I really should have started an isolation journal back in March, but I'm guessing that I'm not the only person feeling like this. At the time when everything started to change, it changed fast and even though I had more "time" my mental energies were a bit frazzled.
For me as I've mentioned in my previous post it all felt (feels) a bit like a dream, we flew out to a tropical island and by the time we flew back my reality was very different, but rather than try and distill the past 10 weeks into a journal entry, I'm going to just think about today as part of the weekly challenge from Curtis Brown Creative.
Last night I went to bed fairly late as I have this week off as holiday, I'd decided to participate in a creative writing week with my friend Lauren and so I didn't end up getting into bed until around 1am as I'd been up doing a freewriting challenge. Annoying my laptop decided to freeze and omitted half of what I'd written!
It meant that I woke up after around 7.5 hours of sleep and finally dragged myself out of bed after 9am knowing that I needed to get myself ready for a cycle ride. I'd arranged to meet my cousin for a socially distanced catch up at Towton Battlefield and swap cakes. My cousin is gluten free so I decided to make some chocolate cornflake cakes and used my favourite life hack ever of melting chocolate with a hairdrier. I ate a banana for breakfast and had a black coffee from our lovely new coffee machine.
Alan came with me which was helpful as I'm still a bit nervous about cycling and despite googlemaps claiming it was 4.5 miles it ended up being 6 miles. We met just after 11am and had a nice long chat whilst some farmers were laying out some cabling across the field. We had the new awkward scenario of how to exchange cakes whilst keeping a social distance, it almost looks like a very small hostage exchange. I felt bad on the way back as Alan pointed out that we'd not actually gone for a stroll around the Battlefield especially after reading my favourite 1 star review.
boring field
I like to come to the old battle fields. This battle field is the most boring one out of them all there is nothing to see but boring old fields. I payed a tone of money to get there and when i got there all it is, is fields after fields and the best moment was the trip there and back!!!!!!
I made some pasta for lunch with some roasted courgette and yellow pepper and chorizo and made some marmite sauce for mine after my friend Lauren had told me about it - basically cook the pasta and save some pasta water and mix it with butter and marmite. It was very salty, but delicious.
Whilst I was cooking I listened to half of a talk from the The Hay Fesitval online by Devi Sridhar above the Covid-19 pandemic and I need to finish watching it because she was giving some really balanced critique of the UK handling including the observation that countries with less strong health systems were more rapid and robust with their responses and consequently experienced less deaths than those who on paper were better set up with strong health systems and so perhaps delayed their decisions to respond longer.
We ate lunch and I watched another event from The Hay Festival live by Daniel Davis on immunity and Covid-19, Lauren was also watching and we both found that it was very science based in explanations and for me I need to re-watch it!
Lauren and I then had a video call to talk through the writing that we had done and to compare some notes about how we'd found the writing exercise. It was really nice to actually do some writing and have someone else give some feedback. I had written a piece of freewriting and thought about the concept of freedom in lockdown and Lauren had written a piece inspired by the writing prompt He knew she’d never come back. Lauren had written with pen and paper and it made me think that I might like to try doing some writing that way as I think typing and writing use slightly different parts of your brain. We're going to do some more writing and discussion over the week and have both booked onto a "flash fiction" course with Arvon on Thursday.
After I'd finished the call I watched the Daily Briefing from Downing Street which had two of the questions from the public that I would be asking if I'd been given the chance - Will people fined in similar situations in lockdown looking to access childcare now be able to appeal their fines in light of Dominic Cumming's behaviour being described as "legal" and also a question about if we can go shopping for non essentials why and when can we see our families? Matt Hancock gave a more consistent briefing than we have seen over the past couple of days, but was extremely dismissive of the media and didn't allow follow-ups on their questions. I'm worried about why we have the highest death rate and yet we still don't have a robust test, track and trace system set up and what is happening with the app? It amazes me that people are still willing to defend our government without question as we are so far behind the world in being able to get back to some sense of normal life.
After the briefing I decided to go for a run, I'm aiming to run around 1000 miles in 2020 which sounds like a lot, but is actually only 4.4K per day when you break it down. I also wanted to take some pictures for the photo competition that one of the ladies from my running club has set. I took pictures for the "bugs eye view" and "red, blue or yellow" categories. I was going to go for a run up and down the hill on the road next to the house to keep an eye out for an amazon pantry delivery, but it had been left by the door when I went to set out for my run so I unpacked it and set off. I ran 5K in 27 minutes.
Alan made dinner and we had a Hello Fresh recipe of Lamb Kofta and he even made a rhubarb crumble which we had with a bit of vinetta that was delivered with the Amazon Pantry order. The biggest issue I have with lockdown is just how much sugar and puddings I'm eating, generally I've been healthier in terms of sleep and excercicse - I'm running, cycling, zumba and walking as well as Pilates classes, but I definitely need to try and cut down on the sweet things!
Whilst eating dinner, we watched a very odd film that promised more in the description than it delivered. The Voices - A likable guy pursues his office crush with the help of his evil talking pets, but things turn sinister when she stands him up for a date. It gets 6.4 / 10 on IMDB, but I would probably give it 3 - 4 as it really didn't have a very coherent plot and was just a bit gross, but not in a funny or contributing to the plot way.
We then put Friends on again in the background whilst I started to write my isolation journal...
For me as I've mentioned in my previous post it all felt (feels) a bit like a dream, we flew out to a tropical island and by the time we flew back my reality was very different, but rather than try and distill the past 10 weeks into a journal entry, I'm going to just think about today as part of the weekly challenge from Curtis Brown Creative.
Last night I went to bed fairly late as I have this week off as holiday, I'd decided to participate in a creative writing week with my friend Lauren and so I didn't end up getting into bed until around 1am as I'd been up doing a freewriting challenge. Annoying my laptop decided to freeze and omitted half of what I'd written!
It meant that I woke up after around 7.5 hours of sleep and finally dragged myself out of bed after 9am knowing that I needed to get myself ready for a cycle ride. I'd arranged to meet my cousin for a socially distanced catch up at Towton Battlefield and swap cakes. My cousin is gluten free so I decided to make some chocolate cornflake cakes and used my favourite life hack ever of melting chocolate with a hairdrier. I ate a banana for breakfast and had a black coffee from our lovely new coffee machine.
Alan came with me which was helpful as I'm still a bit nervous about cycling and despite googlemaps claiming it was 4.5 miles it ended up being 6 miles. We met just after 11am and had a nice long chat whilst some farmers were laying out some cabling across the field. We had the new awkward scenario of how to exchange cakes whilst keeping a social distance, it almost looks like a very small hostage exchange. I felt bad on the way back as Alan pointed out that we'd not actually gone for a stroll around the Battlefield especially after reading my favourite 1 star review.
boring field
I like to come to the old battle fields. This battle field is the most boring one out of them all there is nothing to see but boring old fields. I payed a tone of money to get there and when i got there all it is, is fields after fields and the best moment was the trip there and back!!!!!!
I made some pasta for lunch with some roasted courgette and yellow pepper and chorizo and made some marmite sauce for mine after my friend Lauren had told me about it - basically cook the pasta and save some pasta water and mix it with butter and marmite. It was very salty, but delicious.
Whilst I was cooking I listened to half of a talk from the The Hay Fesitval online by Devi Sridhar above the Covid-19 pandemic and I need to finish watching it because she was giving some really balanced critique of the UK handling including the observation that countries with less strong health systems were more rapid and robust with their responses and consequently experienced less deaths than those who on paper were better set up with strong health systems and so perhaps delayed their decisions to respond longer.
We ate lunch and I watched another event from The Hay Festival live by Daniel Davis on immunity and Covid-19, Lauren was also watching and we both found that it was very science based in explanations and for me I need to re-watch it!
Lauren and I then had a video call to talk through the writing that we had done and to compare some notes about how we'd found the writing exercise. It was really nice to actually do some writing and have someone else give some feedback. I had written a piece of freewriting and thought about the concept of freedom in lockdown and Lauren had written a piece inspired by the writing prompt He knew she’d never come back. Lauren had written with pen and paper and it made me think that I might like to try doing some writing that way as I think typing and writing use slightly different parts of your brain. We're going to do some more writing and discussion over the week and have both booked onto a "flash fiction" course with Arvon on Thursday.
After I'd finished the call I watched the Daily Briefing from Downing Street which had two of the questions from the public that I would be asking if I'd been given the chance - Will people fined in similar situations in lockdown looking to access childcare now be able to appeal their fines in light of Dominic Cumming's behaviour being described as "legal" and also a question about if we can go shopping for non essentials why and when can we see our families? Matt Hancock gave a more consistent briefing than we have seen over the past couple of days, but was extremely dismissive of the media and didn't allow follow-ups on their questions. I'm worried about why we have the highest death rate and yet we still don't have a robust test, track and trace system set up and what is happening with the app? It amazes me that people are still willing to defend our government without question as we are so far behind the world in being able to get back to some sense of normal life.
After the briefing I decided to go for a run, I'm aiming to run around 1000 miles in 2020 which sounds like a lot, but is actually only 4.4K per day when you break it down. I also wanted to take some pictures for the photo competition that one of the ladies from my running club has set. I took pictures for the "bugs eye view" and "red, blue or yellow" categories. I was going to go for a run up and down the hill on the road next to the house to keep an eye out for an amazon pantry delivery, but it had been left by the door when I went to set out for my run so I unpacked it and set off. I ran 5K in 27 minutes.
Alan made dinner and we had a Hello Fresh recipe of Lamb Kofta and he even made a rhubarb crumble which we had with a bit of vinetta that was delivered with the Amazon Pantry order. The biggest issue I have with lockdown is just how much sugar and puddings I'm eating, generally I've been healthier in terms of sleep and excercicse - I'm running, cycling, zumba and walking as well as Pilates classes, but I definitely need to try and cut down on the sweet things!
Whilst eating dinner, we watched a very odd film that promised more in the description than it delivered. The Voices - A likable guy pursues his office crush with the help of his evil talking pets, but things turn sinister when she stands him up for a date. It gets 6.4 / 10 on IMDB, but I would probably give it 3 - 4 as it really didn't have a very coherent plot and was just a bit gross, but not in a funny or contributing to the plot way.
We then put Friends on again in the background whilst I started to write my isolation journal...
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