Monday 30 March – Random Witterings from Home #3

Shopping
Fresh supplies were running low and I* needed to visit a supermarket. I expected a lengthy expedition involving queuing outside due to restricted entry. The reality was that I drove into a car park that was quieter than normal, went straight into the shop, got everything on my list bar those items that Lidl doesn’t sell (I even got bread flour and oats; had we needed some I could even have got pasta), I walked straight up to one of the three open tills and was back out in the car park, with enough groceries to see us through a week, in record time. After such a positive experience, I thought I’d nip into one of the big supermarkets on the way home, to pick up the items not sold by Lidl. I didn’t even enter the car park, as I could see from the main road the queue of people snaking around the car park waiting for entry and decided we could manage without those items.

In lieu of frozen spinach, later in the day I harvested baby stinging nettles from the garden. For the moment they are cooked and in the freezer. I may report back in due course on how that substitution worked out.

Doing
On the basis that there’s a danger (as mentioned in my last post) that we will spend an unreasonable proportion of our time sitting doing nothing during this period of restricted movement, I put together a list of activities at the weekend. They are roughly grouped into categories (Exercise, Fun, Education, Cleaning, Maintenance and Garden) and this week’s objective is to tick off at least four activities each per day, preferably in separate categories.

I’ve put minimum times (or other appropriate measures) against each activity, set at levels so that the thought of ‘Oh, I just can’t be bothered with doing that’ can be counteracted by ‘It’s just for ten minutes out of an otherwise empty day!’. I know from long experience that once I’ve convinced myself to do something just for ten minutes, it’s likely I’ll carry on for much longer and that the hardest part of many an activity is getting started**.  These are odd times, though, and in some cases the minimum time limit is also the strict maximum. Our garden, for example, is small and doesn’t contain much so if we spend more than 20 minutes per day working in it, we’ll have run out of things to do by the end of the week. Similar limits have been put on abnormal housework tasks.

Back of the garden just after we got started with taming it

Three work sessions later

One activity Mick has on his list is digitalising his RAF Flight Log Books. He’s only two days into this activity and has already made it into 1979 (the books span 1977 to 1993, after which he had a ground tour before retiring). He assures me it’s okay to dedicate so much time to the task due to the data analysis he’ll be entertaining himself with once he finishes the initial data input.

Exercising
It occurred to me during the second week in March that if this month went to plan it would, by some margin, be my highest running-mileage month on record. When we got home my intended schedule went out of the window, as there were no longer any events to train for. I may have been covering fewer miles, but I’ve been out on more days and as a result I’m going to finish the month having run over 125 miles. Not too shoddy, all things considered, I reckon.

I took the opportunity yesterday morning (on the basis that Sunday morning + clocks changing (people being an hour behind themselves) + lockdown = almost no-one out and about at 0830) to run along a pavementless main road that I would usually avoid. I was on that road for around 2 miles, during which time three cars passed me. Sod’s Law dictated that two of those cars passed me at the same time, in opposite directions. I opted to be the one to give way, stopping and hopping up onto the high verge.

What a fantastic run of sunny running days we’ve had! Not quite the same as being in Spain, particularly as I seem to either under- or over-dress most days.

I can also report that our makeshift gym is getting a reasonable amount of use.

^{(*We usually shop together, but at the moment there's no point in doubling the household exposure to infection and as I'm in the lower risk category out of the two of us, I've nominated myself as the shopper.
**I’ve long been an advocate of the ‘just do it for 10 minutes’ method of motivation. I clearly recall a day when I was 16 and couldn’t be bothered going out for my scheduled run but talked myself into it on the basis that ten minutes was better than nothing and ten minutes would be over before I knew it. Off I set, first telling my mother roughly where I was going and how soon I would be back. Of course, once I got going I found that I was enjoying myself and I kept tacking a bit extra on before I turned homewards. It was the first time I ever ran for more than an hour, and as I approached home I could hear my mother’s voice shouting my name from the nearby fields in a complete panic that, being so horribly overdue, I had been injured or worse.)}