Lockdown Diary - Saturday 6th March 2021

The usual Saturday. Pick any one of the previous however many Saturdays since I started being locked down - say late February last year - and unless there was something extraordinary it'd be similar.

Actually I'm being bleak here. After the usual early rubbish I spent three hours in guided meditation with the NHS and a group of twelve or so others from 10 till 1. A useful antidote to my current sense of pointlessness, at least for three hours.

After that, time to catch up on all the usual other chores, which primarily means washing.  No time to read the papers as the afternoon was peppered with phone calls: starting with my brother-in-law telling me of the funeral arrangements for my stepmother-in-law and more that I can't go into here.  I'm still under orders not to tell my wife of her stepmother's death. Bloody hell.  Her family are so bad for keeping things from one another, for fuck's sake, what is wrong with being honest and open?  Here I am, piggy in the fucking middle. My assumption is that I'm not supposed to tell my wife, for fear it will upset her and have further consequences, which I guess is a possibility.

A little later my older sister phoned to enquire about Friday's hospital visit and for a general catch-up - we chatted for a fair while - another way to keep encroaching darkness.  

Later still my younger sister phoned for an even longer chat. We have a boat in common, or at least we are in adjacent boats heading into similar uncharted waters, for different reasons.  Whilst there is much I can't share, she does at least understand my situation and I can talk about some things with her that I probably couldn't say to almost anyone else.

Still doing chores much later than usual, but the meditation was needed and  so I can't complain.

Son #1 is cutting son #2's hair, which is risky in the extreme, as far as I can see, as he's not after a single grade all over (which is dead easy!)  This is a long and slow process which means I'm doing dinner and is putting film night in jeopardy.

After a brief bit of wrangling son #2 chooses the film (it needs to be short as it's late) instead of son #1, who's not happy to have to choose a short film (timings set by son #3), so we watch 'Mean Girls', which I've never seen.

'Mean Girls' was OK, though it seemed like all the characters were cardboard cut-out identikit representations of people you might encounter in a school back in the early 2000s. A gay one. A goth/misfit. Valley girl clones. The nerd. And so on.  It was a mild diversion from more pressing matters.

Swerve left, Elvis Costello & The Imposters with 'Why Won't Heaven Help Me' from album, 'Look Now'...

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