Staying Home: Day 40

A curious upside to the lockdown for us is that we are enjoying the luxury of proper weekends. M normally works most weekends with NHS 111; I usually work Mondays and Tuesdays at the archives, then fit freelance work around that. We usually try to keep Thursdays work free so we can have a day off together, but sometimes we have weeks where one or other of us is working every day. Now I am spreading my work more evenly over Monday to Friday and M is not able to go into work, so there is a proper distinction between weekdays and weekends. 

I enjoyed a lazy morning listening to a podcast and then watching a couple of BBC programmes about medieval history on iPlayer. The first was about the Mappa Mundi, a 13th century world map which belongs to Hereford Cathedral, and the second was about Julian of Norwich. While I watched I did some more stitching on the William Morris bookmark. Before lunch I did some yoga - I hadn't done any for a few days and this has turned out to be one of my under-par days, so I struggled and cut  it short. 

The girls walked down to Tesco Express this morning in search of flour (no luck!) and were startled by a deer running past them. We have seen them in the woods, and they can be a menace on some of the country roads, but none of us have ever seen one in a built up area before. I presume the lack of traffic on the roads had allowed it to wander further than it should, and it then got lost. H managed to get a photo. Is is a muntjac deer - they aren't native to the UK, but the Duke of Bedford imported them to his estate at Woburn in Bedfordshire in the early 20th century and since then escapees have built up into a substantial wild population. 

In the afternoon M and I went for our walk. H did some uni work and TG did a dance masterclass. Her dance school is trying to arrange a different bonus class each week; this time it was with two former pupils, a brother and sister who are now professional performers but are back home while everything is shut down. They took the kids through the routine at the beginning of this clip. 

 

Once she had cooled down TG baked a lemon and poppyseed cake, then we watched last night's episode of Friday Night Dinner and today's Disney movie, Christopher Robin. A local cafe is doing limited takeaways at weekends, which have to be ordered and paid for in advance and collected at a reserved time. We had an order in for four portions of cod and chips, so after the movie H and I went to collect them. Delicious!