I wrote the following entry a year ago and then decided not to publish it given the uncertainty over how COVID would affect everyone. I didn’t want to publish an entry talking about going to the swimming pool when it might have been safer to stay at home. It seems okay to publish it now as a way to look back at this time last year.

We’ve been at home all week. On Monday, Boris Johnson announced a nationwide lockdown, which we’d missed as we were walking the dog and, with the announcement trailed in advance as a ‘big statement’ we pretty much expected to find that we’d been incarcerated on our return. Not that it made much difference to us. Mrs TwinbikeRun has been home for six days and I’d been home for four. We weren’t going back to work or out and about now. 

At home we’ve divided the house in two with each of us at opposite ends of the top floor. We share a speaker and she gets to choose the playlists as I don’t need to listen to music while working and can easily tune it out if I need to. However, after one day we need to establish some Spotify ground rules when choosing tracks. And, according to Mrs E, rule number one is that it’s entirely reasonable to listen to One Direction’s album ‘Made In The AM’ five times in a row.

At work, on Monday lunchtime the Scottish government announced that we must close down all work for the foreseeable. On Monday night the UK government announced we could stay open. We listened to Nicola Sturgeon and not Boris and closed down on Tuesday. Others didn’t which led to one newspaper report of angry staff recording conversation with their boss to ask him “Who was more important, the chief exec who ordered them to work, or Nicola Sturgeon?”. The answer: “Well, Nicola doesn’t pay your wages does she?”.

A day later everyone was shut. Everyone was on “furlough” and we just had a skeleton crew. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate name!” I said and the next day we were the “core team”. 

Today, is the weekend and I can tell because my laptop is closed.

Other than that I’ve tried to clean my bikes, get them ready for summer and generally potter around the garden. I don’t potter round gardens. I pay people to do the gardening. I hate gardening. Instead, I realised something bad about me today: it takes around 500 people to die before I will willingly take out a lawnmower and cut the grass.