Well, my Wednesday got a little muddled yesterday. Our daughter has some childcare problems on a Wednesday. The nursery has no room for her small people - fully booked! As a rule this is not really a problem as her partner is able to arrange his work schedule so that he has Wednesday morning free. Every once in a while, though, he has to work on Wednesday morning. As his work involves a lot of time spent on the telephone or online, looking after two small people becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Yes, I know some people will turn around and give examples of the many working from home folk who manage to juggle childcare around that. And yes, I know that many of them are women, some of them single mothers. And yes, I acknowledge that they are doing a fabulous job of multi-tasking. But it doesn’t work for everyone.
So every once in a while the small people spend Wednesday morning here. And it’s nice to see them indoors for a change. I get up an hour earlier than usual and organise myself to entertain them. Mostly craft activities yesterday! Apart from a prolonged period of broken-hearted crying from the smallest of the two, who has not had chance to get used to being in our house with all the restrictions that have come and gone since he was about six months old, all mostly went messily well.
Now, on a Wednesday I usually cycle to the market on Uppermill. Well, that was a no-go. The weather promised to be reasonable so a mid-morning walk to the market was not out of the question: smallest person in the buggy, second smallest mostly trotting along and occasionally hitching a lift on the “buggy board”. Mummy could meet us at lunchtime for a picnic in the park. The weather let us down! Rain, and rain, and rain until until lunchtime. So no market trip yesterday.
In the midst of all this rather well-organised chaos my replacement iPad was delivered. Hurrah! So later in the day we spent some time, with assistance from our daughter, making sure that all my stuff was transferred from the old and unreliable machine to the new one.
At one point our daughter suggested that sometimes iPad charger ports get dusty and that a puff of air in the port could be the reason for my old machine’s failure to charge. That did not explain why it could tell me it was empty one moment but fully charged the next, only to be without charge five minutes later. However, we had a try at artificial respiration for iPads and, lo and behold, it charged! This facilitated the transfer of stuff from old machine to new. But just in case it proved to be fickle once again, we got on with the transfer as quickly as possible and here I am, re-established!
Maybe, when all this isolation business is over, we’ll consider taking the old machine to an Apple shop to see if an overhaul is any use. No doubt someone in the family can make use of a refurbished machine!
Will the isolation be over soon? Well, the messages are still mixed. I stood in a queue outside the baker’s shop in Uppermill this morning, earwigging on other people’s conversation. (I had transferred my Uppermill trip to this morning - no market but the good Italian green grocery and the deli were available. Not to mention the bakery, although I had to stand in a longer queue than usual as it was almost lunchtime and local workers were queueing to buy bacon sandwiches, sausage sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches and pies and pasties!) One queueing lady was reading news out loud from her phone: remote areas like Cornwall and the islands off Scotland were going back into tier 1 - almost no restrictions - various places, including London and Liverpool, were going into tier 2 - no indoor mingling - and a lot of places were remaining in tier 3 - more or less still in lockdown! And Greater Manchester? At that point it was not in any list at all.
We joked that they might be inventing a tier 4 or 5 for us. Or maybe they planned to build a wall round Greater Manchester and leave us to fend for ourselves, like the village of Eyam during the plague. Some time in the future a new “ring a ring of roses” nursery rhyme would be written about us.
Then it was my turn to go into the shop and the conversation was over!
We remain in tier 3. It’s official. I heard it on the radio. Plus ça change and all that sort of thing. Lots of people on social media have been saying that Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, is being punished for being an awkward so-and-so, especially as Liverpool is now in tier 2. However, we do still have a very high infection rate. Once again I say, plus ça change!
I understand it’s all up for review in a couple of weeks. We shall see. In the meantime ...
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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