OK, this picture isn’t high art but at least it’s something different, as the council decide to take advantage of the lack of traffic and resurface the road outside our house. I’m glad there is still a semblance of working life out there but I’d quite like to go to work myself, on occasional days (did I really say that? It’s true though). This is only the fourth picture to feature people who are not family members since the end of March.
Under conditions of day-to-day repetition it’s nice to have reasons to select shots. This mirror selfie makes it because I realised it has become the 42nd self-portrait to feature on here — and the number 42 has been highlighted whenever and wherever it appears. So you can now see that I am in sore need of a haircut, like many other people. There are worse consequences of the present farce, of course.
Evening shots have virtually disappeared from the blog since lockdown: this is only the second post-7pm shot since February. But every evening now begins and ends in the same place, doesn’t it?
It’s Joe, and his peers, for whom I feel sorry the most. He’s 17, he shouldn’t be inside day after day, under house arrest in all but name. What will this do to the psychology of his generation, not to mention their prospects? It could be worse for us of course — he’s not a belligerent kid, there have been no tantrums nor lapses into week-long bouts of near-catatonia. Not yet anyway. But like the rest of the country, and the planet — how much longer can he go on like this?
Except for the guys on the screen last Sunday, people have been absent from the blog for many days now, so let’s rectify that today to make us remember that humanity has not yet quite given up the ghost. Would this have been better, or worse, had the weather been poor? I suspect worse. At least this guy’s approach to boosting his vitamin D levels — the chair, the can of Carlsberg — is still available to us.
Some forms of exercise can still be taken out of the house, but not Clare’s weekly ballet class. That’s gone online, and into the bathroom, on this latest public holiday-that-was-not-a-holiday.
When in prison, the arrival of the mail is always a big event. Joe gets his major input of the day with the delivery of the latest in a series of information processing devices. Well, there’s not much else to spend money on at the moment.
At the end of all this, how long before we are able to feel comfortable with each other again, physically close? Even the dogs are getting the message.
The Greatest Media Panic of All Time does not change the turn of the seasons, at least, not yet. it was time for the little potato people to get into the ground today, where (if past experience is any guide) they will stay in a kind of stasis until this time next year, when we will hopefully dig up about the same number and volume of potatoes to eat. If we get to the other side of this rupture, anyway. Here, Clare and Joe do the work, while I laze in the sun and document it.
Somehow it seems to be a time to say hi to old friends. It’s been a while since Mr B appeared on here.
I don’t normally depict work colleagues on here but it’s worth making an exception today. For three years at least I’ve been working on getting a new hybrid (mixture of online and on-campus) MA launched (in Educational Leadership), and over this weekend we are finally welcoming our first batch of students. Here are some of them, along with Paul, Bee and Steve, fellow academics, looking happy about this at the meal we organised to mark the occasion. And I am glad too, it’s always a relief to see something come to fruition. There’ll be more of this on Sunday, a working day this weekend (a price to be paid)…
Being 42 