Do make me laugh.

I missed a day and I’m still grumpy.
“So, will you be feeling better in the morning or....?” the Long Suffering Husband said before we went to bed.
Obviously, I hoped to be feeling happier, no one chooses this, do they? However, this morning no sleep miracle has occurred. Maybe I should try and work out why. I mean, really, I don’t have any reason. My life is pretty good.

However, I just have a growing sense of unease.

Maybe I preferred full lockdown. Shut in my little house, with my little family, except for long country walks, where nothing could go wrong. I probably did but I think it’s more than that. This half and half, in limbo stage is really hard.

I think I would have preferred to stay in for longer and then enable life to go back to normal. If this disease is so dangerous it would have been better to eradicate it. With thousands of new cases and hundreds of hospital admissions and deaths a day the virus is still very much with us, which means we have to continue to modify our natural behaviour to stop another exponential spread. It also means that the vulnerable will never get their normal life back.

I also feel a bit wobbly about how decisions are being made about who and what can re-open for business. It creates a them and us situation which is never good.

I’m in the half of the school that isn’t in and that feels weird. I say half because I’m including the children. Most staff are back in. Although it is lovely to be able to potter round the garden and choose when to work, I know that I and all the children at home are missing out on a shared experience. We will never be able to join in the conversations.
“Do you remember when Mr B tripped over the table?”
“Nope, I don’t because I was in year 3, my mum didn’t work in the school and the government decided there was no need to educate me. But do you remember that long hot summer where we had 5 months to make mud pies and watch the birds?”
You could argue that it works both ways, except that everyone’s experience of being at home is slightly different.
Yesterday, our school held a virtual assembly on Facebook Live. I found it very sad. It was too different and too distant. Obviously, I’ll never tell anyone that. “It was lovely,” I’ll say, “what a brilliant idea to keep a sense of community going,” which I suppose it is but it also felt like a slap in the face - a this is what we’ve got and you can’t have. I know! I’m an adult and should be more grown up about these things!

I also have a growing fear that what I do is never going to be allowed again. Gavin Williamson implied that in September all children will be back in school in bubbles of 30. I’m not sure how this will work in senior schools but the implication is that classes won’t mix and won’t move much. There are constant rumours that singing in groups is dangerous, which I think comes from the fact that a whole choir of octogenarians in Germany died. He also announced that schools were to make sure that their pupils ‘caught up.’ They haven’t said on what yet but you can almost guarantee it won’t be an understanding of how pitch, rhythm, musical notation work. I fear that music lessons will be scrapped in favour of extra spelling tests.

It has also worried me that the government only thinks about big business and forgets the little people at the bottom that make the big business work. For example, premier football but no smaller divisions. The arts industry in the UK is worth more than the sport industry and so the government will talk to the big business leaders of these industries. Luckily, Cameron MacIntosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber understand the grass roots needs of the industry, but those big businesses (where their wealth is tied up in huge central London property) is where they’ll start.

I know what I need to cheer myself up.

I’m sorry it’s taken this long.

I need a good laugh.

The government has started to talk to ALW and CM. This was their first suggestion:

Musicals could open without singing.

Ha ha. That’s better. I’m feeling happier already.

Libraries could open without books.
Ballet could be staged without dancing.
Social media could happen with blank screens.
Swimming pools could open without water.
Football could be played without balls.
Orchestras could play without instruments.
Perfume shops with no smelling.
Shoe shops without shoes.
Parliament could sit without MPs

Now, there’s a thought.