The Covid-19 Diaries: Part 2

Crossroads from the balcony
The view from the balcony

The Covid-19 Diaries: Part 2

April 28 2020.

It’s been six weeks since St Patrick’s Day. Six weeks and one day since I was last in the office. I’ve left the apartment five times since then. Four times to go to the supermarket, once to go to the park. But now, it’s seventeen days since I left the apartment.

In that time, almost 21000 people have died in the United Kingdom. That’s over 3 times the population of my hometown, Kells, in Co. Meath in Ireland.

About two weeks into all this, I had a conversation with someone about how I genuinely couldn’t understand the tone of the media in the UK. Everything was about the talk of the crisis in Italy and Spain. I couldn’t understand how they were not getting and choosing not look at what was and still is happening on their own doorstep. These figures aren’t just numbers, they are lives.

Now, four weeks later, BoJo is out of hospital and back at work. I wouldn’t wish anyone to be ill with Covid but it does seem that when BoJo was admitted to hospital, that was when the UK government decided it was time to take this seriously.

In my opinion, they were too slow.

Having a Routine

Image of Nessy's Exercise bike distances for three days
Today, yesterday and the day before. 70km done.

I’ve been really lucky during all this. I’m working from home which makes evenings and weekends seem like evenings and weekends.

Myself and Talulah have been getting up every morning, doing a bit on the exercise bike and then doing our bits for the day. The first week or two was all about getting used to the fact that even though I was at home all day, this wasn’t all free time. I still had a days work to do. So Monday – Friday 930-530 aren’t my hours. The extra time I have is the time that I save from not having to commute, which is a godsend. I hate commuting at the best of times.

Home Deliveries

As I mentioned in my last post, my immune system doesn’t work properly and then isn’t good in pandemic times. It’s also not good that I almost died from smoke inhalation when this Covid-19 thing attacks your lungs.

I attend a rheumatologist in Ireland, one of the reasons is because the medication I take daily, isn’t licensed in the UK. So I registered with gov.uk to say I was in a more high risk group. This has proven to be of immense help as I was then added to the priority list for online grocery shopping. It took a while to happen, but I genuinely have no words to describe how beneficial this has been.

Myself and Talulah initially went to the local Lidl and stocked up on what we could on St Patrick’s Day, during times when we thought that people would still be at work. The only other place we had been was our local Sainsbury’s, which is a small shop, once a week for the next two weeks. The first time was ok, social distancing etc. The second time was crazy. Social distancing measures outside, we queued up to get into the store, but mayhem inside. Plus, there were a lot of items they didn’t have. We ended up ordering all our veg online from a local market supplier.

Three weeks ago, an early Saturday morning visit to Tesco proved very helpful and relaxing but the following week, there were too many people in each aisle. I just wasn’t happy being there.

We’re now getting our groceries delivered on a Friday evening, so it feels like a weekend.

As a side note to this, I had a phone call from the National Screening centre who are monitoring all the people in vulnerable groups. They asked if I was ok, if I had enough supplies, if I needed someone to drop round with a box of food. All extremely nice of them. I don’t need their food boxes, there are more entitled and needy people who deserve to receive these food parcels. Good job though, they will definitely help a lot of people in this shitty situation.

Online Life

The first couple of weeks of the lockdown were crazy for social media / online activities. I had decided that I would try doing a daily vlog and I would try doing some Insta chats with musicians in the evenings. I found these to be near impossible to do. Not that I didn’t want to chat to these incredibly talented people but I found that are dealing with people during the day and during the difficulties of a pandemic, I was physically drained by the evening and I could just about muster the energy to keep up.

I had hoped I would write more etc etc but as well as doing my day job, I had to chill, decompress and look after myself for a bit.

That hasn’t stopped me in my spare time, working with an artist to help them promote their music using my Nessymon Media moniker. There have been a couple of releases, which have gone down a storm, which is great. It’s a bit of fun and I enjoy it.

However, after six weeks, I do want to write more myself and I do want to try and do more with the blog.

I think in the next post, I will tell you more about what I’ve been doing in the evenings and weekends to keep myself entertained.