Day 17...

One of our town's main road during rush hour this morning!

News: The PM has been moved out of Intensive Care, we have been officially told that the lockdown will not be ending at the end of the initial 21 day period (not a great surprise to anyone, I don't believe!) and a warning has been issued to people to ensure that they continue to follow the guidelines over the long weekend. Locally, our council have now locked up the car parks that serve the Town Park - a bit of a surprise as they weren't particularly busy last weekend, but with good weather forecast for at least part of the Easter break, it's probably sensible.

MrEH has had his first three day week, and seemed to manage to fill a solo day off today while I continued to work. In fairness, he's spent enough years heading off to work on a Friday leaving me to be a lady of leisure so this is not entirely unreasonable. We've agreed that on those weekdays where I am working and he is not, we'll continue to get up at the same time as usual and stick to our routine with regard to getting out first thing for either exercise or shopping if any is needed.

I'm still planning meals around a combination of what we have in the freezer and what we have that needs using up - although this week's food has has quite a familiar pre-lockdown look to it. When MrEH was at the supermarket this morning he managed to get a tub of their fresh egg noodles, which fitted well with the stir fry I had planned - a piece of frying steak from the freezer, with veg mostly from the fridge - the last courgette, the final chunk of cabbage, a rather withered chilli, a carrot, the last of the bag of kale...with a handful each of frozen mushrooms and peppers from the freezer. Tasty and packed full of a nice mix of varied veg too towards our five a day. Planning that way also helps to ensure we have no food waste - which feels even more important at the moment. (Oddly enough having popped over to have a read of Sue's Challenging Myself blog and see she has written about something very similar today!)

The shortages of various products in the supermarket are definitely beginning to ease now, although there are still items that I haven't seen any sign of in literally weeks - pasta, which isn't a problem because we always have a couple of bags in anyway, and bread flour - which will shortly become a problem - we're onto the very end of our only bag of wholemeal, and have started our last bag of white. Apparently the mills are finding there is still a huge demand for it, and are struggling to get sufficient into the small bags that go to supermarkets to meet that demand. We have enough for another couple of weeks, but have now started consciously searching in each store we visit to see if they have any. We may visit the lovely local bakery tomorrow - I believe they were due a flour delivery today so fingers crossed it didn't all sell this afternoon!

Robyn