Reflecting on the apparently rapid passage of time over the last few weeks.
It’s fifty-five years this year since the restaurant chain TGI Friday’s was founded in New York, and since then the phrase Thank God it’s Friday – as well as being uttered most weeks in most workplaces – has also been a disco film and featured in several pop songs (not to mention a brilliant piece of stand-up by Jasper Carrott, but that’s another matter).
Now I’ve invented a replacement especially for the lockdown – at least our experience of it – “Can’t Believe It’s Friday”. It’s just that the time seems to be going so fast, so that when you wake up in a morning, and you actually work out what day it is, you suddenly find that another week has gone by.
Here we are, in the first few days in May, six weeks since the lockdown began and seven since we started our own sheltering from the world. And I just cannot believe how quickly the time has passed.
Our lives have fallen into a routine, built around reading in the morning, working before and after lunch and a 20-minute walk, then fiction writing for a couple of hours before cooking dinner and watching some TV. It’s surprising how important those walks are, though the weather hasn’t been quite as good this week, so I’ve missed a couple of days – following on from last week, when a sudden short bout of tendonitis also made me miss a couple.
The last couple of weeks have seen my new book on the market for bus services, The Bus Demand Jigsaw 2020, published, further work on getting my fourth novel Governing Passions towards publication and some more progress on my fifth, Steering for Freedom, which has now reached just short of 30,000 words. I’ve also been doing some other consultancy work and writing.
On the domestic front, online shopping was restored to us from Sainsbury’s this week, eliminating one lot of stress, and Michael has managed use the web to track down supplies of bread flour and yeast for our bread-making, as well as a local source of eggs. Boots came up trumps this week with our prescriptions as well.
Lots still to do in the coming weeks, as well, on all fronts, so I’ve no doubt I’ll keep waking up once a week and muttering “can’t believe it’s Friday” all over again. As long as I managed to work out what day it actually is first.