Admittedly, this is a day late as I’m actually writing it on April fools day but sadly, no-one’s popped up to admit Coronavirus was just a prolonged joke.

In theory, I should have plenty of time to write these blogs as – in theory – I’m ‘kicking my heels’ at home. Only that’s not how its working. I seem to have become a victim of ‘Parkinson’s Law’, where work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion!

To be fair, slide scanning is a slow, tedious process when done properly. Each slide has to be broken out of its plastic mount. Cleaned and remounted in a glass mount to keep it perfectly flat for scanning (so everything remains in focus and it doesn’t ‘pop’ the way slided so in projecters) whilst keeping everything as dust-free as possible. Once scanned, the slides are removed from their glass mounts and slipped back in their sheets which are then sealed and labelled. But it’s not all over yet, then the scans are checked and edited in photoshop, where colour-balances are adjusted and any scratches, dust marks or damage is cloned out or retouched.

After the first few dozen you start losing the will to live, even if it is lovely to look back at some of the old memories and remember when I took them. As it’s such a time-consuming job I take regular breaks for exercise in order to prevent developing corns on my bum and enjoy staring at something other than a screen by admiring the birds feeding or gazing across the valley.

Yesterday Dawn and I had to use the car for the first time since last Thursday as we needed to pick some stuff up from the supermarket that was too bulky to carry back in rucsacs. The Tesco’s in Sowerby Bridge was pretty deserted. There were no queues, so we walked in and found (mostly) well-stocked shelves – except for eggs. You could tell the panic-buying was over as they were selling off a lot of bread products at reduced prices. A couple of weeks ago you’d have been lucky to find anything even left on the shelves.

Whilst we were there we were gently ticked off by a ahelf-stacker for coming as a couple. Apparently, they now only want single shoppers but no-one on the door had bothered to tell us! Suitably admonished, we promised to shop solo next time!

Back home we packed away our shopping and continued working for another few hours. Before we knew it the time had flown. It was nearly 7pm when we decided to pack in for the day and get the exercise we’d have normally combined with shopping. We’re very lucky where we live as there’s some woods along our road, so we power-strolled uphill through them to the promenade above which seems to get quieter each time we visit. Having admired the view across the Calder valley we did a lap of Savile Park before retracing our steps home. Byt this time it was dark. It was actually a good time to go out for exercise as there were bugger-all people about. Judging by the flickering light we saw through house windows as we passed, most were already cooped up in front of their TVs/Computers/games consoles.

To be fair, that’s how we ended the day, with the pair of us curled up in bed watching Netflix on my laptop.

Today’s been one of those very mixed ones where the realisation that what we’re going through at the moment isn’t a passing fancy begins to hit. It’s the weekend (woo hoo!), not that you’d know it – as nothing changes. It’s just another day for those of us who’ve been under house arrest for the best part of the week. For key workers who’ve been busy these past few days and finally get a break it must be even more surreal.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not had the best of days – for reasons that I won’t go into. It’s certainly been an introspective time. Having spent the morning at home sorting out chores I headed off out for my daily perambulation. I didn’t have to do any shopping so I was free to wander ‘lonely as a cloud’. After heading up through our local woodland I ended up at the Promenade on the edge of Halifax. For once, it was almost deserted. The fact the Police had a video van parked up there was obviously pure co-incidence! As you might have sussed from comments in earlier blogs, the ‘prom’ has been a bit of a problem. It’s a favorite haunt of the young who hang out there as they think they’re out of sight and out of mind. Stick a video van there and they just melt away…

As I needed to get a decent amount of steps in I wandered up to a place where you’d be lucky to bump into another soul (unless it’s the Zombie Apocalypse). There’s a sprawling old graveyard below the Wainhouse Tower which a local undertaker has gradually been clearing of undergrowth over the past few years.

It’s a fascinating and sobering place to wander around as it puts our present troubles into perspective. The earliest graves I saw were from the 1820s, the latest were from the 1960s. In our modern age we forget the levels of infant mortality of Victorian times, not to mention the rudimentary health system and lack of knowledge and treatments compared to today. Bugger the people who want to turn the clocks back, just check out an old graveyard to see why ‘Victorian values’ is not a thing to boast about – and thank your lucky stars that you live in an age where we have the NHS and modern healthcare systems.

Having got my exercise I returned home and retreated to the office in pensive mood. I can’t help wondering what the world will look like when we come out of the other side of this pandemic. I’m 60, and I’ve never known anything like this. Shit, when I was a kid the one thing we worried about was us all getting wiped out in a nuclear war between the Americans and the (then) Soviet Union! In most scenarios where that played out you’d get sod all warning and if you were lucky you’d have had just enough time to kiss your arse goodbye! Forget ‘self-isolating’!

Funny old world, isn’t it?

Is it really only day two? Maybe it’s because I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of ‘Dr Who’ whilst scanning slides, but time seems to be rather elastic at the moment. One minute I’m looking at pictures from 1991, then watching a ‘Dr Who’ from 2006, then I’m back in the present day, not that the present seems any more real than anything else!

Both Dawn and I are trying to establish a routine. Dee’s up before 6am to do a Joe Wick’s workout routine in the living room whilst I take it slightly easier by having a coffee and checking the news before beginning the first picture scanning of the day. Then we normally get together for a meditation session before heading off to our respective home offices and knuckle down to several hours work. I’m lucky in that I have a bit more flexibility. Mainly because I have no commissioned work at the moment, which is obviously a double-edged sword. I didn’t mind quite as much today as the weather’s been gorgeous, with plenty of sunshine and temperatures that meant I could peel off several layers of clothing. It really did feel like Spring today, so I had a few hours tidying up the front garden before catching up on reading the latest RAIL magazine in the sunshine. For a moment I got lost. The only noise was the birds singing in the trees opposite, the sun was warming my skin and all was well with the world for one brief moment before I realised where I was and snapped back into reality.

There was no need for us to venture to the shops today so the pair of us enjoyed a walk together unfettered by the need to carry rucsacs. We’re lucky that we have a lovely bit of woodland to walk through on the road we live on. This takes us up to the Promenade on the edge of Halifax that looks across the Calder Valley. It’s a lovely place, but it gets abused by young people who drive out there to sit and smoke dope and/or congregate and play loud music – totally ignoring the residents who live across the road. Despite the supposed ‘lockdown’, this is still happening. I’m beginning to think that it’s going to take a couple of needless deaths from Coronavirus in the younger community before the message sinks in through some thick skulls.

It feels like many in Calderdale are complacent. To date there’s only been 7 confirmed cases in a population of over 210,000. It’s way below average, but I really don’t believe the stats present the true picture. I can’t help wondering how much of this is due to a lack of testing. Time will tell…

Meanwhile, here’s a more light-hearted moment although with a serious message. The Chiropodist in Siwerby Bridge has two skeletons that they use to put in various poses in order to get (often light-hearted) messages across. Here’s their current pose.

After days of speculation, the fact we’re now finally in this situation was a bit of a relief. All we’ve got to do now is work out exactly what ‘lockdown’ means in practise as it’s fiendishly difficult to implement in a developed country as there’s always going to be exceptions, muddles and ambiguities – and so it’s proved. Many people have been asking simple questions such as “can I still get my car MOT’d”? Others have asked if – as it’s OK to get outdoor exercise – can they not drive outside a crowded city for a few minutes to walk in the great outdoors free of the suburban masses? Plus, the self-employed and freelancers like myself still don’t know where we stand, only that advice is ‘on its way’…

To be honest, this was always going to be the case and I’m not going to criticise the Government for not having all the answers to everything straight away. I notice that they revised and watered down their statement that only ‘key’ workers should go to work within a couple of hours as it was obvious they couldn’t define what the definition of ‘key’ was. It’s going to take a few days for all these things to become clearer. But – the advice is obviously having an effect already. To be honest, trying to enforce a total lockdown would be a logistical and policing nightmare. We don’t have the same sort of paramilitary police or the sheer numbers of officers that countries like France do – especially after 12 years of austerity.

So, day 1 has felt rather weird in that our routine hasn’t really changed at all. The pair of us have been busy working at home, it was only in the mid afternoon that we took a break. As the weather was sunny and warm we decided to combine an afternoon constitutional with a walk to the supermarket, meaning we only had to leave the house once and we didn’t need to use the car.

We passed several people on our roundabout way to the supermarket, all of whom were sticking to the guidelines on keeping their distance. After walking through Scarr Woods up to the promenade (which was pretty much free of promenaders) we bumped into a trio of people we knew and stopped for a chat. Anyone who didn’t know what was going on would have though we were weird as the five of us formed a circle at the requisite distance – even though four of us were couples!

Heading across Savile Park we strolled on to Tesco’s. The lockdown meant it was the quietest we’ve experienced since the shit started to hit the fan. Even better – there was still stuff left on the shelves! We managed to get the fresh vegetables we’d run short of, as well as coffee – which I was perilously low on. New restrictions had been added to the amount of alcohol you could buy (3 bottles each) so there was still a few decent beers available for me to buy. Tesco staff were doing their best to get people to stick to the 2 metres apart rule and to be fair, so were most customers. There’s always one or two who’re either too dim or too self-absorbed for such simple things to sink in, but that’s life. The groceries we managed to pick up mean we can avoid shops for several days now. We have the fresh ingredients we need to cook and eat well.

Being allowed to get out for exercise does make a huge difference as we feared we’d be trapped indoors for the duration (although if the fcukwits carry on the way they are and the infection rate skyrockets that could still happen). We’re better placed than many to cope as we have exercise equipment (weights etc) at home. Whatever happens we’re determined not to turn into couch potato’s. People are likely to go one of two ways, lose weight because they can’t go to the pub/takeaway as often so see it as a chance to get healthier – or go the opposite and binge on processed food and snacks as they confine themselves to the settee in front of the TV. The next few months are going to be an interesting sociological experiment. Only time will tell…

It’s not all been doom and gloom. It’s very early days yet, but the FTSE has gained 9% today. Is this the start of a financial recovery? Who knows, but it’s encouraging to see the rise which makes a change from the kamikaze trend we’ve seen in recent weeks.

Not that we’re anyway near out of the woods yet. The infection rate and death toll is only going to get worse. The $50,000 question is – when will it peak and start to fall back? We’re not going to know the answer to that for some time yet, but if I was a betting man, I’d certainly have money on the lockdown lasting longer than the 3 weeks the Government’s talking about right now.