The numbers are up again (the bad ones, the COVID-19 ones) and the daily cases are actually above where they ever got in the first wave. The response has been slower, patchier; nobody’s ready to jump straight into a full national lockdown again. It feels like it could be coming, though. I’ve mixed feeling about how ready for that I am.
We have this new home: spaces to work and to rest that are separate from one another. We have a garden, although autumn’s washing in and that the garden is becoming less of a crucial assett over time. I have a new job to worry about, a sense of forward momentum that is very different from the feeling of forestalled progress we felt in the first lockdown.
Ideally all the books in the API should stay in the store even if they haven’t been included on any of the named shelves in the last Goodreads scrape. When a new scrape is run it would add any books that don’t appear, shift any books that are in the store but don’t appear in the latest scrape to a no-shelf status (representing books I know about but have no relation with, I guess). All of that is much easier if Goodreads has a persisting book ID. If the data persists I can add my own columns to the data too, like whether I own the books.
We’ve had a lot of peace. We’re spending a lot of evenings in the pool, where only twenty people are allowed at a time and only swimming in a clockwise loop. We’ve been taking sick days when we feel worn out. I’ve been reading a little more. Emma has planted the raised bed at the end of the garden with bulbs that are supposed to sleep over the winter and erupt in spring. She forgot to check they were the right way up, but faith and bad statistics tell us about half of them will grow okay.
We’ve been on the coast of North Devon. Today the younger ones struck off from a larger group of trundling adults and children to get into the sea (we were standing on the headland and the water looked so calm and blue that Emma couldn’t think of anything other than finding somewhere to get into that sea).
We found a small rocky beach at the end of a crumbling single-track road. Emma and I went ahead in one car and wondered whether the others had lost their nerve on the way down. That was until we saw the others walking down the cliff path as we bobbed in the shallows. We swam out to the rocks and balanced on them, rising out of the water like miracles as we stood on ones that had already been covered by the waxing tide.
I woke up early and lay in bed for a while knowing Emma wanted a big lie in to catch up on sleep from a bad week. Eventually I got up and booked a slot at the gym and cycled there. I’ve been running less and going to the gym more, is that a more vain balance of exercise? Jay Rayner was back at the gym, and this time James Nesbitt was there too. I’ve told a couple of people this and I know that there’s nothing to care about but I still feel like I should do something with the information.
I might be getting back to work in the office soon. I always used to value the physical and mental separation of work and life. I think I still do and I’m looking forward to having it back for two days a week, which is the plan at first.
A lot has changed since I left the office, though. I am much more invested in my home. For one, it’s gotten much bigger and can therefore accommodate work mode more easily. I also have gotten to like sitting in my own garden as I break for lunch and the flexibility of fixing some practical task in between work meetings rather than having everything waiting for me at home when I make it back around 7.
Some days are good for nothing. It’s Friday and I’ve left work early but I haven’t been able to concentrate all day anyway. I feel unhappy and all I can think is I should go to the gym or play the piano or practice my Spanish or draw something or… Instead I’m going to flit between things, getting agitated at nothing.
It’s been a good week. We came back from Scotland and spent a week relaxing at home around my birthday. Then Tom arrived in Heathrow having run the gauntlet of the travel restrictions imposed by the Indian government, UK government, and the various airlines. He’s been decompressing here for a week or so, and making us incredible amounts of food and drink in the meantime. It’s good to have your habits disrupted.
Yesterday I watched a whole season of Kingdom on Netflix. It’s a big budget zombie show set in 16th century Korea. It being a Korean language show, there are English subtitles. However the subtitles not only translate dialogue but describe other sounds. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those subtitles.
We’re coming back to the world in floods of normalcy at the moment. One of my best friends was back in town on Thursday, and he came over for dinner and a drink. He was able to see our new home, I was able to cook for him, we were able to sit in our living room together and chat. We kept up chatting until just before midnight. We were all just so thankful to be able to have the kind of conversations you have with your friends in person when you’re relaxed. Then on Saturday morning I walked down our new high street as it opened up for the first time since we’ve lived here. Saturday was the day the majority of the businesses in the country were given to open up again. It’s been so long that bustling commerce, restaurants, markets — they all feel like a new idea. It’s like they’re inventing something new: the sit-in café, the come-in-and-look-around gardening supplier. I was practically bouncing down the road by the time I’d picked up all my supplies. I took pictures of the fronts of shops with their wares spilling out on the pavements, flowering all at once.