Day 39 - Back to work (at home)

The Easter holidays are over, so it was back to work today. Peter was up at 7.30am working away, and I surfaced about two hours later! I’d a Zoom conference call to check in with the rest of the staff, and then I spent most of the day preparing and recording my lectures for the week. It takes a good bit of time to make the PowerPoint and to then record it, so I got a bit frustrated at how slow it all took, especially with the weather being so nice outside!

As I’ve mentioned previously, the weekly Tesco shop has become one of the big highlights of the lockdown for me, and today was the big day again! To make it even more exciting, we weren’t able to book a delivery slot, so we got to drive down to Wilton Tesco to do click and collect instead. Both me and Peter went, and it was exciting to be out on the road again. I think I’ve only been out in the car about three or four times in the past five weeks. At Tesco, we parked at the Cick and Collect door, Peter gave our name and a guy came out with our stuff in boxes and left them beside our car. Then, Peter put the shopping into the car (because only he had gloves), we left the plastic boxes back beside the door and headed home. We didn’t encounter any police on our journey, but I was a little bit nervous when driving as I’m not entirely sure if we’re allowed to be out driving with two people in a car together.

I the evening I went for a lovely walk in the sunshine. What absolutely brightened my day, and made my walk so enjoyable was noticing, for the first time, that lots of houses on Blarney Street have things in their window for passers by to have a look at. I’d heard of this happening in lots of places around the country, but only noticed it here today. I also passed a climber practicing on the wall of Cork City Gaol! This is one of the best things I’ve seen yet. I called over to him and told him that it was a great idea and how it’s brilliant to see how creative people are being during the lockdown. He replied that he “just had to climb something,” and that he was only climbing sideways as he thought it might be illegal to climb to the top! I told him to enjoy, he told me the same, and I continued on my walk with a smile!

It was nice to see so many lovely things on my walk. The six o clock news was very sad this evening, and I had watched it just before I went out. They announced seventy seven deaths today, the highest daily total yet. Then, at the end of the news, they put up a few pictures of people that have died so far, and I started crying. I think I have a lot of pent up emotion, that I don’t realise, at the moment. The one image that struck me the most was a picture of quite a young man from Cabinteely in Dublin. Seeing these people’s faces is really upsetting, but it’s a nice tribute to them too.

I’m going to make a prediction for what I think will happen next, in terms of the lockdown, if only so that I can laugh at how wrong I was in two weeks time! I think that at the end of this period of the lockdown, on May 5th, they’ll announce that some people can go back to work, and that the rest of us can start going more than 2km from home. People are starting to get a tiny bit complacent now, they’re also starting to get itchy feet, and the government will be coming under pressure to ease the restrictions soon. Word is also coming through of other European countries that are already relaxing restrictions. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but I don’t think things will change as much as people want them to!Les mer