after all. One of those things is hotel rooms. So we’ve managed to spend even more of the remaining meaningless balance of imaginary currency on some really nice hotels in Tokyo.

We’ll be in Japan for just over a week. We’ll start in Tokyo, head down to Kyoto, do a day trip to Mount Kōya, and then end up back in Tokyo.

We are both ridiculously excited about this trip. I’m actually going somewhere overseas that doesn’t involve speaking at a conference—imagine that!

There’s so much to look forward to—Sushi! Ramen! Yakitori!

And all it cost us was a depletion of an arbitrary number of points in a made-up scoring mechanism.