Corona Journal, 3 April: Day 19
7am Ok. I am awake. I’m going to get up and make coffee and read my book for an hour and not look at my phone, like a modern Buddhist monk or a person who makes morning routine videos on YouTube.
10:30am Right. I fell back to sleep. It’s ok though, all is not lost. I will just get up and read my book now.
11:30am Got distracted by replying to WhatsApp messages. Am deep in a conversation with two best pals about how early we are allowed to start drinking. The consensus is probably not yet, though no judgement if one of us does.
1pm Start reading, finally.
2.30pm Planning tomorrow’s Italian lesson/virtual babysitting session, a truly humbling experience. I am 26 years old, have an Italian degree, and I’ll admit that I did not know most of these words before today.
4pm I put the above photo on Instagram. An Italian acquaintance whom I haven’t spoken to in years messages, ‘It’s LO specchietto’. I respond by unfollowing him.
4.30pm Go for another cheery walk through the graveyard. See a pretty tree.
6.30pm Boyfriend arrives home and immediately goes to the shower to wash the corona off him. I pour a glass of wine and we order chicken wings from Wingman’s up the road. Feel very noble for supporting local business and helping the economy.
8pm Zoom pub quiz with my family turns out to not be quite as chaotic as I had imagined. We have each written a round of 5 questions on a subject of our choice; mine is ‘literature’, my brother’s is ‘sport’, flatmate’s is ‘which is further North’ and so on. Tensions run high when my 11-year-old cousin announces the topic for his round is going to be ‘basketball’. Nobody gets more than 1 question right in his round, causing flatmate to mutter that next time his specialist subject is going to be ‘things that are in my wallet’.
10pm Watch Have I Got News For You, corona edition, where all guests have dialled in from home and there is no live audience. Absence of canned laughter makes me realise how spectacularly unfunny the show is. We cringe our way through anyway.