• Feeling: just tired
• Listening to: No such thing as a fish
• Watching: Hawaii Five-0

We left the house today for the first time since St Patrick’s day (17th March). We didn’t go far and were probably only out for about 20 minutes. It was odd to see other people out walking (and felt very strange that we were trying to plot a course that avoided them as far as possible).

Going back to the start of the day, I woke around 4am and found it hard to settle again. Eventually I moved downstairs and did manage to get back to sleep on the sofa listening to the “No such thing as a fish” podcast.

When I woke again it was after 8am, and it turned out both D and I had the same thought on waking: “how lovely to have slept until after 8”, until we realised the clocks had gone forward and it was really only just after 7!

We got up at a very leisurely pace and it wasn’t until after 10am I got out in the garden to pick up from where I left off yesterday. It was cold out and I needed my woolly hat and coat first thing. I managed to tidy up some of the junk I’d found in the hedge on Saturday, avoiding starting trimming our other hedge until as late as possible so as not to disturb our neighbours. Eventually I got the trimmers out and went into battle with the hedge, taking several feet of growth off the top!

I couldn’t reach all the way across the top of the hedge to completely trim the top, and I don’t really want to try going around to the neighbours to work from that side at the moment – I think I need to find a way of hooking or looping the growth to pull it over to our side – I’ll have to think how I can do this.

I wasn’t quite up to tackling the leylandii that makes up the rest of the hedge today – it will be a bit of a tough job, but I’ve got plenty of time.

F has been struggling today. She’s had several melt downs, and was crying as it was time to go to bed claiming it was “too early”, until after questioning she explained that “there wasn’t anything happy to think about” when she went to bed. To try to cheer her up I’ve downloaded series two of Cabin Pressure for her to listen to (I’d originally promised this as a treat for when we drove to Wales for our Easter holiday. She’s also been enjoying John Finnemore’s (writer of Cabin Pressure) “Cabin Fever” videos which he has been posting on YouTube to entertain people (and possibly himself!) during the lock down.

I’m hoping tomorrow the promise of an Art class and an online tutoring session from “Explore Learning” will help cheer F and B up, although that said last week F struggled with the Art lesson – so it might not go to plan. Fingers crossed anyway.

Apart from our short walk, D, B and F spent quite a bit of the day inside. D made good progress with a “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” jigsaw.

Meanwhile the kids played with their “Turing Tumble” – a great toy which uses some cleverly designed plastic “switches” and ball bearings to let kids (or adults) build mechanical computing devices. The kids managed to build a machine that counted in binary today!

F has been making good use of our new Disney+ subscription to work her way throughh the “High School Musical” films, and Number 3 was on her afternoon viewing list.

This afternoon I had a call with the rest of the choir committee to discuss how we should keep the choir going while we are on lock down. We’ve done two online “virtual rehearsals” so far and we want to take the most successful elements and use them to build an approach that can work over weeks to keep people engaged and involved. It was really great to see the rest of the committee and talk to them, even though we were mainly talking business. I can’t wait until we can all meet up again and actually see each other.

Another day done, and another week done. I started this blog a week ago because it felt like I should really document a period of time that is likely to have a huge impact on everybody’s lives. Writing everyday hasn’t (so far) been a chore, although sometimes it has kept me up later than perhaps is wise. I also suspect that as we settle into our routine more, documenting the minutiae of each day will become less interesting for me and for any readers – but at the moment the idea of being able to go to the shop tomorrow seems exciting and slightly shocking!