This was supposed to be a good year, this was going to be the roaring ’
20s, things were going to go well, money was going to be made, goals achieved, limits smashed.
WTF happened.
Today was the first day of home-schooling. Erbie’s school is providing an amazing service, lessons were as his regular timetable and came through online with a teacher offering feedback to questions.
First thing, Erbie looked up a Hama bead tutorial and proceeded to make a cartoon skeleton called Sans from Underworld in tiny plastic beads which I ironed into a solid image for him whilst he cleaned his teeth.
When Alexa’s timer told him: ‘Time to get to school’, instead of reaching for his coat and running out of the door he ran up and down the stairs twenty times.
I spent a stressful hour checking finances, should we take a mortgage holiday, is it a possibility we might be able to freeze credit card payments, how much left to come in. The GR has literally had all of his work in the creative industry cancelled for the unforeseeable future.
I had good intentions, yoga, meditation, make my own toasted granola, soda bread, carrot soup, set the table up for a jigsaw, get crafty, many, many good plans. The reality was sitting in my inside out jumper braless without a comb through my hair, top lip peeling from dehydration – strange how drinking copious amounts of wine doesn’t hydrate one. Wine belly too snug in my PJs. STRESSSSSSSSSED.
And breathe.
I went to bed to work, I post cheery things on social media about the natural world, it was not flowing. Sometimes finding an image first helps, baby birds, hedgehogs, bees, we’ve been slowly killing them and now we are dying too.
TheGR starts drinking at 10am, the day may end well, or it may not.
Chaffinches, hedgehogs, bees, flowers, nests, brambles.
My thoughts wander to the allotment. Will I be able to vist? Will it be total lockdown soon? Why did someone strim the whole bramble hedge that abutted one side of the entrance, what were they thinking - a mass of wildlife habitat wiped out in one fell swoop, nesting birds, visiting bees, hungry foxes, sheltering hedgehogs, to look neater?
Today I should have been on my gardening course at Capel Manor in Regent’s Park, the course I signed up for as a sanity treat. Just as Spring hits and the weather soil warms up, things begin to flourish and grow. Who will water all of our seedlings carefully pricked out and potted on in the poly tunnel.
3.30pm Erbie’s home school day ends, there have only been a few tears, none from the grown ups. I go to my allotment with a flask of tea. The usually bustling high street is as empty as a month of Sunday in the 1970s. I social distance every time someone comes past in the opposite direction, sometimes walking in the road to do this, it’s okay there is hardly any traffic. A solitary bus goes past with a driver and one passenger.
Debbie’s sister cancelled her wedding in April and had a quick registry one at the weekend instead, 5 people max, no family went! They tried to live stream it but couldn’t get it to work. Debbie is a nurse, she’s just gone back to work, we joke about timing and how her old ICU training will come in handy. I have learnt that ICU stands for Intensive Care Unit very recently. Katherine, a doctor, jokes that as she doesn’t have ICU training she will be on palliative home care – only neither of them is really joking.
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, it could be lots of mums last one.
Several WhatsApp groups are sending the same memes, jokes, videos of people trying to laugh through the pain, some of them are funny, they get shared everywhere, I’ve seen the same guy voting to self isolate without his family shared on 8 different groups.
2020 is cancelled, loo roll is worth it’s weight in gold, dogs are exhausted.
Watching the news is stressful, none of my friends are sleeping properly, everyone is drinking too much tea, wine, gin, anything.
I sit in the sunshine at the allotment and drink tea. I water my seedlings.
Hope.
I walk back past the closed up shops, the bike shop, travel agent, pub, shoe shop, coffee shop, ‘It is with a heavy heart’, I read again and again handwritten or typed, on every shop door, a lump rises in my throat.’
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