Corona Journal, 30 April: Day 46
9am Log on to Zoom meeting for M’s Italian lesson. The audio connects and he is bawling. I mean screaming and crying his eyes out in full meltdown mode. It’s too early for this shit.
9:02am I think I’m just jealous, honestly. I’d quite like to have a tantrum on an international scale as well, but I can’t because apparently I’m a ‘grown up’ and I have to ‘act like it’.
10am Exhausted. Calmed M down eventually and got him interested in the animal flashcards, but it wasn’t easy. A highlight was when he insisted that the rhino card was a hippo, which made me happy because I didn’t draw the rhino, boyfriend did. No time to gloat, though; French lesson about to start.
11am Want to nap after all that teaching, but napping so much is really messing with my actual sleep. Resist.
2pm Pop out to Boots to pick up a prescription. It starts drizzling so I ask the old lady with the zimmer frame who is behind me in the queue if she wants to go ahead of me, since I am young and sturdy and spritely and she looks like a good gust of wind would knock her off her feet. She takes the place ahead of me without so much as a thank you, the ungrateful cow. Hope you were watching that, God.
2:30pm Looks like it’s brightened up outside, so maybe I’ll go for a walk now that I’m done running errands. Step outside Boots and no sooner has my shoe hit the pavement that it starts chucking it down, like a switch has been flicked. God obviously not watching my good deed, then – or maybe this is my punishment for calling the old lady an ungrateful cow, even if it was only in my head. And true.
2:40pm Get absolutely drenched on the 10 minute walk home. Get home, peel off my sodden jeans and put my pyjamas on. Make myself a huge mug of tea and curl up on the sofa to watch the first two episodes of Normal People; listen to the rain rattling the windows in their panes and feel very cosy and content. It’s Thursday afternoon, I remind myself. This is so weird. And even weirder is that it doesn’t really feel that weird at all any more.
5pm Decide to watch the Corona briefing for the first time in weeks, because apparently that’s still happening.
6pm Boyfriend arrives home. I enquire after the flowers on the doorstep, deciding that if they’re still there, the rules of Finders Keepers have surely come into play. Sadly, he informs me that they’re gone. “They must have belonged to upstairs, then,” I say balefully, thinking of the compost that I so needed. That, or Mr and Mrs Upstairs were engaged in the same game of compost chicken that we were, and have decided that the flowers couldn’t possibly belong to us because we would have surely picked them up by now.
7:30pm A fresh spring evening, and I am out for my walk listening to a podcast. Walk past this intriguing graffiti that I can’t stop thinking about.
7:45pm Ahh, feel so peaceful and wholesome. Even see a rainbow. So serene – oooh! Sister is ringing me.
7:49pm Answer, “Hello!”. She says, “Are you coming?” Oh balls. I forgot another family Zoom. Leg it home.
7:58pm Arrive home in the nick of time, and just about escape the horror of being out walking along the street when the world and his wife come to the window to clap the NHS. Imagine the horror, the embarrassment! Suddenly realise how boyfriend must feel when we joke with him to stand at the window in his scrubs. Feel a bit bad.
8:01pm Badgering boyfriend to stand at the window in his scrubs.