Life at Full Speed

Life has gone back to full speed now, and although I mean to keep writing here regularly I blink and another week has passed. For most of the week we had a heatwave. These photos were from a walk on Wednesday morning, and it was already hot by 9am. Although I am now back to working entirely in the office, I left early on Tuesday and finished off some work at home as M needed the electric car to go to work mid-afternoon, and I just couldn't face taking the little car and driving home without aircon in the heat.

On Monday the government moved to Stage 4 of its re-opening plan and officially abandoned all anti-Covid regulations in England. Masks in shops and on public transport are no longer compulsory, although still strongly recommended. Restrictions on numbers who can meet or attend events, both indoors and outdoors, have been lifted. All this despite being well into the third wave of the pandemic, with 50,000 cases a day last week. Encouragingly, this week case numbers have dropped significantly, probably because the Euros have ended (lots of people had been meeting up to watch the football), the weather has been good, and schools have finished for the summer. The big test is going to be whether case numbers start to shoot up again as the relaxation of anti-Covid measures takes effect. In practice, many organisations are keeping at least some anti-Covid restrictions in place, and we now have 70% of adults fully vaccinated and nearly 90% with at least one dose. Will it be enough? Maybe. It's a gamble, and we can only hope that it doesn't turn out to be a bad one. At work we had a big staff meeting on Monday, with everyone in together for the first time since March 2020, to discuss what changes if any we would be making. The answer was "not many", partly due to caution about Covid and partly due to being short-staffed as someone left the week before and it will take a while to replace her. 

TG finished school on Wednesday, having made it through the term without being sent home to self-isolate. I think by last week about a third of school children in England were in isolation, so the was lucky. I had a lazy day - too hot to do much! - but went to an orchestra rehearsal in the evening. I signed up to play at an outdoor vintage festival at the end of August. I played at the same event in 2019 and enjoyed it - great atmosphere and fun music to play - so decided to do it again even though it is a bit far to drive for rehearsals. It took me well over an hour to get there as I relied on my memory and didn't read the directions properly. Once I realised I was lost, I then relied on Google maps which imploded and sent me down a track to a dead end. Then I read the instructions, which included a warning not to rely on satnav. Duh! 

M was working on Thursday, so I took TG out for lunch to celebrate the beginning of the holidays. We went to Yo Sushi, which is her favourite place to eat. They now have a system where you order on your phone, then the food is sent to your table on the sushi belt with a traffic light system - red lights show at the side of the table which turn white when a dish is approaching and green when it arrives. 

It has been a very social week, starting with catching up with colleagues I hadn't seen since before the pandemic on Monday. On Friday I woke up to a text from an old school friend wondering if she could drop in for coffee as she was going to be in the area. In the end she came for lunch and stayed most of the afternoon. We used to meet up regularly when our children were young, but realised we hadn't seen each other for nearly five years so there was lots to catch up on. Then in the evening I drove over to Bedford to meet up with a group of close friends. Four of us had got together early in the spring, but only outdoors and it was too cold to sit and chat for long, so being able to go back to meeting indoors was lovely. The fifth member of our group has health issues and has not yet had her second dose of vaccine, so she joined us on Zoom. Yesterday we got together with all our neighbours - we had hoped to do a street BBQ but the weather forecast wasn't great, so in the end we just all took drinks and chairs out into the road and sat and chatted - we are at the end of a cul-de-sac so there isn't any traffic. We managed a couple of hours before it started to rain. We are incredibly fortunate to live somewhere that is a real community, where we all know each other and can rely on neighbours to help out if necessary. Today was a day for family socialising, as R and H and their partners all came for lunch, along with my brother. It was the first time they had all been here at the same time since before the pandemic, so that was another milestone passed.