1.The weather. It has to be connected, right?
2. How the front at Brighton smells like the sea. I’ve never noticed that before. On the same note, I cycled past a field of sheep yesterday and I could smell the wool. Maybe fields of sheep always smell of wool and I don’t notice. Either way it’s a plus;
3. Cycling. I’ve not been up to Devil’s Dyke before because there are so many cars. Without cars, it’s a great ride;
4. Afterwards, and how none of us know what that will look like; commuting, car driving, frequent air travel, shopping all the time – now we’ve gone cold turkey, we can choose something different;
5. Seeing who people live with when they’re out for their exercise;
6. Key workers and how grateful we all are; the NHS of course and all who work for it. And everyone else – care-workers, shop workers, bus and train drivers, the people that make sure we have gas, electricity, sewerage, water, police officers, fruit growers and pickers, food producers of all types, lorry drivers and others responsible for transport of essential goods, delivery workers, amazon employees, post-people, street cleaners, refuse workers, plumbers and electricians, journalists and people who work in television and radio, leaders and people who have to make decisions, those who make sure our phone networks and broadband run, and everyone else we rely on for a nice life. After this, the low paid amongst this list must have a voice and everyone should insist their pay and conditions mean they can live comfortably;
7. Now we’ve been pretending to home educate, we have to recognise what a skill good teaching is and reward it properly. For everyone’s sake;
8. The guy throwing a rugby hall on Hove lawns, running and catching it while his little girl, about 18 months, did the same in a fluffy net skirt (I wish I’d taken a picture for this blog, it was the cutest thing);
9. Queues that look incredibly long but turn out to be quite short;
10. How much fossil fuel isn’t being burned and how a tiny little thing that doesn’t even have a brain managed something that all the leaders, all the protestors, all the kids, all the scientists of the world couldn’t;
11. Dogs who believe they are the eternally three year old sibling, equally entitled to play the game but absolutely rubbish on the rules;
12. Some seriously good roller skating;
13. People dying without their families close;
14. People dying before their time;
15. Deteriorating mental health, frightening levels of domestic abuse, fighting with your family, vulnerable children, vulnerable old people, people who have to go to work even though they’re scared, people who’ve fallen through the government’s various rescue nets, looming unemployment, people getting sick with other conditions and being too scared to go to hospital;
16. Loads of individually difficult, sad, worrying, nightmarish situations that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the pandemic – we can all help when this is over. We can move away from nationalism, blame culture, climate destruction, isolationist, and unjust economic policies that reward the already rewarded and exploit the poor. It’s up to us in the end.
I’d add not being able to get a hair cut which is becoming an increasingly pressing issue, (women with short hair are peculiarly disadvantaged). What do you love and loathe about this time?
PS if anyone can tell me how to remove the number formatting from the first line in wordpress, I’ll be eternally grateful (but only if you genuinely understand the problem, and have worked out a solution – it’s not obvious).
