So. This lockdown thing. Now we’re in week 4 of social distancing, I wanted to sit back and take stock of how I’m feeling about it all. It’s had time to ‘bed in’, as it were, and this new normal is starting to feel, well, normal. Here, in no particular order, are my 20 Lockdown Life observations.

1. One of my children is more of a social animal than I’d thought, whereas the other one is much more able to cope with lack of contact with friends. It could be their ages (the older one is 10, and is struggling a bit, the younger one is 6), and Skype chats with friends have helped the older one a lot, but it’s been interesting to see how they’ve reacted.
2. Many of my day to day worries and anxieties have been locked down with the ‘lockdown’ – they simply don’t apply, or are now largely unimportant. This I like a lot, although I am now worrying about what happens when it ends and they come back!
3. I’m drinking wine. Lots of wine. This probably needs to stop. This may be helping or hindering point 2.
4. Food is a marker of time – I’m doing most of the cooking and it’s amazing how quickly lunch and dinner times roll around. The mental effort of thinking about what to feed the four of us three times a day is a culture shock! (My children generally have school dinners, which are a wonderful thing, and take the pressure off at least once a day!)
5. I haven’t shaved my legs or armpits in weeks. This should probably be remedied before I turn into a Yeti.
6. I’m running every other day. Well, I say running. I’m walking 2.5k and running 3.5k. This has helped A LOT with my physical health and my mental health. I’ve even been wearing shorts, despite the hairy leg thing.
7. I’m eating a lot. Prodigious amounts, in fact. I may well be fitter by the summer, but I’m likely to be fatter!
8. Routine is key for some members of the household, but less important for others. This is quite difficult to manage. I’m OK with a ‘see how it goes’ approach, but The Husband needs a timetable.
9. We are lucky, at this time, to be able to work from home (we’re both teachers), which feels weird in some respects (teaching is the ultimate ‘how can you do it from home?’ profession, but it’s proved to be reasonably OK to do). That means, for the moment at least, finances aren’t being affected. I am grateful for this in so many ways.
10. We’re also lucky to have a decent amount of outside space. This gorgeous weather has meant sitting and playing in the garden a lot, and I’m hugely thankful for that.
11. In the same vein, being able to watch the soap opera of the wild birds who visit our garden has been fascinating – we have a pair of blackbirds, a pair of sparrows and, wonderfully, a visiting crow (a giant among the jackdaws) who has popped up in the past few days. I’m loving watching them!
12. Inertia is definitely a worry, and I have found myself wasting a lot of time. I’m pretty self-motivated but I have caught myself drifting, and, mentally, that’s a problem for me.
13. The dog’s knackered and can’t understand why we’re around all the time!
14. I’m reading lots – and a variety of stuff. I’m commuting between commercial fiction and classics at the moment, which both fulfil a need for escape.
15. I miss people – especially my parents, sister and brother and their families, and my friends. Although I’m a solitary animal, the face to face stuff is hard to live without. WhatsApp has been great for this, but I really miss the full blooded giggles that occur from being in the same room together.
16. That said, I’m also missing the solitude of working from home, alone, three days a week! Why are all these people in my house all the time?!
17. The garden’s never looked better.
18. I think, by the time this is over, I’ll have forgotten how to drive.
19. I never realised there was so much dust in my house. I’ve been trying to eradicate it since all this started, having before been a ‘dust, what dust?’ kind of gal.
20. The weather is either a help or a hindrance, and I’m getting obsessed with the forecast.
21. Oh, and one last one – BBC Radio 5 is a constant companion on my working from home days anyway, but now, more than ever, I feel part of the 5Live family – they’re an essential background to my days!

If you fancy an escape to Somerset without leaving your home, please feel free to dip into one of my novels – click the pics to be taken to my pages on Amazon (also available on iBooks, Google Books and Kobo).