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Saturday 9th May 2020

6375/19295

My attempt to diet through the virus has failed pretty badly and my weight is creeping up. Apparently the increased risk of death for the obese is not enough to persuade me to stop eating bread. It’s pretty annoying though as I had started the year with great momentum and had been getting pretty fit.
I went for a run this morning and it felt surprisingly OK. I couldn’t quite make it all the way up the hill without stopping, but only took a small breather. There weren’t too many people around but I did pass a family who were feeding grass to the horses. I tried to keep to one side of the path, but they didn’t seem concerned that a sweaty stranger was running speedily/stumbling slowly towards them and I had to dodge a child or two and hope that none of us were infected.
The mobile butcher had just arrived in the village and I curtailed the run to join the long queue. Mostly people social distanced, but a very hobbly old man got out of a car and passed within inches of us all, stopping to nudge someone in front of me. Given he himself was surely in the at risk group this seemed a bit foolish. But I guess people are tired of the isolation and confused by the mixed messages from the government and the media.
It’s good to see the village so enthusiastically using the service that the butcher is providing, though I have never had to queue for 30 minutes before the virus and hope people will remember how useful this was once this was all over. Though I suspect that all of us will slip back into the convenience of the weekly supermarket shop. Be nice if we didn’t though and carried on giving custom to the post office and the mobile butcher and fishmonger. If the virus helps us appreciate and use our community properly then it won’t be all bad. As long as the community doesn’t kill us all by not understanding social distancing.
I don’t think it’s realistic to expect people to only use these services once this is over, but I intend to use them more than I did at the start of this year, When I needed a neighbour…
I did the majority of the childcare today after my wife had kindly let me had a lie-in til 7.15am. I was tired by the end of the day, but it was mainly a pleasure of tag, timed races round the garden and spraying the kids with a hose. I thought about having a BBQ with some of the meat I’d bought, but we might do that tomorrow. The blues of last weekend are largely banished, but the stress dreams continue and the dread of long term effects on work and mental and physical health is hard to shake. 
We had a gin martini and a nice bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that I’d bought years ago. We used it as a swearword  like Delboy so we are probably too uncultured to deserve it. My wife noted that it was from 2012, the year we got married. As I opened it I said, “I hope our marriage lasts longer than the bottle.” And though it took us a couple of hours to drink, the marriage did outlast it. 


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