• Feeling: OK
• Listening to: Something inside so strong – the tenor line!
• Watching: Nothing today

Last night I was was pondering on where we were in the Covid-19/Coronavirus crisis, and realising we were probably not even half way through a realistic ‘best case’ lock down period – that’s pretty sobering to be honest.

I’ve been trying to keep this blog about how the current situation is affecting us as a family, and to record something of daily life at the moment but it doesn’t seem right to pass without mention that this evening that the Prime Minister was moved into intensive care as a result of Covid-19. While the PM is just one more person affected by this virus (and so many have already died as a result of it), it seems inevitable that his condition will have an impact on how people, in the UK at least, regard the situation we are currently in and how we react as a society to it.

Back to more personal stuff …

I set an early alarm (6am) in order to get up and do some work before the start of the day proper. I didn’t exactly leap out of bed but I was at my desk by 7:10 and even managed to spot our milk man doing a delivery for the first time.

The Easter Holiday starts for the kids today, which means the schools haven’t set any work. I’ve been dreading it a little – originally I was due to take this week off, but there doesn’t seem a huge amount of point at the moment. D has decided to work half days for 2 weeks instead of taking one full week off as originally planned.

B already had lots of plans for his holidays (mostly about some computing projects he wants to work on) but F not so much – but she seems glad to not be worrying about school work at all. Despite the holidays the kids had Art class today and an hour of Maths & English tutoring each.

Once D was finished working for the day she took the kids out into the garden, and they started work on digging a space for us to bury an old baby bath to start a pond. Over lunch I helped with this and we got the bath into the ground.

I’m hoping we can build up an area around it and have a little water fall – but for now we’ve sunk the bath and ordered some plants to go in it.

The rest of the day was mainly work for me. I cooked sticky ribs for tea which F loved and B thought were my best attempt at them so far (meaning he was just about willing to eat it) – which I was pleased with considering the recipe was basically:

• Some left over passata
• A slug of soy sauce
• Roughly 2 tbsp dark brown sugar
• A good squeeze of ketchup

Everything mixed up and thrown over the ribs, which were then cooked at 160℃ for an hour or so.

For the “virtual choir” project my choir is doing we are a bit short of tenor voices, so I offered to try to record the tenor (although I usually sing bass in the choir, I can sing in the tenor range especially for this piece which doesn’t go particularly high) – so I’d been listening to the guide track all day to learn the tenor line and recorded it this evening after the kids were in bed.

Doing the recording at home makes me feel I want to do a few more looping based songs which I started doing after my singing teacher introduced me to looping last year. Here’s one of my old ones, but I have another one I was working on a few months ago which I’d like to resurrect – if I manage it I’ll post the results here.

Stay safe, stay strong.