Read the rest of my Corona Lockdown diaries here.
As of today it’s been 5 weeks since the UK schools closures were announced and one month exactly since lockdown began.
Because (strangely enough) I’ve not got a great deal else to write about at the moment, I’m trying to keep a Lockdown Diary of sorts to keep my brain ticking over.
It’ll be something to look back on once this whole sorry shitshow is over.
Here is week 4’s post, here is a post from week 3, and here is a post I wrote the previous week (a lighthearted one at that…). Here is the post I wrote the day after we were put on lockdown and a post I wrote just after the school closure announcements.
Then there is this one, from 12th of March, which is wondering whether I was overly worrying about Coronavirus. Ha, ha, ha. Etc.
Just over a week before that, I was still on holiday.
It seems a lifetime ago now; a totally different world.
I wish I could regale you with tales of projects started, DIY completed, my homeschooling wins and all the home baking I’ve been doing, but my sole achievements from this week have been;
a) Getting out for the world’s slowest walk with my children each day
Appropriately socially distanced of course.
I know these are meant to be for health, but I’m not convinced to be honest. My phone automatically monitors my steps and it splits them down into ‘healthy pace’ and ‘shouldn’t have bothered’ steps.
Children do not allow you to walk at a ‘healthy pace’, and they certainly moan about it a lot.
We did find this rather spiffing (possibly magical?) hollow tree though.
b) Learning how to socialise online using Zoom meetings
It’s taken me a while to get into the idea of it, but with one other adult human and two small ones becoming my entire world for over a month now, I finally caved and joined my very first Zoom meeting; a quiz set by Laura of Tired Mummy of Two and BlogOn fame.
The main rule of Zoom socialising appears to be that you need to have a drink in your hand.
Luckily for me, I had put a tongue-in-cheek request out for people to buy me items from my (affiliate link y’all) Amazon Wishlist (everyone on Twitter was doing it, I promise) and a lovely soul named Beth actually bought me a bottle of my favourite pink gin, so I was sorted.
Now, if there is one piece of advice I could share with you from my Zoom meeting experience, it would be to stand up every now and then to make sure that you still can.
Evidently, sitting in front of a computer in your living room (or, in fact in the garden office, like I was) lulls you into a false sense of security.
Unlike in a pub setting where you chat, and sip, and your friends are there to make sure you don’t make an almighty dick of yourself, no one can really tell if you’re slurring your words online; in a group chat at least one person’s internet is crap and people can’t really hear what you’re saying anyway.
So, by the time you do stand up to go to bed several hours later, you may have got through rather more gin than you intended and be a little worse for wear.
And you may end up rather ill and suffering from the world’s worst hangover, the likes of which you’ve not experienced in around 7 years, and you won’t even have amusing selfies and a front garden littered with road furniture to make up for it.
Anyway, thankfully I’m out of gin now, so we won’t be repeating that this week. It’ll probably be wine instead.