Wednesday, 1 April:

Got up pretty early… my mind had been on lots of coronavirus-related stuff and so I thought it would be useful (for me) to try and write down stuff (see today’s Reflection).

After breakfast, spent a very helpful hour talking to my “Bloke’s Prayer” buddies… lots to chat about and reflect on, as you can imagine. Robin made us laugh by dressing in a jacket, bowtie, yellow/cream trousers, white shirt and braces especially for the occasion!

While I was ‘zooming-with-my-mates’, we received our online supermarket delivery… which was good. Sadly, it excluded LOTS of stuff we’d ordered (eg. bread, cheese, chicken, tinned tomatoes, baked beans etc). Hey ho! Later, we also had a delivery of vegetables, bread and cheese (sadly, no fruit) from our lovely local greengrocer Hugo... which was good news. 

Moira and I went for our regular harbourside walk mid-morning… hardly saw a soul (and enjoyed walking in the middle of roads!)(image: always nice to see Banksy’s ‘Girl with the Pierced Eardrum’).

As an experiment, my urban sketching friend Ana and I ‘got together’ to do some virtual sketching. We chose Underfall Yard as our location, then each selected a ‘view’ from the google map links… and then ‘met up’ again via zoom for a show-and-tell chat after an hour’s sketching. Although it was hardly the same as our usual urban sketching ‘sketchmeets’ (and, of course, you were sketching from google ‘streetviews’), it was good fun… and we decided to invite other sketchers to a similar ‘virtual sketchmeet’… and ended up choosing a location in Madrid(!) – Ana’s home city – and setting up a drawing session for this coming Friday.

After supper, I took part in another ‘zoom’ group discussion. This time our lovely StorySmith bookgroup… and, again, it worked surprisingly well and it was lovely ‘seeing’ everyone again. We’re going to try to repeat it next month – provided that Dan is able to source purchasing a batch of one of our short-listed books (their two suppliers have had to shut down due to the virus) – but, even if this proves impossible, I think we’ll end up ‘meeting up’ anyway (perhaps just to discuss our favourite books or whatever).

PS: Feels very strange not to be using money (ie. notes and coins) or our bank card at the current time (since we self-isolated and don’t go ‘proper shopping’ anymore).