Corona Journal, 14 May: Day 59

9am Started the lesson with M. He is bawling his eyes out, not a wonderful start. I have my first caffeinated coffee in weeks.

9:30am Manage to engage him as I have made a presentation of all of his favourite things including dinosaurs, a scooter, a fire truck, a police car, a motorbike and a chocolate cake.

9:45am Boyfriend arrives home from night shift in scrubs. I ask him to put his stethoscope around his neck and try to interest M in him – asking, who is this? What is this man’s job? M stares for a full ten seconds in fascinated silence, while I will him to tell me ‘dottore’ or ‘medico’ – but then he shrugs and runs away to climb up the curtain rail (literally). It’s very good for boyfriend’s ego.

10am Battle through lesson with K who doesn’t want to do French today any more than on any other day.

11am End of lesson. Boyfriend has gone to bed, and I climb in next to him for a ten minute rest. Tell him, fresh from a 12-hour night shift, how tiring 2 hours of sitting at my computer ‘teaching’ is. Not my most tactful moment, I’ll admit.

12:30pm Doorbell rings. It is Mrs Upstairs holding two bags of food from Pret À Manger; she explains she was waiting for a parcel, so buzzed a delivery driver in but when she got downstairs, it wasn’t her parcel after all but a food delivery. The delivery man was nowhere to be seen, so she assumed the food was meant for us. Receipt says ‘Rachel’. Flatmate admits that we are notRachel, but offers to go knocking at other flats to find her.

12:40pm There is no Rachel in our building.

12:45pm There is no address on the receipt stapled to the bag.

12:50pm Call Pret twice. No answer.

12:55pm Peek inside the bags. Two chicken and bacon baguettes, a packet of yoghurt coated cranberries, a bag of sweet and salty popcorn and a frappé. Mmmmmm.

1pm Tweet Pret. They reply and tell us to contact UberEats.

1:02pm Tweet UberEats. No reply.

1:10pm Spend ages trying to track down a way to contact UberEats. There is no support number for customers (or non-customers who have received food) so I call the one for delivery drivers, which, after I click through the options, tells me to look for the answer to my question online (I have done, the answer is not there) and hangs up on me. How rude.

1:20pm Stomach rumbles loudly. Flatmate and I are eyeing the food, wondering how much trying we need to do before it is not morally abhorrent to eat what the universe has presented us with.

1:30pm According to the receipt, it is now a full hour since the food was delivered, and longer since it was ordered.

1:35pm No reply from UberEats.

1:40pm DELICIOUS.

2pm Finish Gone Girl. Never thought I was the kind of person who would be into thrillers, but I sped though this one.

3pm I know I shouldn’t, but I want a nap. Curl up on the sofa to fall asleep, but immediately a car alarm right outside decides to go off intermittently for the next fifteen minutes, like a sign from the universe telling me naps are bad.

3:30pm Car alarm has been sorted out, but were birds ALWAYS this loud?

4pm Couldn’t sleep. Heave myself off the sofa to go for a run instead.

4:30pm More of a walk/jog than a run. It feels hard today, and everything is heavy and hurting. Try not to beat myself up about it and let myself slow down to a walk from time to time (or, more accurately, let myself speed up to a jog from time to time). A skill I’ve been learning over the past year is to be a bit nicer to myself, and it’s working – I walk/jog 5k and feel nice at the end, even though it was difficult and slow for no apparent reason.

7:45pm Flatmate presents us with dinner – slow cooked pork (free from Waitrose, he’s had a great run of free food this week), romano sauce, rice and broccoli. It is delicious.

9pm Boyfriend out for final nightshift, flatmate gone to bed, I am watching Gone Girl. I have seen it before, about 5 years ago – but my memory never fails to astound me in its inability to remember anything, ever. I watch the film as if I have never seen it before, with only a vague recollection of ONE scene (the one where she is driving along in the car, window down, wearing a big shirt and eating fast food from the seat next to her. Iconic).