Lockdown Diary - Friday 23rd October 2020

Despite living under the restrictions that lockdown imposes, the weeks seem to be flying by at the moment, so here we are at the start of Friday again. I don't think they're flying by because I'm having a wonderful time, far from it. I'm often painfully reminded that I / we (my sons included) have not managed to get away at all this year, and won't have done by the time it ends. 

The biggest challenge to going away - if that meant all of us - is how is my wife would be cared for whilst we're away.  As things stand, especially given the government's treatment of care homes, I'm not happy with the idea of her going to a care home for respite, assuming they'd even accept her. The alternative would be to have someone live here with her, but when I've looked in to that, it's a lot more complex than you might imagine, and, in reality, it would probably mean that there would be long periods each day when she'd be left alone, though not at night when she'd ideally be asleep. That also ignores the added covid risk it would expose her to, which is a risk I'm not prepared to take. Given the direction of travel the restrictions are heading in, all this is probably irrelevant, since more than likely we'll all soon be unable to go very far anyway.  Anecdotally, my sister, who works at the nearby hospital, tells me that the number of covid intensive care beds is not far short of the peak earlier this year, so clearly the local trend is in the wrong direction.

Most of the daylight hours have been devoted to work, give or take the odd interruption, such as when I became 'nurse' for a brief period at lunchtime as I donned my apron and gloves to flush my wife's catheter.

Tonight we're making shepherd's pie - I have the recipe lined up and have prepped all the vegetables so that it's easy for son #2 to kick the cooking off whilst I take  son #1 and his gf to the station in order that she can return home for work tomorrow.

On returning from the station, we're met by the appetising smell of the lamb mince and vegetables cooking and so I get on with cooking the potatoes and knocking up the stock. In all the recipe takes a little over an hour (excluding preparing the veg) so we're all going to be ravenous when its ready.

Tonight's democratic TV choice is 'The Third Day' starring Jude Law, and hardly anyone else so far.  The first episode has an undercurrent of unease alongside some hints of disturbing themes.  A couple of the visuals reminded me a little of the folk horror film 'Midsommar', though there's no clear sense that that's the direction this is heading in, yet. There is one challenge to the story, though: the middle section was a live 12-hour episode which we don't have and so far I've been unable to find. We would have recorded it, but inexplicably it was shown on a different channel to the main series - the Sky box has some intelligence, but that was too much for it.

No time to listen to music today and after 'The Third Day', Bedfordshire beckoned. 

I first heard this several days ago now.  When I first heard it, Stuart Maconie described it as Prog Metal, a genre I have found to be devoid of any of the things that I enjoy in music. On paper it sounds like a perfect marriage - I like some Prog and I like some Metal - but alas, everything I've listened to in this genre has managed to combine what I least like about Prog with what I least like about Metal. Until I heard this.  My interest level was raised when I learnt that the lead singer and lyricist, Cammie Gilbert, is a black woman - a rarity on two counts in both Prog and Metal - and I wondered if she might bring a different perspective to things. This is cheerfully titled, 'The Soundtrack To My Last Day' by Oceans of Slumber, from the album of the same name.

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