Earlier in the Covid outbreak I alternated between a few days of feeling quite content at home and actively enjoying having less demands on my time, then a day or two for feeling very unsettled by the situation. As the number of cases have fallen and lockdown has begun to ease my mood is generally more even. Occasionally I am frustrated by things we can't do or bothered by the uncertainty of the future and realising that social distancing measures are likely to have to continue for the foreseeable future, but most of the time I'm just living my best life here at home - working, exercising, reading, crafting, watching more TV and movies, enjoying family time. All in all, despite the circumstances, life is pretty good.
I am still a bit surprised at how easy it is to fill my time and how quickly the days pass. I would like to fit some decluttering and music practice into my days as a regular thing. I'm sure I can make time by being more disciplined about wasting time on social media, playing online Scrabble and so on, but being self-disciplined is not my strong point, I'm afraid.
More reading would be good too. I finally finished my book today, which I think I started soon after lockdown began. Why I decided an 800 page biography was the right choice as a lockdown read, I'm not sure, but I have persisted with it. I think forcing myself to tackle a book that needed focus and concentration has been good for me. It was a prize winning biography (
William Morris: a Life for Our Time by Fiona MacCarthy), and was clearly extremely well researched as well as being well written, so did repay the effort. Over the last few years I have tended to shy away from longer, more difficult books, partly because I not a very fast reader and it takes me real effort to get through them, and I think it was good to commit to one. I did read at least some of it most days, though there were a few when I didn't manage to drag myself away from unfocused online clicking and scrolling. Now the magnum opus is finished, I'm planning some easier reading for a while.
M and I went for a walk this morning, which was both a little longer (4 miles) and a lot tougher (long grass and stiles!) than our regular walks. We drove to a nearby village where my father was born, and where almost all his ancestors came from. The walk was partly through the south end of the village, but mostly across fields to a nearby hamlet and back. We walked past one farm which we concluded was where old tractors go to die! The village has some lovely old houses and a 12th century church. The stone work around the doorway is beautiful and typically Norman. I got home very tired but still managed to make myself do a yoga session later in the afternoon. I can feel the exercise is doing me good, though my muscles are complaining!
The weather has been much warmer today, so I was able to spend a bit of time back in the comfy hammock in the garden this afternoon. While I relaxed in the garden all the younger members of the family went out. H and her BF went to his parents' house (or rather, garden) for a BBQ, and TG went out with her friend to take photographs. They are both taking photography as one of the their GCSE options at school, and both now have their own cameras. We helped TG to buy an entry level DSLR last year as she had been saving hard for a camera but couldn't afford one which would be good enough to use for GCSE work. It turned out to be a very good decision as she loves it and it gets a lot of use. I am strictly an iPhone photographer and M isn't really a photographer at all, so we didn't have a camera at home that she could borrow.
This evening we watched a couple of travel programmes and I did a bit more cross stitch - one was a railway journey across Finland, and the other a visit to Zimbabwe. As travel lovers, this is the closest we are going to get to the real thing for while.
No comments:
Post a Comment