One of the unexpected pleasures of lockdown has been seeing inside other people’s living rooms. With TV presenters broadcasting from their homes and local groups meeting on Zoom, we can indulge our nosey sides with impunity. My cursory research suggests journalists and their interviewees most often choose to sit in front of bookshelves, but sometimes […]
Only a month ago, only 40 people in the UK had contracted the Coronavirus and no one had yet died. Less than a week ago I was writing here of a ‘calm before the storm‘ – as the mounting number of cases still seemed remote from our socially distanced little bubble. Now that’s all changed; […]
It was a lovely bright morning today – and I was surprised how much it lifted my spirits. The first few days of lockdown had started with sunshine pouring into the bottom corner of our garden and I had enjoyed starting each day there in the birdsong with a cup of tea. But last few […]
We are barely seeing our teenagers, not because they are wrecklessly flouting the lockdown, but because they appear to have become nocturnal. When their school closed nearly two weeks ago, I had all sorts of good intentions about getting them up at a reasonable time and encouraging them to follow something along the lines of […]
Toilet rolls are back in our local Sainsbury’s – but there are no baking goods. Husband went out hunting and gathering this morning with a list that included strong white flour, plain flour, sugar and baking powder, but he came back empty-handed. How foolish was I to think I was was the only one planning […]
With news today that the Prime Minster, Health Secretary and Chief Medical Officer are all testing positive for Coronavirus, you might think we were already at the height of a full-blown health crisis. But in our house the feeling is more one of a calm before the storm. We are all well; we have food […]
Today’s hot topic is the protocols of social distancing. How do we organise ourselves on the occasions we need to leave the house to get to the places we need to get to without breathing droplets of coronavirus all over our fellow man? We’ve not done this before. We don’t know the rules. It’s not […]
Today the teenagers seemed to ‘get’ what this lockdown means. Until now, their social isolation included going for a haircut, having the girlfriend over to watch a film, going to a barbecue and sleep-over. Last night when 6ft-tall son went out to buy ’emergency crisps’ I started to wonder whether I could arrange to have […]
We’ve been cutting back on contact with others for a week or so here – hand-washing to the point of rawness, cancelling yoga classes and a birthday bash – but today was the first full lockdown, as decreed last night by Boris in his address to the nation. So it seems a good time to […]
This is what an Xbox looks like after it’s been dropped from a first floor window. It happened a year ago and it wasn’t my finest parenting moment. In fact, it was the culmination of years of frustration at the grip of computer gaming on my sons – who were then aged 15 and 13 […]
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