I thought this lockdown was meant to mean that we’d have time on our hands? It certainly doesn’t seem to be working out like that for me. Friday was a bit of a frustrating day as I didn’t get anywhere near as much done as I’d planned. For once I didn’t even get time to get a walk in which left me way behind the 5+ miles a day that I normally manage.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. I did manage to sift through the next slide album in the queue for scanning which is the one containing the very first slides I took way back in 1989. I junked over 250 of the 830 in the album mainly because I’d got better pictures taken in the intervening years – or the fact that actually, some of them simply weren’t up to scratch! My standards and technical proficiency have changed somewhat in the past 31 years! Weeding out the rejects now saves me time when it comes to the scanning process. As I wasn’t so fixated on scanning slides I also managed to get some decluttering done and junk a load of old paperwork, which was mainly press releases and conference bumpf going back several years – none of which had any relevance anymore but you keep ‘just in case’. I’m getting much more willing to dispose of these things nowadays and be less of a hoarder, not just because of the space they take up, but also because life’s too short. When you consider the amount of stuff we surround ourselves with nowadays a bout of decluttering is no bad thing. Let’s face it , if I kicked the bucket tomorrow, most of it would end up in a skip anyway!

Another bright spot was the news that Chris Packham lost his legal case against HS2. I’d suspected he would as his action seemed to be completely without merit. I won’t go into it in detail as I blogged about it here yesterday. Maybe now we can finally get moving with a project that we desperately need for several reasons right now.

This weekend I’ll be keeping my foot off the slide scanning pedal as the weather’s meant to be improving and I’ve work to the cottage that I want to do. Normal service will be resumed next week as all the signs are that the lockdown is going to continue for several weeks yet. The death toll’s rising, which is tragic but hardly unexpected. We’re not going to be out of the woods for quite some time yet, so it’s a case of making the most of being cooped up at home and using the time to catch up on all those things that never made it to the front of the list. Who knows, by the time this is all over I might have all my old railway pictures online!

For me, Friday was the day when I’d often go up to our local pub, the Big 6, to meet up with friends and do the quiz, from the Pub Paper. As this is out of the question nowadays a few of us have got together to do it online, which isn’t quite the same, but at least we still get to interact and have a laugh. I do wonder just how we’d all cope with lockdown without the internet and modern communications. The ability to interact with family and friends – or just stream movies and binge-watch TV is making life more bearable. Just imagine how much of an emergency it would be now if the internet went down…