Get up. Figure out what freaking day of the benighted Covid week it is. Have coffee, shout at newspaper, emails, work. Walk up to the little French cafe and line up - masked, scanned and sanitised - for a cappuccino and maybe an iced custard choux thing so delicious it can only be the work of Satan. Merci. A demain et demain et demain....
Every day the same, yet compared to life as hitherto known, so surreal. Thanks to the vagaries of big-box store click & collect, we had what these days counts as an excursion to rival a minibreak to Sydney to pick up a toddler grandchild's birthday present. A sit-on sand digger, since you asked. He loves diggers. "Digger, digger, digger!" We drove to West Auckland, sent a code by text and lurked, masked and sanitised, in the carpark until someone came out, furtively dropped a parcel and ran away. It felt like an illicit drug deal.
Two grandchildren came for a socially distanced, outside visit. We walked to the village. It's hard to choose a treat by peering past a Perspex barrier into an empty Two Dollar Shop. We got icecream. As I write, we can shop again. Two steps back, one step forward.
What to do back home for a couple of hours during which they are unable to raid the snack drawer or beg screen time? They found the bucket and pulley arrangement used to haul up supplies to the old tree house and proceeded to rig up an elaborate arrangement to transport teddies between the deck and the garden below. There are apparently endless ingenious things to do with an old school game of Monkeys in a Barrel, including a sort of art installation involving many monkeys making light work of a pair of sweaty sneakers. Even the adults have dusted off the Scrabble.
Lockdown has been hard on children but maybe such disruption to their normal busy, structured, slightly dystopian 21st century schedules has left more space for that most human attribute, imagination. I haven't seen them all play together like that, engrossed, in harmony, for years.
Meanwhile, in the adult world, chaos. Everything changes fast and with change comes anxiety, fear, a lot of headless chookery. I put my hand up for that and have the therapy bills to prove it. So the PM gets hammered for easing restrictions and hammered for having restrictions, often in the same interview.