Day 12...

A nice "pottery" sort of day here - I've talked before on here about the fact that I can quite happily potter about doing odds and ends, and bits and pieces. One of my concerns about the lockdown was that I might start to find I was getting bored with that, but so far so good and I'm really not struggling overmuch to fill the extra time I've found myself with. Part of the battle there has been to let go of the feeling that I must be doing "something" all of the time - there seems to be a real feeling running through some parts of social media at the moment that we must all come out of these weeks with some form of devastating new skill, and it's incredibly easy to get sucked into that. Now if that's what you want to do then brilliant - go you. If you're doing it because you feel you *should* though - then take a step back and think of letting go - this is a stressful time, it's absolutely fine to not be OK about what we're going through, so if you're feeling a bit scared and overwhelmed about the whole situation then join the club - I certainly am! You absolutely don't need to pile any more pressure on yourself by feeling that you have to learn to play the banjo, learn Swahili or have knitted yourself a three-piece-suit using unravelled jumpers from the back of the wardrobe.

So today then - exercise this morning was a fitness session over at the playing field, called by MrEH, this was his chance to get his revenge for the running! (And as we did burpees, we can consider that he did!) The home and lunch before heading across to Sainsburys for some shopping. We've been trying as far as possible to not use the cars - basically we've agreed that we'll only really use one or other if we need to drop anything off to Mum & Dad's - which means we're going our own shopping on foot. So an amble to the other side of town this afternoon, and back again before getting another new cake recipe on the go - coconut cakes from Jane Brocket's "Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer" book of recipes from childrens books. These are actually "Mrs Banks Bribery & Corruption Cocoanut Cakes" from Mary Poppins. Rather than the coconut buttercream topping suggested in the recipe we topped ours with a glace icing using stewed redcurrants and some more coconut - delicious and just enough tartness from the fruit to offset the sweetness.

Most of the latter part of the afternoon was spent jigsawing - something we do rarely but really enjoy! We often do at least one jigsaw on holiday, and Christmas week on Lundy saw jigsaws constantly on the go on the big dining table at the house and even in the pub! We're ordered a couple more, second hand from eBay so those should keep us going for a few more weekends yet too - and then there's always Monopoly, Scabble, Yahtzee...

Robyn