Shame!
A diary of lockdown, week 2
Lockdown Day 7
In a turn of events that I wouldn’t have believed if I were watching it in a film, both our Prime Minister AND the health secretary have Covid-19. This means the daily press conferences, formerly led by Johnson, are now presented by a rotating cast of politicians. I tried to watch one with Michael Gove, but something about him makes me want to throw things. So I’ve given up on them. Instead I rely on one of my sisters to fill me in.
Never in a million years did I think I would actually miss the presence of Boris Johnson, but that’s the kind of life I live now.
Could be worse. At least we don’t have Trump.
Lockdown Day 8
My sister has coronavirus, we’re pretty sure. She works in a hospital, so if anyone was likely to get it, it was her. Still, it’s scary to be far away from her and my niece, unable to help in any meaningful way. I wish I could hug her.
Lockdown Day 9
One of my family members has a new catchphrase.
‘SHAME!’
She said it to my cousin because he’s refusing to comply with social distancing. She shouted it at the BBC News presenters for complaining about the tennis being cancelled. She wrote it in all-caps on our family WhatsApp group when she found out about the idiots slashing ambulance tyres. In one twenty-minute phone call today, she shamed so many people that she almost exhausted herself.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘All this shaming can’t be good for your blood pressure.’
‘Yes, but I just can’t help it.’
I keep getting emails from the app NextDoor, in which various locals are also enjoying a good bout of shaming: about the lack of clapping for the NHS, the lack of compliance in social distancing, people going out only to buy chocolate and Coke instead of essential items. I do get it, but also, I hate how quickly some people descend into this kind of obsessive behaviour.
I read a Mumsnet thread in which a man appointed himself the village inspector, donning a clipboard and a hi-viz, wandering around taking notes about how many times people are leaving their houses and then posting passive-aggressive Facebook messages about it. (The irony of him being outside for a non-essential purpose must have escaped him.)
Anyway, this has made me paranoid, as there is some confusion about the rules, with some people interpreting the government advice very severely, and others barely paying attention to it at all. The other day we took the kids for a walk and a lady walking in the distance started filming on her phone. I’m presuming she was filming the lack of people around (just us and her) considering it was such a beautiful day. But for the rest of the day, I half-expected a scathing Facebook post to appear about the four of us. I sort of wanted to call over to her, ‘HELLO! LOVELY DAY, ISN’T IT? DID YOU KNOW WE’RE ALLOWED OUT IN A GROUP OF FOUR BECAUSE WE’RE ALL MEMBERS OF THE SAME HOUSEHOLD?’ but I thought that might be a bit much.
Lockdown Day 10
I broke the rules today, I think. One of my daughter’s friends dropped a card through the letterbox for us as part of their daily walk. I yelled hello to her from about ten feet away. This small amount of human contact made both mine and my daughter’s day.
Unfortunately I happened to be on the phone to the family member I mentioned earlier when the door knocked. When I called back to explain, I could tell I was teetering dangerously close to being shamed myself. She did hold it back, but tutted her disapproval when I told her I didn’t think to spray Dettol on the envelope before bringing it into the house.
Is this allowed? What if I’d bumped into them in the supermarket? Are we allowed to talk then? Or are we supposed to be pretending other people don’t exist? I want to follow the rules because I do care quite a lot about flatting the curve.
Anyway, this whole thing has made me realise how much I miss people, and I’m a massive introvert who usually finds other humans exhausting. Goodness knows how the extroverts are coping.
Lockdown Day 11
Pretty good day today. Kids were happy enough playing, and they even helped me with dinner (by which I mean my daughter chopped up courgettes into insane shapes while my son stood on the chair chomping his way through half a red pepper. He’s so vegetable-averse normally that I just let him get on with it.)
Speaking of my son, he turned into Jigglypuff for the last part of the day. He would not be addressed as anything other than Jigglypuff. He only communicated by squealing the word ‘Jigglypuff’. Unfortunately, he had a LOT to say to me. It continued right up until bedtime.
Me: ‘Goodnight, sweetheart. I love you.’
Him: ‘JIGGLYPUFF.’
Spent the evening in bed watching Tiger Kings and having a gin. It is the most thrillingly bonkers thing I’ve seen in a long time and is the exact escapism I’ve been searching for.
Also? I’ve hurt my foot. Or my leg. Or something. Basically, everything on my left leg from the knee down is throbbing, and every time I put my foot on the floor I get a sharp spike of pain through my shin up into my knee. I’m laying 100 percent of the blame onto Joe Wicks rather than pondering my own lack of fitness.
But seriously, what is the point of exercise if you end up hurting yourself and having to have a break from exercising, only to repeat the whole routine again in a few days’ time? Surely it’s an act of self-sabotage more than anything.
Lockdown Day 12
Spent the morning working and the afternoon clearing out the garden, which has been neglected in the winter (this is a massive understatement). The kids were overjoyed to have access to the slide again once I’d de-spidered it.
The intense emotions I felt during week one of lockdown have faded into something resembling normality, and the anxiety is lessening. However, today, I was about to cook dinner when I started to read a story about a nurse in the UK who died from coronavirus after treating sick patients.
I read that her husband held her for one last time before she died and told her, ‘don’t worry about the kids.’
I had to go upstairs so my kids wouldn’t see me cry. That was just one person of the 600 or so that died along with her in one 24-hour period. 600 grieving families left behind.
Hanging onto the hope that Italy’s numbers are finally leveling out.
On an unrelated and much less serious note: clearing out the garden? It was a massive mistake. My leg feels like it’s on fire.
Flipping Joe Wicks. I thought the fact that he refers to broccoli as ‘midget trees’ was the worst thing about him, but actually, it’s the fact that his stupid kangaroo jumping has done my knee in.
Lockdown Day 13
My daughter and my husband are spending a lot of time playing Minecraft. They spent the day planning, in detail, their excursion to the Nether to get blaze rods. She told me the plan at breakneck speed without once pausing to draw breath.
‘Daddy is going to build a Nether portal and then we’re going to hunt blazes and get the blaze rods and then we’re going to go home and making a brewing station and THEN I’m going to make my house look a bit nicer because my house is just made of dirt which is silly I want to make it from glass but do you know how to get green coloured glass Mummy?’
My son spent the day mixing water and mud in the garden.
Decided I’ve been reading too much Mumsnet after reading an argument about whether bread and milk are considered essential items or not and if people should, or should not, be expected to survive on crackers and water. So I finished The Gunslinger, the first book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Decided to give the series a go again having abandoned it midway through Wolves of the Calla over a decade ago.
It is the cause of much shame in our marriage, because Chris passionately loves these books and I promised them I would read them. And then I stopped reading them. And then he kept saying ‘When are you going to finish The Dark Tower?’ and I’d say, ‘I’m definitely going to read them soon,’ and then I wouldn’t for some reason and then a decade of marriage passed somehow. Despite me making him listen to all the Harry Potter books. And despite me describing the overarching plot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, followed by a rundown of my favourite episodes. And despite me spending an entire day on holiday in Lanzarote describing everything that happened in The Night Circus after ignoring him for hours while I read it beside the pool. And despite — well, you get the point. He’s put up with all of my nerdy passions and I haven’t honoured my promise to finish one of his.
(I should point out that I have enjoyed tons of TV shows/books/games/videogames as suggested by him, but you know, this one is his favourite and I feel bad about it.)
Anyway, I enjoyed rereading the first book, but I’m wary of getting attached to any of the characters for obvious reasons. Stephen King has a way of devastating me even when I can see a characters’ death coming a mile off. Fully expect to be sobbing by the end of book 7.
I’m going to bed. Wary to see what another week of lockdown will bring.
Stay safe ❤
