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Saturday 12th September 2020

6498/19418

Six months since I last took my daughter to her gym class and as we drove the familiar route she thought we’d taken a wrong turn because she didn’t recognise where she was. Which brings home just how long six months is for a 5 year old. I tried to ask her about what she’d tell her grandchildren about this year, but she didn’t answer and asked instead for a game of “Guess What I am!”,  a car game we have invented that is nothing like Twenty Questions, partly because you can have as many questions as you like. But also it’s totally different. Shut up.
I have not been sleeping well this week (I was up at 3.30am the night before The Chase and I keep failing to get back to sleep if woken in the small wee hours- which is always due to me having a 53 year old bladder) and it was tough work getting through today. I probably didn’t help matters by going for a run this morning, but it’s probably good I pushed myself to do that. I have stuck to my resolution to remove unhealthy snacks from my diet and am slowly losing weight as a result. Even though I’d had a couple of alcoholic drinks last night for the first time in four or five weeks, there didn’t seem to be any repercussions today.
There are bigger things to worry about in the world than my son gleefully telling me I have a fat tummy. He’s not fat-shaming me, he just likes to speak truth to power. The world seems to be sleep-walking towards disaster because it turns out there is nothing that can be done if governments just decide they aren’t going to follow the rules and if they are led by people who don’t have shame. We are watching the storm on the horizon and marvelling at the clouds turning grey and the swirling whirlwinds and yet we’re still all going to be surprised when it arrives and pulls us apart. Who could have predicted that the thing that we could see coming for months and years finally arrived? How could we have prepared? Why would we have taken measures to stop it or protect ourselves?
We’ve been incredibly lucky to live in the time that we do and (for most people reading this I assume) in the places that we do. Let’s look back in September 2030 (if I have survived and the government allows freedom of expression via the revolutionary medium of blogs then) and see what we have lost and gained.  
But for now we just have to worry about the possibility/probability of a second wave and as I sat watching my daughter doing her gym exercises I wondered if it might be another six months before we can go back there or if things are going to carry on neither turned on or off. Losing most/all of a year is not a big deal for someone in their fifties when most of your days are lost in any case, but wiping out a year for a five year old and a two year old? I guess my parents lost more than a year during World War Two, and this isn’t as bad as that (yet). 
Vesuvius is belching out smoke, but daily life goes on for now.
It’ll probably be OK right?


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