The daily grind of lockdown.
Get up. Drink coffee. Have a shower. Drink more coffee while looking at the latest news on Covid-19 on the BBC and the Guardian websites. Check my various social media feeds covering both personal and work life. Look the weather to determine the optimum time to go out for my daily walk. Get some work stuff done (mainly project proposals at this point).
Today I ran the gauntlet at my local M&S. I only had to wait for a couple of minutes to go in. The woman at the door managing how many people were in-store at any one time asked if I could keep to the arrows when going up and down aisles. They have direction arrows, new from last week. This brought me some strange level of joy. But even with the arrows, there was a woman who clearly missed the brief. She was on the phone so perhaps didn’t notice that every time she walked up an aisle, everyone else was moving in the opposite direction.
There were various things I couldn’t find or there was too much i.e. bag of baking potatoes when I only want two, but nothing to stress about. Today’s lesson is that I have to spend more time on my shopping list, various things I left off, various things I didn’t buy. I may need to go back again this week. I’m still getting to grips with this strange new way of life where it would now be odd just to pop to the shop to buy a breadroll for lunch and nothing else.
Some phone calls to discuss various projects and some other stuff.
Today is a day where mild irritations are more irritating than they should be, and would have been, in ‘normal’ times.
I still haven’t adjusted. It reminds me of when I moved to the UK, about 20 years ago now. And it was the little things – trying to work out an electric shower, different plug outlets, swing handles on many toilets rather than a press button at the top.
It’s the detail and mundane where things I do now are different to ‘normal’ times. It’s the whirring away in the back of my brain where everything’s the same but different. At first it’s a change, it’s interesting, it’s novel. For a while. It then it gets irritating. Until it isn’t.
And in the news, Carrie Symonds and Boris Johnson have now had a baby boy.
New figures are out – 26,097 in total, now taking into account deaths outside hospital. A big jump but not unexpected. A jump from 21,678 reported yesterday due to this inclusion. There remains a timelag between the figures from non-hospital settings and death registrations so the numbers in reality will be even higher. My hope is that now social care, and care settings, will get the same level of attention that the NHS has received. This is certainly not an either/or scenario, this should have been the case from the outset.
I’ve just been for my walk. Dulwich Park was pretty quiet as it’s still grey and a little chilly outside. Now for a glass of red wine.
So that’s it for Day 37. Stay safe, stay well, and stay home!