Wednesday 8th April 2020
This morning, warp-girl surprised me by saying ‘I want to do my school work!’. I had a think over breakfast about what we could do that would count as ‘school work’ and then I remembered that a friend had told me about a COVID-19 diary for kids. After a quick Internet search I found it; ‘My 2020 COVID-19 Time Capsule’; and the pdf was free to download. Consisting of 11 pages, this booklet had lots of things to draw and write about, including a picture of your family and home, an ‘All About Me’ fact file and a section where you could interview your parents. This occupied warp-girl for several hours, leaving me free to crack on with my own work. Later, I spoke with my friend in Thailand again. They now had a curfew between the hours of 22:00 and 04:00, although they are allowed to visit the homes of there family members. There are also no flights into Thailand until 18th April at the earliest. We don’t have any such curfews at the moment, but we do have to stay with the people within our households. We also have a limited number of flights in and out of the country. The different approaches that different countries have been taking are interesting to see; and it will be even more interesting to see the outcomes of these measures in the months to come.
Thursday 9th April 2020
Today warp-girl was excited to carry on with her COVID-19 Time Capsule booklet so I cracked on with checking and archiving emails, warp-boy cracked on with his living room destruction and jef set about shaking some trees and catching some bugs to pay off our latest island improvements on Delfino. Later, we were out of milk (again!?!) so I headed to the shop. We are shopping as little as possible, but with restrictions on the number of bottles of milk you can buy in one visit to the shop (and two young children who drink a lot of milk) this is proving somewhat challenging. No queuing today though, although they now have spray bottles of disinfectant to spray on your shopping trolley handles and hand sanitiser as you go in. There are also a growing number of people wearing masks (and scarfs) over their faces and gloves on their hands. This isn’t a requirement here, and it is not actively encouraged by the Government, but a lot of people seem to be making the decision to wear them anyway. Inside the shop there were mountains of Easter eggs which were all buy one get one free…with three days still to go until Easter Sunday, this seemed crazy…but then again, being in the midst of a lockdown; with travel and shopping restrictions in place and a contagious virus on the loose; is pretty crazy too.