Corona Lockdown week 0: I’m trying to stay positive, but everything is completely shit, isn’t it?

Read the rest of my Corona Lockdown diaries here.

Well, fuck.

On Monday, the schools in England, Wales and Scotland close for an unspecified amount of time – but likely to be until September.

That’s a long time.

Oh, and (as you well know) we can’t go out during this time because hello, Coronavirus. And we can’t have contact with grandparents because it’ll put them at risk. So we’re on our own, in our houses and open spaces. Just us.

You probably realise this, because wherever you are in the country – or in fact THE WORLD, this probably applies to you too.

(NB; I wrote this post earlier about things to do when kids are off school, but it wasn’t real then. Now it is).

It sucks.

I am not ready to home educate. I am fully ready to admit that I am a shit teacher, possessing the patience of a three year old who wants a snack.

I was not designed to teach.

When I was about 17 I attempted to help my friend, who was doing a GCSE resit in order to secure her place at uni. Theoretically I had top marks in Maths GCSE and was acing my A-Level; the knowledge was there and it should have been no problem.

Quite frankly it is AMAZING that friendship survived intact.

I just do not have the capacity to impart knowledge in a meaningful way. IT JUST IS, OK! is apparently my teaching method, which I concede is a bit rubbish but I do have other strengths, I think.

And that was an 18 year old desperate to learn to get off to uni, not a stroppy 4 year old.

My kids are way too smart for me to let them down. They deserve better. Thank god for Twinkl.

So I’m looking forward to that immensely, as I’m sure you are too.

In addition to this, my husband has been made redundant, and searching for a job at the moment (particularly one senior enough to fund my very recently acquired nice cocktails and new dress habit, which I’m going to have to go cold turkey on over the next six months. SIX BLOODY MONTHS) is like looking for rocking horse shit.

It’s going to be a hell of a struggle.

Again, this definitely isn’t just us. Everywhere, people are shitting themselves and wondering how they are going to pay their bills or whether they’re going to have to start eating rats and how you might catch them.

I can tell you first hand that actually, the economic situation concerns me more at the moment than the virus itself, which also sounds like less fun than a Jim Davidson gig.

We saw it coming…

As soon as the news – which wasn’t exactly unexpected, given that he worked in the travel industry – hit, we started cancelling our direct debits. No gym, no drama classes, they won’t be open anyway. Netflix can stay.

We phoned our mortgage company who took two hours to answer (TWO HOURS) and a further 5 to call us back, only to confirm that despite Boris ‘Can’t Answer A Single Bloody Straightforward Question, Who The Fuck Put Him In Charge’ Johnson’s assurances that everyone would be offered a three month payment holiday (woohoo! The best kind of holiday am I right?! The kind you still have to pay for. Yay) they weren’t actually asked about this and still maintain they can’t do anything over two months.

Fucksake.

Only another four months (conservatively) to pay for then, from nothing. And bills and fourteen meals a day (kids man) and shit on top. Woohoo.

And freelance work is also going sooooo well right now (this needs a sarcasm font). If I get one more email asking me to write a blog post about some dodgy website but they are ‘only able to offer a backlink in exchange because of Coronavirus’ (come up with a better fucking excuse than that for fucks sake) I will set fire to my inbox.

Anyway.

Other fun stuff we’ve been dealing with… We were mid-remortgage, hoping to buy out the equity loan we had used to purchase the house ten and a half years ago.

We paid an absolutely exorbitant amount for a nice enough almost-retired man to come round, ask me how much I thought the house was worth and talk to me about his son for half an hour – but since then fuck all had happened because conveyancing solicitors, as far as I can work out, are lazier than my four year old.

Today, we phoned them up and said the jig was up and we would have to pull out. Despite people being A Bit Upset and trying to impose admin charges all over the shop (‘Sure! Send me an invoice, it’s next in line after paying for my kids to have food!) and obviously the fact that we will probably never be free of this bastard loan, it has at least finally put my mind at rest that we aren’t entering into a fraudulent agreement. I can breathe out now and actually talk about the redundancy on my blog and social media without jeopardising my house, so that’s nice.

And to think, just over a week ago I was on a sunlounger in Morocco.

Fucking hell.

Still, we have our health, and at least we don’t actively hate each other (yet). We could be a lot less fortunate.

It’s still shit though.