Saturday 9th May
Saturday kicked off with a trip to do the big food shop. Having now been in lockdown for almost seven weeks, I was getting to know the best times to go food shopping; when there was less likely to be civillised, socially distanced queuing outside or a rather less civillised scrum of people vying for reduced mince and lamb chops in the chilled aisle (the fights for toilet roll and pasta seemed to have subsided in recent weeks). For my supermarket of choice, this time seemed to be just as the dedicated time for older people or NHS workers was finishing. This morning’s trip proved true to my theory and I was able to go straight into the shop without any queing. Inside almost everyone was observing the social distancing requirements and the shop itself had plenty of stock. After my successful shopping trip I returned home and began the painstaking task of putting away the food. I’m not being melodramatic here; in our house putting the food shopping away takes absolutely ages. It starts with the bags being put in the entrance to the kitchen. Next warp-boy appears and inspects each bag, one by one. Then he takes out each item from the bags, investigates it and decides whether it is a nice or nasty food. This is followed by him making corresponding gestures – rubbing his tummy and saying ‘mmmmm!’ for nice foods and shouting ‘BLEUGHHHH!’ at the top of his voice for nasty food – before finally carefully passing the item to me. This continues until all items have been processed and put away. You can’t help him either; I regularly have concerns for my eggs during this process and for him when he attempts to pass me 3kg of potatoes! Nevertheless, this is the food-putting-away process in our house and it seems to be one of warp-boy’s favourite hobbies at the moment.
After our epic food shopping experience in the morning, our afternoon was topped off by (wait for it…) more Play-Doh. While we obviously had the obligatory bears tea party, I decided to make some doughy family creations. I was most proud of my portrait of jef which, as it happens, was scarily true to his real face. Reminiscent, prehaps, of some revered creation by Michaelangelo or Raphael…. Maybe looking more like a dodgy pizza that their reptilian counterparts would probably eat after a day of fightingFoot Soldiers… Either way, I think the lockdown cabin fever might be setting in!