A to Z of a lockdown

Animals – as soon as we were able, we did our bit to support animal attractions that had been forced to close for months. All the animals still had to fed, watered and cared for during lockdown and some came close to having to put animals to sleep. Edinburgh zoo is currently considering whether they have to send their two giant pandas back to China as they’ve had very little income for twelve months.

Baking – I, along with most of the UK going by the empty flour and sugar shelves in the supermarkets, felt a need to bake. Very yummy it was, but unfortunately not good for the old waistline!

Crochet – I’ve never crocheted so much in my life! Lockdown made me feel that I needed to be productive and crochet was one of the ways I did this.

Dog bite – I got bitten by a dog on the beach in Norfolk in between lockdowns and ended up in A&E and on antibiotics.

Exercise – I managed to mitigate the baking a little with exercise. The gym was closed so I found other ways of exercising, enjoying the outdoors when the weather was good and building our home gym for when it wasn’t.

Fur babies – a massive upside to being home so much has been spending lots of time with Olive and Tinkerbell. It’s really comforting to look round during a day of working to see them snoozing on the bed.

Garden – I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve thanked my lucky stars that the pandemic didn’t happen when we were in our tiny flat with no outside space.

Harry Potter – bizarrely Harry Potter has played a big part in keeping me sane over the past year. I listened to all the books on audible and hearing those stories again was strangely calming. When I was furloughed we set the spare room up better for working from home and gave it a Harry Potter theme. I made 3D models and splashed out on Lego Diagon Alley which I love love loved building.

Improvements – we made several home improvements. Apart from the Harry Potter room, we also stripped the wood chip and redecorated our living room, built a catio so our furry girls can get some fresh air, had our loft insulation upgraded and replaced all our double glazing.

Jigsaws – I’ve done loads! My friend sent me this one which I really enjoyed.

Kindle – once I’d worked my way through all seven Harry Potter books on audible, I switched back to my Kindle and I discovered the Seven Sisters series by Lucinda Riley and read the six that are already released. They’re really good. I’ve got loads of books on there so I’m all set for the rest of lockdown.

Lego – hubby bought me Lego Hedwig for Christmas which triggered my Lego joy!

Masks – I was hesitant to start off with because BoJo was telling us that masks didn’t help with stopping the spread of covid, but once they told us we had to wear them I embraced it and made a few. It’s become almost a fashion statement. In Scotland I wore my Harry Potter one when we went to the Elephant House cafe where JK Rowling wrote some of the books and my dinosaur one when we went in search of wee Nessie.

Netflix – along with Disney+, Prime TV and iPlayer, Netflix has kept me entertained. I’ve watched Tiger King, Picard, Safe, Bridgerton, Mulan, Moana, the Stranger, Fleabag, Pete’s Dragon, Inside Out, Brave, It’s a Sin and goodness knows what else!

Online deliveries – many of them entirely superfluous to my needs! I ‘needed’ heart shaped cutters to make heart shaped sandwiches for Valentine’s Day and glitter for us to make Valentine’s cards so we could avoid shops. Our poor postman looked absolutely terrified every time he knocked on the door, which was almost as many times as the Amazon delivery driver.

Pooh bear memes – there have been loads of memes and funnies around. If anyone is yet to see David Attenborough narrating Boris Johnson cleaning a chair in a vaccination centre, I urge you to visit YouTube to rectify that. Anyway, me being me, I was drawn to the Pooh bear memes.

Quizzes – during the depths of lockdown we joined two friends every Sunday evening on FaceTime to do a quiz that their local pub quizmaster had moved online. I’ve been so grateful for technology during this time – I was able to virtually see more of some friends than I did before lockdown.

Rowena – this is my great aunt, Rowena. She passed away in February and I wasn’t able to go to the funeral because I was still in my isolation period after catching covid. I watched it online though, giving me another reason to be thankful for technology. It was hard seeing my family on the screen, but not being able to see them in person when it’s been so long.

Staycations – we were really lucky that we’d booked a foreign holiday at the end of January so we had the memories of that to keep us going, but we still felt the need to get away when we were allowed and we went to Norfolk in July for a couple of nights and Edinburgh for my birthday in September.

Tennis afternoon tea – I had tickets booked for the ATP Tour Finals at the O2 in London in November and that got cancelled so I made us a tennis themed afternoon tea as recompense.

Unbooked holidays – we should’ve been going to Jamaica in May and that was cancelled so we had a non-Jamaican party for two instead with Jamaican themed food and Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff playing all day. We swapped that holiday for Orlando in April this year, but that’s been cancelled too so, unlike the photo below, the adventure doesn’t begin, not just yet.

Virtual tours and shows – tour guides have become creative whilst they’ve not been able to offer physical tours and they’ve moved on line. The tour below took us all round the different Harry Potter locations in Scotland. I’ve also watched several West End shows on line, and Cirque du Soleil and next week I’m going to Iceland (virtually).

Working from home – this was my first day working from home when I actually bothered to get dressed before lunchtime and clearly made an effort with my breakfast. you can see why I had to rearrange the room – it was a bit depressing facing the wall all day.

Xmas – I don’t like shortening Christmas, my Grandad used to say that shortening to Xmas was crossing out Christ, but X is such a stupid letter and I couldn’t think of anything else. Despite the restrictions, we had a good day. We walked in the park in the morning with some family and then my Dad (who’s in our bubble) joined us for the rest of the day, the first time I’ve seen a member of my side of the family on Christmas Day for years.

Yawn – working from home has meant an extra hour of sleep each working day which I really appreciated through the Winter when I normally struggle with seasonal affective disorder and live in an exhausted fog for four or five months. I also appreciated it when I did succumb to covid because it really wipes you out and I needed sleep. Of course there’s no change for our Olive – she’s a gold medal snoozer!

Zoom calls – thank goodness for zoom, teams, WhatsApp calling and FaceTime. They’ve kept businesses going, but they’ve also kept friendships going and families together.

Happy Valentine’s Day

🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍

I know some people are cynical about Valentine’s Day, we’ve all heard someone say ‘every day should be Valentine’s Day’, but let’s face it, that’s just not feasible is it? Life gets in the way, and that’s perfectly normal. Others say it’s a made up day for commercial gain, well, you know what, Winnie the Pooh Day’s made up too and I’m not going to stop celebrating that either! What’s wrong with taking the time and putting the effort in to celebrate your love on one day a year?

This time last year we celebrated the day with a meal at one of our favourite restaurants, Los Banditos.

As you can probably tell from the name, this is a Mexican restaurant and the food is always top notch! I nearly always have chicken fajitas. The eagle-eyed amongst you might notice that on my skillet is steak. I remember now that the staff were run off their feet and also dealing with one very large and very demanding table (for demanding read rude) and I felt awful telling them they’d brought me steak instead of chicken, but they swapped it quickly and all was well.

As an aside, I can’t believe how much my hair’s grown in a year! I’ll have to put that jumper on to check, but I reckon it’s down to the middle of the next white diamonds now.

Anyway, I digress. This year’s been a bit different. Obviously we couldn’t eat out and hubby is now at work, and I met my sister-in-law for a walk early doors, but in between times we have celebrated in our own unique way.

First I made us an afternoon tea. Ok, so maybe it’s a bit more relaxing if you don’t have to make the afternoon tea yourself, but the benefit of making it yourself is that you get to choose exactly what’s on it!

Our heart-shaped sandwiches were filled with tuna mayonnaise and sweetcorn, cheese and pickle and cheese and red onion mayo (hubby is still being pescatarian so no meat today).

We also had olives and crisps (Walker’s Sensations Thai Sweet Chilli – the king of sharing crisps!) which you wouldn’t normally get with an afternoon tea.

I didn’t take an individual photo of the scones, but they were yummy. It’s such a shame that for something so delicious, they get overshadowed by controversy! First of all, no one seems to be able to work out how to pronounce them! Is it scone as in gone or scone as in flown? It’s perfectly simple as far as I’m concerned – it has a magic ‘e’ on the end, therefore my scone is flown! But then that theory doesn’t work for gone. No wonder people get confused by the English language! Then we have the cream or jam first debate. Are we supposed to go the Devon way of cream first and jam on top, or do we follow Cornish traditions and slather on the jam first with a dollop of cream on top? I go with Devon. Surely the cream is a substitute for butter, and when would you ever put butter on top of your jam? Also, if you have decent clotted cream, then it will be significantly more dense than your jam, meaning it’s much easier to spread jam on the cream than vice versa. Maybe it depends whether you think of your scone as a savoury treat that happens to have a sweet topping, or as a dessert. I think of a scone as essentially a savoury snack, hence my feeling that the cream is a butter substitute, but if you think of it as a dessert, then I guess the cream would go second in the same way that you would put cream on the top of an apple pie, not the other way round. I don’t think there will ever be a definitive answer on this, but I am perfectly prepared to do extensive personal research in search of the solution!

I may be shot down for saying this, but I always feel that an afternoon tea is too heavily weighted towards the sweet with insufficient sandwiches so I redressed the balance. We had one main cake which was my banana bread which is the easiest thing in the world to make, and I do so most times that we have over ripe bananas to use up, and I made some dark chocolate dipped strawberries to go on the side.

Yum, yum and some more yum!!

After we’d devoured our afternoon tea, we laid out all my craft supplies on the table. Hubby is back at work at the hospital and even though he’s not working on the Covid wards, he’s obviously still at higher risk of coming into contact with the virus so he’s doing his best not to go in shops so he doesn’t inadvertently pass it on, so we decided to make our Valentines cards this year.

Here’s his card to me.

Quite minimalist and tasteful I think …. until you look inside!

Still, he’s thinking outside of the box by decorating the inside of it. He was laughing to himself as he was gluing away and said at one point, ‘you’ll just have to tell people V made it!’ V is my five year old niece. This might be feasible if she didn’t live over a hundred miles away (and she also probably wouldn’t have made me married to a one armed, naked husband). However, I love it and we had lots of fun together making the cards.

Mine to him is a bit more cohesive, shall we say!

It doesn’t have buttons and a ladybird inside though!

I hope everyone who wants to is managing to celebrate this day of love in the best ways, despite not being able to do the usual kind of things. I’ve probably enjoyed this Valentine’s Day more than any other I’ve ever had.

🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️🥰😍❤️😃😍

2020 A Year in Review

2020 may have been the oddest year of most of our lives but it’s done now, and we have to have hope that 2021 will be better. I have, for the most part, managed to stay mentally sound throughout most of the year, which I know isn’t the same for everyone. I thank my lucky stars that this happened now and not a couple of decades ago when we would have been far more isolated that we have been thanks to Zoom, FaceTime and Teams.

I also massively appreciate the fact that we have outside space which, although at the moment isn’t at all enticing due to the inclement weather, got us through the warmer months of the year with relative ease, especially so when we were allowed to have people in our garden.

Here are some of my favourite garden photos of last year.

The garden was reasonably productive in terms of fruit and veg in 2020 …

… and we had quite a few visitors of the fauna variety!

Inside the house, we made a few home improvements. The first was pre-lockdown when, with the help of my Dad, we transformed our bathroom from dingy to sparkly clean safari wonderland.

During lockdown when I was furloughed and hubby’s workplace was demonstrating exactly how a zero hours contract benefits the employer (they still are!) we tackled first our spare bedroom/my home office making it a homage to all things Harry Potter …

… then when I was unfurloughed but hubby was still unbusy with zero hours, he decided to tackle the woodchip in our living room and we completely redecorated including wallpapering, laying laminate flooring, opening out the fireplace and hanging the TV on the wall.

Outside we built a catio on the side of the kitchen so our furry girls can get some air safely.

Away from home, amazingly we did manage to squeeze in three holidays. The first was, to paraphrase Craig Revel-Horwood A-May-zing!! A week long cruise round the Caribbean preceded by a two night stop in Orlando and a trip to Universal to go on the new Hagrid’s Magical Creatures coaster. This was pre-COVID, in fact I remember the first I heard about it was by scanning the Sky news app whilst I was sunbathing on deck, and I assumed it would be like the previous SARS disease. I never even entertained the thought that it could turn into what it has! Blissful ignorance, eh?

In between lockdown 1.0 and lockdown 2.0 we managed a short break to Norfolk which was a game of two halves – lovely to get away and see the sea, but I got bitten by a dog, we had to come home early because hubby had a job interview (which he didn’t get!) and I got a flat tyre!

In September we went to Edinburgh for my birthday. This had been booked pre-pandemic and we didn’t know until the last minute whether we’d be able to go, but I’m so glad we could because we had a fantastic time. One of the best holidays I’ve ever had.

We had a few great days out – we walked alpacas, visited confetti fields, played with meerkats, met gorillas at Twycross Zoo and we walked and cycled many times in Sutton Park and Kingsbury Water Park …

… and we also had a couple of great days in making up for things that we should have been doing. We had a non-Jamaica party for two on the day we were supposed to be flying out and we had a tennis afternoon tea on the day Dad and I were supposed to be going to watch the ATP tour finals in London.

I also did a lot of crafts – mainly crochet, but also knitting, baking, jigsaws (do they count as crafts?) model making, felting and, obviously, mask making!

So, all in all, although it certainly didn’t feel like it at times, 2020 was actually a pretty full year and I achieved quite a lot. Amongst all this, I was also working full time (apart from being furloughed for nine weeks in the summer) in a job that I only started six weeks before we were plunged into lockdown and home working, and I feel that I managed very well to learn the new job (although this is an on-going process) under challenging circumstances. It turns out that home working, while it doesn’t suit everyone or every job, works pretty well for me, and for my team. As I mentioned before, thank goodness for technology!

Now it’s time to look forward to 2021 and I’ll finish with a quote that I recently read in a fiction book, the sixth in the Seven Sisters series by Lucinda Riley but that is based in fact (the first book I didn’t enjoy as much, but I’m so glad I persevered because they got better and better and one thing to look forward to in 2021 is the release of the final in the series).Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards – Soren Kierkegaard.