Tag: lockdown

drifting away

It’s a couple of months since we went into enforced lockdown in the UK. Even now, we are supposed to be continuing with social distancing and limiting activities and time spent with anyone beyond our own household bubble.

To be honest, it hasn’t made a huge impact on my life as I can continue to work from home and although virtual meetings are not the same as face-to-face, there is so much time saved by not having to travel, that there’s time to talk to far more people and my diary is more full of appointments than ever before.
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blue horizons

For me, some flowers and plants are inextricably linked to books I have read. I can’t see a periwinkle flower like the one above without its other name – Joy-of-the-ground – springing to mind alongside images of Maria Merryweather and her pony at Moonacre Manor in Elizabeth Goudge’s delightful story The Little White Horse.

Salmon pink geraniums also take me to the same story, but they don’t fit this post’s colour theme, and, really, it’s colours not books that I’m thinking about today.
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encounter with cows

During the lockdown, I’ve begun going to the racecourse when I have time for a proper walk, as there is plenty of space to avoid people. As well as the paths around the track, there’s also a small wooded area, where I know I will be completely alone, and there are a couple of places where you can climb over stiles and get onto footpaths that cross the adjoining fields.

There’s a proper made-up path on the inside of the track, but I prefer the natural path thats skirts the racecourse; this is quite narrow, but you can always dip under the fence to ensure the recommended distance is adhered to.
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cracking the code

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the slightly strange fact that during this lockdown my muse seems to have been liberated and I am writing again. Admittedly, I’m not writing a huge amount of poetry, but then, I don’t think I ever did write that much, and I’ve always accepted that poems can take years to evolve, so the fact that I have some jottings may mean that more poems will come in time.

There’s also prose, both creative and associated with my business. As I said yesterday, social distancing actually seems to have encouraged conversations, and each conference call or webinar seems to produce at least one gem of an idea that could be worth working up into a full-length article or essay.
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far and near

One of the most notable things about the current crisis is how easy it has become to use words such as crisis, pandemic, unprecedented… And another is how easy it is to speak of thousands of deaths as if each one of those statistics didn’t refer to a unique and cherished individual.

For me, another of the most notable aspects of the last few months is how much contact I’ve had with people all through this “social distancing” time.
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frustrated plans

During this coronavirus lockdown, times and dates have become less important than they sometimes are for many of us.

For those who have been furloughed, normal office hours are irrelevant, while for those who are working from home, even early morning meetings seem to start later – the breakfast meetings I attend are at 9 instead of 7am – and since there’s no commuting time, there’s no need to set an alarm clock.
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being reasonable

I don’t think that I’d really realised how Anglo-centric the UK news is until the recent lockdown. All the reports about recommendation, rules and regulations that I’ve seen are based on the law in England. But I have family in Wales and the rules there are rather different. For example, while here in England the once-a-day limit for exercise outside your home is merely a recommendation, in Wales it has actually been the law for some weeks.

Or has it? I’ve read the guidance on leaving home to exercise published by the Welsh government and although Regulation 8 section 2b says one of the reasonable excuses to leave home is “to take exercise, no more than once a day”, the guidance immediately continues “(or more frequently if this is needed because of a particular health condition or disability)”.

So you must only go out once a day, unless you need to go out more than once a day.
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