The end of week five of our self-imposed isolation, and week four of the compulsory version sees us both in good health and relatively stress-free, though the inability to access online shopping and the need therefore for a weekly supermarket visit is an ongoing cause of anxiety. We're keeping busy and there's progress to report on several fronts.
It would appear that being 74 on the one hand and 69 with ongoing health issues including diabetes and a history of heart problems does not make you quite vulnerable enough to qualify for priority list at Sainsbury’s. As long-standing online customers of the supermarket chain going back more than five years, you may imagine that we’re a bit disappointed. Their loss is Waitrose’s gain during the priority hour on a Thursday morning, but I'm not allowed to go and Michael finds it very stressful.
That aside, life carries on pretty much in an established routine which includes plenty of the three Rs for me - Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic! Cooking and a daily walk also form part of the mix, with evening TV – including some relays of plays and musicals, of which more in a future post.
Reading comes in the form of news media (usually The Times online and the BBC News website) plus books - altogether this occupies a couple of hours each day, including that all important pre-sleep read in bed that has been a part of my life since childhood.
Writing continues in two forms – non-fiction work on transport issues and fiction. Good to report substantial progress in both directions – the new version of The Bus Demand Jigsaw is now virtually complete, and will be ready, as I’d hoped, by the end of the month. This has involved plenty of arithmetic (well, spreadsheet work to be honest, but still). This has been necessary in compiling and updating the report’s 63 tables and 72 graphs and charts. I’ve also contributed articles to the trade press.
Progress on the fifth novel, Steering for Freedom, has been good, with 24,000 words now written – that’s 10,000 during the last three weeks. With the bus book now virtually there, I hope to be able to spend more time on this for a while – I am really enjoying connecting once more with my two main characters, Alan and David, first introduced in Veering off Course last year, and taking their story forward.
There's also some good news on novel number four, Governing Passions. Karen Holmes, my editor, is still working her way through a detailed edit/proof read of the revised version, but early bulletins are that the new version has gone a long way to solving the problems she identified at the beginning of February. As you may imagine, I am quite chuffed about this! More news on a publication date shortly.
Michael, meanwhile, as well as keeping the admin side of the business together, has been taking advantage of the good weather and making a start on the garden – fashioning a new flower bed, getting the mower working and restoring the garden furniture we inherited with the house. “Much fruitful activity”, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would have put it!
Focusing on the mundane and everyday is still the main focus here – though, like many others, I am turning my mind to the future – especially the consequences of all this upheaval on public transport and its providers. I shall be writing more about this on my Passenger Transport Monitor blog shortly – but suffice it to say that the results are unlikely to be pretty.
The first signs of hope that the lockdown is achieving the desired result are indeed welcome, and they offer the prospect of some form of relaxation some time in late May or June. But, like many people, we are facing the fact that things getting back to “normal” – i.e. life as we knew it up until the middle of March – is not going to happen.