Wight Weirdos

I have finally had a week off, I have enjoyed the sunshine, sitting in the garden, swimming in the sea and the odd cycle.

I had a few things I wanted to have a go at and even managed to do about 1/3 of them. I started a new crochet project and I did a huge baking afternoon.

I also had a go using up some of the mass of lemon balm as pesto – it was all quite alternative – the recipe suggested parsley and cashew nuts I had to replace with oregano and walnuts. Taste is lovely but the texture is a bit bitty – I will definitely have another go and try blanching the lemon balm first to soft slightly (thanks for the suggestion Jonathan:-)).

I also managed to put some of the excess outside to contribute to the amazing GIVE group – Green Island Veg Economy – which just aims to give away excess seeds, plants and produce. My station was much more modest than the ones pictures in the Metro article .

We managed to pick elder flowers on a cycle ride into Newport, but again as we are trying to reduce our shopping trips (aiming for once every 3-4 weeks at a supermarket with farmhouse fayre, Island foods, and Wight and Wessex Wines deliveries between) I was working on replacements in my recipes. My elderflower champagne used up the last actual lemon plus I added a bit of bottled lemon juice – but it hasn’t started bubbling yet so my replacements might not be working . I have added a bit of yeast today so I am waiting to see if that starts of the fermentation. The cordial however had lime and satsuma zest and all bottled lemon juice plus the addition of some lemon balm (well when you have so much you need to do something with it) – it actually tastes pretty good but not like elder flower cordial more like a sort of herbal drink. So that means another bike trip out to get elder flowers so i can make the cordial that everyone will expect me to produce from the freezer at Christmas.

My final rural pastimes have been trying to grow some rosemary and lavender from cuttings – they are sitting in a pot full or water just now we’ll see how they go. I am even having a go at drying some lavender.

I have had a great week off, feeling relaxed and accomplished which is a great combo. Next week I am back to Zoom maths lessons and the final taught module of my behaviour change masters.

I thought having a look back over the last few Mondays would be good for my record keeping of this time – this is probably not going to be of any interest to anyone else aside from me. I wrote this post last Monday but it has taken me a week to get photos in it – so this Monday has been quite a bit of up and down but more up than down in the end!

This week is bank holiday Monday – It hasn’t been that strange a bank holiday for us to be honest. As we work for ourselves bank holidays aren’t that different to any normal day. We have both done some work/study, had a blustery walk and now we are on-and-off watching the Folk On Foot Front Room Festival. Folk On Foot is a fabulous gentle podcast where Matthew Bannister visits folk musicians and goes for a walk and chat with them and their guitars.

Last Monday 6th April -start of week 3 of lock down. Thinking back to this week I already can’t remember what was going on and looking in my diary for last week it pretty much just says I spent the whole week working and working out the least worst option of how to do the shopping. In the end we opted for local deliveries from Farmhouse Fayre for veg, Island Foods for meat, and popped to Rosalie’s in Cowes for milk and cheese. I am finding it incredible just how much working out the logistics of getting food with minimal social contact is occupying my time and emotional energy.

Monday 30th May start of week 2 of lockdown – I have written down more for this week – mostly in big letters CAN’T FOCUS. My entry for this date is pretty much talking about the fact that I felt very adrift, this was the first week that I felt we were starting to get a handle on the new way of living rather than falling through each week in free fall trying to manage students and new technology. My other main concern was that I had done nothing on my university assignment for two weeks and my ability to concerntrate on doing research is next to non-existent – again this is the first day I have had time to consider anything beyond just getting through each day. I was exceptionally stressed by this and ended up emailing my tutors saying I wasn’t coping – this is very unlike me. By Wednesday our whole cohort had recieved a 3-4 week extension which was a huge relief for me, but on Monday night I didn’t know that was coming and was feeling overwhelmed.

Monday 23rd our 29th wedding anniversary as well as what was to be the first day of lockdown and the first day that Jonathan is off school. Over the weekend things had changed , poor Jonathan had had to cancel his 18th birthday celebrations with his friends and we had our first virtual church – Martin and 3 other people went to church to present it for everyone else. We celebrated the day by going to Gurnard in the van for a swim in the sea – if was freezing but I managed about 125 strokes and it was exhilerating and we wondered if this might be our last swim for a while. We nipped to Aldi to top up our shopping a bit as we suspected that lockdown was coming.

As this was only week 2 of teaching from home over zoom and writing blog posts and producing videos for my groups I spent a big chunk of the day working on this – particularly putting together teaching packages for my primary students. We did some gardening, planting vegetables suddenly seemed imperative for some reason!

We did manage a bit more fun with a game of Ticket To Ride and we decided to join Gareth Malone’s Great Brittish Chorus which was a good thing as I have enjoyed singing 5 days a week, really good for my mental state as well as making me do vocal exercises regularly which I am really bad at remembering to do!

Then there was the unsuprising and yet still shocking anouncement from Boris Johnson that we were entering a lockdown – we could only go out for limited reasons such as essential shopping and 1 form of exercise daily. I know this word is overused at the moment but this is truly unprecedented and it is unsettling whilst fully expected.

Monday 16th March – Jonathan’s 18th birthday. I started the day thinking that I might get one more week of term being able to teach face to face. Jonathan took the day off school not because it was his birthday but because he hadn’t been feeling well all weekend. That was a shame because at the weekend the rest of our family had returned home and we had gone out for a meal together at the lovely Ada for unlimited mezze and he really couldn’t enjoy it fully. We were having vague conversations about Covid19 – might we need to postpone the gardening day planned at the grandparents’ house at the beginning of Easter and postpone the large family meal out to celebrate Jonathan’s birthday? At this point I was saying,”let’s leave it for now maybe?” I think that Rebekah and Nathan might have had their fingers more on the pulse than us, they definitely seemed to believe a lock down was coming more quickly.

So we spent the Monday doing some shopping at Aldi, which was packed liked a busy Saturday lunch time. There were no eggs and no suger but most things that we wanted were in stock. This is where I was feeling pleased that we still had a fairly big brexit stash of staples under the bed so I wasn’t rushing around buying pasta, rice and flour, and we always buy our loo rolls in bulk from Costco when we visit the mainland so we didn’t need get any of those in either. SInce the issues with lack of stock in supermarkets I have listened to More or Less sugesting that very few people are buying these items in bulk the impact is just from everyone all at once deciding to buy a packet if pasta this week rather than leaving it to next week.

We thought that the first thing the government would do would be to close schools and that would be the following week. But this is the night that Boris starts daily briefings and he sugests some social distancing should be starting now and I decide I need cancel all my classes – this is is the start of two weeks of exhausting work for me and Martin as I try and smoothly move as many of my students online as possible and produce something that will work for my group lessons. I also had to tell Jonathan that his D & D party and sleepover the next weekend is almost certainly off. But over this week we still have a friend over for dinner (although I disinfect doorhandles etc. and we don’t hug, I go to the hairdressers, and we also buy decorating and gardening stuff as we start to prepare for things escalating. But by Wednesday of this week we are all shocked when we hear that not only are the schools being closed from Monday but the exams are cancelled. We are so pleased that that Jonathan has an unconditional offer but this is still very unsettling news.

I am glad all the children came back last weekend as now we don’t know when we will be able to see them again.

I had been feeling sad about missing the sunrise service this year. Last year I was at Carisbrooke Castle and shared the service with friends and strangers and was welcomed back for a hot cross bun at the parish hall by one of my former Waterbabies. Other years we have cycled out to Gurnard to share a fire on the beach, or driven to East Cowes where they cooked us bacon sandwiches on a little stove in the back of a car, and before they closed down we used to go to Shanklin beach and share in bacon sandwiches at the little convent up the hill -it was worth the steep cliffside walk. This year there was nothing.

I woke up early and discovered that Radio 4 had a dawn service that started at 6.35, I popped my headphones in,abandoned plans to write my Covid 19 journal and headed outside with a candle and coffee. This sitting in the cold, this sipping a drink in my pyjamas and a blanket, this looking at the candle not blowing out, this fresh start somehow seemed just right; an unexpedted moment with God where my planned ones had all failed.

Then I switched to the delights of Kate Bottley on Radio 2 and got on with the roast dinner prep. Martin briefly interrupted my peace in a tea making mission but soon retreated back to bed, leaving me with my parboiling spuds. I switched back to radio 4 for the morning service and contnued with my culinary pootling.

Breakfast was timetabled for 9.30 so Martin could begin his epic preparation for virtual church at 10. We usually have a dispaly of abundance on the table and mantelpiece ready for Easter Sunday morning with fruit, sweets and chocolate in abundance, this year was still a delight but definitely more subdued.

We still managed a great breakfast of hot cross bun french toast and fruit and some of our rapidly diminishing stock of yoghurt.

Then getting myself ready for virtual church.

These images make the whole thing look much more peaceful than it was. For the last 3 weeks while Martin has been spending ridiculous numbers of hours getting things working for virtual church, and Jonathan is doing fancy things that I don’t understand on discord that allow him to watch with some of his friends, I haven’t been able to sucessfully maintain a connection. Last week I ended up repeadedly swearing at my computer, which I am sure is not the response attending church is supposed to elict! This week I was using Martin’s laptop – we won’t talk about the fact that in the week I spilt a whole cup of tea over my laptop and it made a very intersting pftzz noise and died – and was hopeful that things would improve.

I managed the whole of the pre-service screen with the music from the wonderful and generous Paul Bell. He has let us use his music in our live streaming. Check him out! I love the sentiment in Be Beautiful and Brave, “every act of kindness sees the world change” – it was the one that stuck out to me this morning before my frustration spoiled my mood.

I managed to get through our prerecorded video greeting – aiming to bring a little bit of Anglicanism to Church on the Roundabout, I managed to get through most of the prerecord of us singing Thine Be The Glory and then my feed started cutting out again, missed the Easter greetings and most of everything else until the sermon. Very, very frustrated. I linked in to Martin’s computer with headphones but couldn’t see the comments or make my own so felt very disconnected to people, and connection is what I am looking for from this. I’d already had great input over the weekend, I just wanted connection to my church out of this. I may have got pretty upset by this. I think I need to change my expectations about this and give up on our live stream for now. I have learned that my emotions are often very governed by my expectations if I change these then I will be happier. This is like the time I used to get frustrated by Rebekah crying during the Woman’s Hour drama when she was a baby, I stopped listening to Woman’s Hour and was much happier.

The rest of the day was lovely, we had a great lunch, played games, ate pudding in the garden and watched the final episode of Picard which seemed to have exceptionally good content for Easter Sunday.

I missed our usual Easter Sunday rituals but we still had a celebratory and joy filled day; I found some moments of peace and reflection and the food was fabulous.

Easter Saturday with all its uncertainties, sense of feeling shaken by events, waiting and grieving, seems to be the place we are living at the moment. This year it feels more real to me than it has in previous years. While we know in the Easter story that Sunday’s coming and there is hope we seem to remain in the limbo of Holy Saturday just now.

However in a bid to be more cheery and to add variation to our days we declared Easter Saturday to be Dutch day. We are missing being able to go to The Netherlands and looking through old photo albums it seems we often go to either the Netherlands or the Norfolk Broads at Easter time, so we decided to cycle, eat pancakes and poffertjes, and attempt to make stroopwafels. Disappointingly there is no Hertog Jan in the house. We wanted to cycle down the cycle path but were aware that it might get really busy so opted for a 7.15 am cycle and saw no one on our route into Newport. We delivered a few things to some doorsteps and headed back – at 8.30 it was much busier and certainly I am glad that I wasn’t cycling later in the day and trying to social distance – it was hard anyway.

Home and a cooked brunch in the garden under the sunshade as it’s already getting too hot for me.

No photos of the pancakes, that came with an amazing salad, curtesy of the Farmhouse fayre delivery I recived earlier in the week – I am loving the local deliveries which have become available.

I spent the rest of the day listening to feminist dramas while doing housework and re-hemming curtains, while Martin spent hours and hours working on the virtual Sunday service. Jonathan, in a allergic rhinitis inducing cloud of dust, spent hours tidying his room – it was so bad that I cracked open my one remaining packet of loratadine.

We usually buy a bulk supply of cetirizine hydrochloride and loratadine at the start of the hayfever season but this year we couldn’t get any loratadine, it seems to be a hording item, So when I went to boots to pick up prescriptions I found one packet and hid it at home. We all get really bad hayfever so one of the one-a-day tablets is sometimes not enough so we like to have both types so we can take a second different one later in the day if it gets too bad. I also try to buy chlorphenamine 3-a-day ones too but they are always difficult to get hold of so we were unsurpised that we couldn’t get these.

We finished off the day with poffertjes topped with chocolate sauce, icing sugar and butter while watching Have I Got News For You – it was strange but not as strange as listening to The Now Show with no audience.