Weekends seem to mean so little now because with ‘lockdown’ every day is pretty much the same. Our only break from the routine we’ve got into is on Thursdays when we head over to Huddersfield to shop for Dee’s parents. This morning we both thought ‘sod it’ and actually had a lie-in which is pretty much unheard of as both of us are normally up early as Dawn’s exercising and I’m scanning pictures. It almost felt rebellious to still be in bed at 10am!

When I did finally drag my arse out of bed I made up for my indolence by getting stuck into some DIY. I’ve been meaning to waterproof the front of the house for the past few years. Where we’re situated, high up on the side of the Calder valley is pretty exposed and the front of the house takes a beating from the elements. Today the weather had warmed up sufficiently that I could apply the waterproofing coating to the stonework as per the manufacturers recommendations. Yep, I’m a bloke so I read the instructions! Our cottage is only small but it still took most of the afternoon as the stuff needs a couple of hours between coats. In-between I kept myself busy sanding down the wooden bench we have outside the front of the cottage in order to treat the wood with preservative and give it some TLC after the winter weather. Our home is South facing and it’s a lovely spot to sit in the summer, gazing across the valley, watching the wildlife in the trees opposite, or just chatting to our neighbours or friends passing by.

Ready for whatever the weather throws at us now!

Funny, isn’t it? We keep ourselves occupied with all those mundane little chores as if life is normal, yet it’s anything but – especially for those people who’ve had their lives altered by contact with coronavirus. Imagine not being able to attend the funeral of a loved one who’s passed away after contracting covid-19? The news reports that 708 people have died today. It’s a bare statistic, yet each one is a real person and almost all will have a family grieving for them in circumstances we know nothing about. Maybe, when we come out of all this, we’ll learn to appreciate what’s important in life – and what’s not. The events of the past few weeks have certainly made me look at life in a different way. I’ll be curious to see if we go back to ‘normal’ (whatever that actually means) when this is all over. Will be just forget about it after a couple of weeks and pick up where we left off? For some people, the one’s who will have lost their jobs, or even their loved ones, that will be impossible. It may be difficult for the rest of us as we still don’t know just what the economic damage is going to be at the end. There’s just so many unanswerable questions right now…

So, I’m not even going to try. Instead, I’m going to have a quiet night in (after all, it’s not like I can go anywhere!), enjoy some good food and prepare to make the most of tomorrow, because who knows what the future might hold?

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…

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.