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Published: June 13th 2020
It is Wednesday - Hump Day. Middle of the week. Halfway between Monday and Friday . I have called it all those things over time. Today is work day . It is shopping day and no doubt it will be shorter walk day. If I were working I would be rushing round doing all those things that need doing before work. I would be driving into work putting my digi key up against the digi lock hoping no-one had changed the lock. I would walk up that flight of long long stairs and headed for the tea room to make my first coffee of the work day . Computer on. E-mails read. Ready for the morning meeting and talking to customers all day about the benefits of work. Work at home is nothing like that .
But shopping took over and I headed for Ziggy . Do people forget how to drive when they stop for a while ? I wondered and thought probably not . Just like riding a bike you would never forget . Would you? The roads are fuller these mornings . Think back 12 weeks and it was as if the world had stopped . Now
we are slowly but surely creeping back to normal.
The queues in the supermarket which once snaked around the car park are a thing of the past. Just a handful waiting for the store to open. I joined the queue - an elderly couple there every week without fail and in front of me. Perhaps the shops opening an hour earlier have helped the situation . As I stood I spotted someone I had not seen for 12 weeks . A fellow swimmer and regular at the gym. She told me she was working one and half days a week and that was enough for her. She said that at the start of the 12 weeks all the families with children at her school sent them as if nothing had happened. They were asked if they were key workers and most had little idea what a key worker was . Gently explained the children were sent home for home schooling . Every time a child coughed it too was sent packing . We wondered if school would reopen before the end of term and both agreed probably not. BoJo confirmed this later in the afternoon.
Shopping did not
take too long . I know where I need to go and go round as if on a race . I still cannot understand and find myself tutting at those who stand for too long playing with the goods before buying nothing . I tut too at the ones who seem to think one way does not apply to them . Perhaps my understanding and patience has long gone with them all as they stand and talk and block the aisles . I was glad to get back to the car on what was turning out to be yet another miserable day .
Rain, light at times . A chilly feel. The low which is stuck out in the Bay of Biscay is delivering us some unseasonal weather . We need good weather to make this isolation at least bearable . The weather forecasters tell us optimistically that the weekend will be better .
Was I less optomistic about it all now ? Is that why I keep a daily blog . Logging my thoughts about the situation and sometimes venting my frustration . I have not kept a diary for years. I bet you were like me.
When you were 14 or 15 you wrote those secret thought in that little book . . You had one of those diaries with a lock on them and you wrote . You filled it with your innermost thoughts and you used symbols and secret signs that meant something to you and you hoped nothing to your mum. You locked it and you hid it . I wish I still had mine . An insight into the mind of a teenager would be interesting now . Looking back I would think - did I really write that ? Did I really think that? I would have read my thoughts about school , teachers , subjects I loved and hated . The cruise and what it meant to me and my parents . Casablanca with the bazaar and camels . Lisbon , A Corunna , and Gibraltar. Youth clubs , friends , falling out with friends .
Perhaps like me you kept one when you were having children . I cannot remember when I started a diary again . It may have been the late 1970's or the early 80's but I remember weighing myself and keeping a record of
my pregnancy . Details of my feelings and the hospital experiences . I recorded the weather and what I did during the day. I noted down weights of the children and their development . How I wish I had those now .
I had no intention of blogging every day . I think I felt optomistic at the start and thought I would only be writing a few blogs. I was walking which was a new experience . I was learning a lot about our village . It made sense to write about what was going on . Slowly over time and reading over them I feel my optomism has gone south . I guess you run out of things to see and write about . Frustration sets in . But it is recorded for posterity now - too late to change my thoughts . And what thoughts they are turning out to be.
Back home a quick coffee before a wet and miserable walk . Me and my thoughts as always . 14 day isolation - apart from key workers coming back here everyone else has to isolate . How is that going to work ? Another one of those ideas that perhaps would have been good weeks ago now seems hair brained . Europe is opening . We are closing . I find I start to think about what has gone well and what has quite clearly gone wrong and could have been done better . As I walked I weighed up all these ideas . I came to a few conclusions not that they would be any use to Boris . He would not listen anyway . Not to me .
Time for work - Time to get on with the day and get that work done . And put my feet up . They are suffering from all this walking . And then there is the Little House . A sign I pass most days on my walk . What do you imagine the Little House is like? A tiny cottage with roses over the door. A two up , two down house. Nothing grand . No think again - the owners were either having a joke or they did not see the irony in the sign . Small - not a chance . It is the biggest house on the lane. It sprawls with its double garages , its many bedrooms and reception rooms . Little - I dont think so .
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Jackie Harrison
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Diary
I actually still have my diary with a lock on it!! Its very boring though - just about lessons at school. My Mum must have been really disappointed there was nothing of substance in it!!!