Lockdown 2020 #3

The world was a different place five short months ago. Those months have been the longest ever due to 'lockdown'. I'm conscious that I'm beginning to forget what life was like at the time and want to make a few notes to help me remember.

Easter was late in 2020 and was in the second week of April. I discovered a new, local plant shop opened virtually on Good Friday and I ordered some plants to be delivered. I used to have loads of houseplants and missed having something to look after. They arrived the following Tuesday by bike delivery.

I started doing my cuppa-on-the-couch afternoons. During the week I'd select an art book to leaf through and look at the pictures and on Sunday it was time for a Sunday afternoon film. New traditions were born to fill the days. The weather got better and I missed flowers and started looking enviously at window boxes - I'd thought about getting them before but never got round to it and now it was an obsession. No point in having a window box, you also need a lot of soil and some plants...

So my walks started taking me past a local hardware shop and a pet shop that sold plants and soil, and one day the stars aligned and they had window boxes and soil so i leapt in and got them. And on a change to my walk I found out that Homebase was open and it was full of flowering plants so I indulged. I now had two small 'gardens' to look after on my window sills. And, one morning, I found a squirrel sitting in my window box smelling the flowers.

The government was doing daily press briefings every afternoon to tell us the number of virus cases and deaths, answer questions and spin its lies. I couldn't watch it and managed to avoid them all to save my mental health and blood pressure, just getting the highlights on the news. Then I stopped watching the news and just heard clips on the radio news about ongoing shortages with personal protective equipment in hospitals and care homes. The government kept announcing it was sorting out the problem but it went on and on.

'Stay at home and protect the NHS' was the mantra and I did. If I went out it was to pound the local streets, mainly walking in the roads since they were largely empty. I didn't go to the Common much due to the joggers and cyclists who deemed themselves immune and didn't bother distancing. And I discovered online drawing through Zoom sessions.

I've done some life drawing in recent years and it was nice to rediscover it by staying at home. A lot of sessions started up and I joined in Zoom drawing sessions with models from all over the country and the world that I wouldn't normally have access to. At first everything seemed to be very flat, drawing from a screen, but you get used to it. I've drawn models in York, London, Paris, Barcelona, Bangalore and New York. We're learning new skills and hobbies in this worldwide lockdown.

My sleep patterns changed and I was sleeping a lot less, waking up very early to see the dawn. Why couldn't I sleep? I can only put it down to the random anxiety of the virus and the uncertainty of the future. I went out less and less and had to force myself to go to for walks in the roads, seeing the same old streets and trees, peering into the same gardens to see how the plants were growing.

Then the D. Cummings thing exploded in late May with him breaking lockdown and driving up to Durham and then going on a sightseeing trip to Barnard Castle to 'test his eyesight'. There was the ludicrous moment when M. Gove said in an interview that he'd driven to 'test his eyesight' in the past. That was the end of social distancing in my area. I could see it happening from my window as people stopped social distancing as they walked in the street and stopped walking out into the road to avoid people but just walked past each other on the pavement. That stopped me going out even more, as the traffic - both pedestrian and roads - increased and distancing ended.

And summer arrived with glorious weather. For a while.