It's a year on Tuesday (23rd March), since Britain first went into full Lockdown in the fight against COVID-19. The television is full of it this morning, which got me thinking... What have I done differently, since we went into Lockdown? There are a lot of things that I did before, that many people have adopted during this time (cooking from scratch, baking, knitting, etc), but here are a few things that I do now, that I didn't habitually do before Lockdown:-
- Regularly walking to L!dl. Our local branch is 1.5 miles away and it's become our primary grocery shop. We walk there about once a week to buy toiletries, dairy products and fresh veg. (Prior to Lockdown, we bought our fresh veg and eggs from a farm shop 5 miles away and split our supermarket shopping between MrT's and L!dl, driving to both. The first casualty of Lockdown was the farm shop - they are in the middle of a National Trust property and were forced to close when the "big house" closed. They haven't reopened.)
- Buy the Sunday paper from the local branch of the C0-0p. Again, this is a walk, whereas previously we'd drive to MrT's.
- Going for a walk "after work" every evening. We've both been working from home since Lockdown started. This is the only way to get that mental space between work-life and home-life, which we'd normally get from a commute. Another plus side is that, unlike many people, I haven't put on weight.
- As you may have gathered, I'm not doing a lot of driving now. The money that I've saved by not buying a tank of diesel every week is going into the "Car Account" instead, to be spent on services, insurance, road tax and the inevitable replacement car.
- Use my "morning commute" time to exercise. Rather than get up later, now that I'm working from home - which might upset DH's daily routine - I use that time to exercise. I've done the Couch-to-5K and now run 3 times a week. On the other 2 mornings, I do some yoga stretches and I've started doing a bit of weight training.
- Learned French via Duolingo. (It's free.) Today is day 296 of my current streak of lessons. I'm spending less than 10 minutes a day and have learned considerably more words than I did in four years of French at high school. I'm not sure I can string a sentence together and I doubt I'd understand if my French colleagues started talking in their native tongue, but I know far more than I did.
What about you? What are you doing differently since you went into Lockdown?
- Pip
