Now you’d think on Day One of Lockdown 3.0 I’d have more important things to worry about than a blog post. In the first lockdown my work - still relatively quiet post maternity leave - meant the blog was the only non-domestic thing I had to do for the first month and then became a nice evening ritual thereafter.
However, by some miracle last year I managed to build up my business to be a full time occupation, so as we watched the all too familiar address on TV last night I accepted the blog would have to take a back seat this time round with moments at the laptop channeled in a different direction.
However, as I collapsed on the sofa at 6.30 tonight having entirely run out of steam and operating solely on pure and undiluted hatred of Boris Johnson and his cronies, I felt compelled to go to my desk and start a post. It’s my therapy and you, my poor unfortunate readers, are my therapists. I will buy you all a drink when this is over, I promise.
Whether this is Lockdown 3.0 or just a continuation of the first one, it feels so painfully like Groundhog Day that I’m starting to think I’ve gone a bit mad. I woke up in the middle of the night and for a split second genuinely thought it had been a dream. It was my puffy eyes from a furious, ranty cry at 10pm that quickly confirmed it wasn’t.
And, only one day in, various friends have told me they had already cried twice before breakfast, that they need a spliff or that they are considering medicating their way through it - and they’re not joking. There’s a social media post going around about the next generation being educated by alcoholics but I am steering well clear of the booze. I fear if I set off down that path there will be very little road left in a month’s time.
Either way, whatever fresh hell this is, it’s still lockdown. It’s six* more weeks of this. (*My arse. They won’t be back at school till after Easter at the earliest.) Six* more weeks of juggling bored, unmotivated, frustrated, cooped up kids alongside a job that fills a solid 7 hours of my day every day of the week. Even my GCSE C grade Maths skills tell me that doesn’t work.
And let’s please not forget that the six* weeks are slammed right on top of the two or more we’ve just done for Christmas. A Christmas in which we saw not another sodding soul. AND I know people who had a fortnight’s isolation right before that so really that makes it a solid 10 weeks for them. Plus the extra month or so the pathetic excuse for a government will sneak on the end.
But unlike the first time when there was a kind of “holy hell we need to nail this virus” blitz spirit about it all, this time it’s excruciatingly, maddeningly frustrating because we all know this could have been avoided. If they’d acted sooner. Enforced previous rules properly. Closed borders. Seen what other countries had done to all but eradicate it. It’s utterly infuriating to sit and watch the same mistakes being made all the time and know they’ll be made again and there is absolutely nothing we can do. And the audacity of the narrative that this is all the fault of the new strain is enough to tip me over the edge.
Right now I don’t know how I’m going to cope. I know I will, because I’m not on the front line, I’m not coping with disabled children or an absent spouse or all the things that make this so much harder for so many people. But right here, right now, at the end of day one I genuinely don’t know how I’ll get through it.
Apologies if you were reading this hoping for some wise words of insight or motivation but there are none. All I will say is what I’ve been telling friends, and myself, in low moments over the last 24 hours and that is not to ever, under any circumstances, think about the future. Just think about today, and maybe tomorrow. But not a minute longer. There in madness lies.
We like to think Andy had some kind of sixth sense about the arrival of Covid because in January last year he bought a chest freezer and happily filled it with chickens, loaves of bread, pizzas, lollies and frozen peas. He was so happy.
However, that moment of inspiration was clearly just a one off, because on Sunday, 48 hours before the kids were expecting to go back to school, and 36 hours before Boris Johnson told them they weren’t, we decided to have a very thorough de-clutter.
Because Henry and Bella - who share a room - had got so sick of one another they had turned physically violent towards each other, it was decided we would bring forward our plan to transform the spare room/Andy’s office into Bella’s bedroom after Andy had returned to work.
We planned it so that Andy would keep his desk in the window and use the room Monday to Friday while Bella was at school, and in return she promised not to touch the computer or doodle in Daddy’s notebook. (A promise she would NEVER have kept, by the way.)
So on Sunday we moved all the piles of crap that wre in there into our bedroom and at the same time got motivated to empty the loft, bringing two broken hoovers, a buggy and car seat, half a dozen large plastic boxes of baby and maternity clothes and two HUGE containers of redundant wires, cables, chargers, old ipods, routers, set top boxes and mobile phones into the living room. To ‘sort through’. By which I mean ignore every evening and promise to start sorting tomorrow.
So now Andy is having to work at the kitchen table so Bella can enjoy her new bedroom, we can’t get into the living room for assorted shite on every spare inch of carpet, and the kids spend every waking minute arguing about one of them going into the other’s bedroom without saying the password, or someone unlawfully enticing Xander into their room with better music/toys/snacks so they have no one to play with.
Andy is musing on setting up a desk in the living room but the irony is there’s now too much crap in there to fit his desk in, the charity shops are shut, the dump may well also be closed and neither of us has got a spare second to tackle the piles of junk. Look out for us in 18 months on one of those Channel 5 shows about people who ended up living among towers of newspapers, McDonalds wrappers and broken fridges and whose bodies were eventually found under five feet of plastic bags full of egg boxes.
So here we are. I will endeavour to keep you entertained over the next few weeks, though not every day I’m afraid. Sometimes I will spend my evenings screaming into a void, others I will be trawling the streets of Hemel looking for a shady character selling weed.
But I do promise to try not to be too miserable and to keep a little perspective - something for which I am not renowned. In the meantime I genuinely wish you all a lot of luck and love for the next phase of this living nightmare, wherever you are and whatever your circumstances.
Over and out.
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