First lockdown weekend : the debrief

 Well, I didn’t actually take my own advice in the end.

Apathy set in pretty soon after writing yesterday’s blog post. The idea of cleaning the house or making stuff out of scraps of wool suddenly seemed like much too much effort. And there’s a limit to the amount of fun you can have gazing at the pots of weedy soil on your window sill.

But the games and puzzles helped pass the time, and I also did some rudimentary “cooking” which involved cobbling together a few store-cupboard ingredients to make a marinade for olives to go with Saturday night drinks.

The aforesaid drinks were quaffed in our new lounge bar (aka the living room) to help make Saturday night feel different to Friday night, which was spent in the Quarant Inn as usual.

So all in all, a pretty uneventful weekend. Much like everyone else’s weekends up and down the country come to think of it.

But what really did help us through our first weekend in lockdown was other people. On Friday night we joined Ben, Josie and some other family members through the “HouseParty” app. Then on Saturday we were “joined” by our friends Keith and Angie – holed up somewhere in Hampshire - for pre-dinner drinks via FaceTime. And Robbie had a meet-up and a quiz with some other young people through the Discord app.

Today I spoke on the phone with my not-very-tech-savvy friend Sue, and later I’ll be “getting together” with friend Dawn via video chat.

Human contact is vital to our well-being and happiness. And it turns out there is absolutely such a thing as a virtual hug.