Blog Post Nine

2nd June

2nd June

Today was such a good day but weird.

It has been a hard week - first shielding but sadness at seeing others go out and meet friends and family, then being able to go out but realising how scary an idea that is!

Today I had an appt which meant I had to go out of my road (this is not something I’m not finding as easy as I thought it would having been isolating for so long). I thought I would be running out shouting to meet the world as soon as they said we could, in reality I am peering round the corner at the end of my road worrying what might be out there and feeling that the world has become a very large and terrifying unknown.

But on the way back I met friends, not planned as they happened to be there as I walked past the house, we sat in a garden in the sun, drank coffee. Apart from the social distance we kept, everything seemed so normal. Traffic sounded the same as it always has, people walking in and out of Tesco as they always do, stopping in the street and chatting. It was for an hour or so as if Covid had never happened. Just wonderful. The start of moving forwards from the virus.

But also quite surreal. For some reason it reminded me of a line from War of the Worlds, just before the earth falls to the invaders “Around me the daily routine of life: working-eating-sleeping was continuing serenely as it had for countless years”.

It felt as if we could be taken by surprise. That it might be just a brief moment, like a memory, that will be take away again. I just hope that this is not the case, that we are not going to get a second wave of Covid

- the “invaders of 2020”, and it’s just a stupid fear I have developed from being away from people and the outside world for so long. I guess time will tell.

5th June

First run outside of my road since lockdown started. Felt so weird and I was so slow! Also found how bad the pavements are...as I fell over a few!! Didn’t come close to anyone at all - far safer here than London yesterday.

6th June

So i decided to take a rest from running but needed to get out - so thought as I can now leave my garden that cycling would be an idea. It was a bad idea. Two lesson learned: 1 - I can’t get the right gear at the right time. 2 - don’t hit the right brake before the left when you’ve just come down a big hill. All good fun though 🙂