Day 72...

I had decided to follow the lead of blogger Snoskred in doing a “photo an hour” post today. It all started well enough first thing...

My now-habitual start to the day in this new normal - first brew of the day and getting some Instagram posts done while still cosied up in bed. It’s definitely one of the things I will miss when  early starts begin again. 

8.30am - morning walk. Again, something that I think we will both miss. I do fairly often find time for a walk before heading to the office in the morning, but rarely more than a mile or so - most days currently we’re managing 3 or so miles before heading back ready for MrEH to start work Monday - Wednesday, while for me....

...9.30am is time for breakfast, and my second brew of course. ALWAYS tea here - I’m not a coffee fan at all - the closest I get to coffee is the occasional mocha which I quite enjoy. This morning breakfast was some granola with Greek yogurt - I don’t “do” cereal with milk, this is as close as I get to cereal + dairy! If the weather is good enough I always gravitate to sitting outside as well - and the wonderfully soothing view from the balcony.

A little later I walked into the kitchen to see this...

Yes, it’s been tidier - so 10.30am got designated kitchen tidying and cleaning time - dirty stuff into the dishwasher or in the case of the pans and knives, washed up by hand. Fruit and veg waste outside ready to go into the compost bin, then a thorough clean down of the worktop, plus a clean of the hob.

By 11.30am it was all done and looking oh so much better! It’s three years since we got this done now and yet the difference still amazes me. It cost a bit but was honestly worth every penny - the room is a joy to work in and makes us smile - it is also far easier to keep clean, and although the earlier shot belies it - tidy, too! 

 A good chunk of housework deserves a reward, so on went my running kit and I fired out of the door to get some miles in. As I had time, and rain wasn’t forecast, I headed for the river - so often my default!

Weather not as good today, but regardless this is a route I always love. A long downhill first mile gives a nice confidence boost and a decent pace - then I switch to unstructured run/walk intervals to avoid the hillier sections destroying my knees. Just two short busy road sections and one quieter one, the rest of it is all either on old roads - now cycle tracks, through Old Harlow, along the river itself or in the Town Park - glorious. Home today via Aldi, and back in time for lunch....

Weekday lunches have been kept nice and simple - a sandwich or filled roll, a handful of baby tomatoes for me, packet of crisps for MrEH, and then some fruit. I’m not much of a daytime snacker which I have always been quite grateful about - but I certainly find that eating a good lunch helps with this. 

Lunch finished, and time to get some photo processing done while sorting out my new FitBit. As I mentioned last week, after over 3 years of daily use my old  Charge 2 developed several cracks across the screen. It still works, but I was concerned that it will be a lot more vulnerable to water ingress in the rain, so decided to move swiftly for a replacement. The new model recently released is a lot more money mainly for a feature that I don’t feel is currently good value - it has inbuilt GPS for tracking walks and runs - but this comes with a trade-off of drastically reduced battery life so I felt it would effectively be useless to me. Instead I moved for the previous model - the special edition version which gains me FitBit Pay (another feature now standard on the newer model). A saving over over £30 on the purchase price though - at £99 it was fractionally cheaper than I paid for the last one - if this one gets me a further three years of use I will feel that was money well spent! 

I lost an hour here somewhere along the line - it was filled with wrestling with the tech, processing photos, sorting out washing and a few other jobs. Mostly wrestling with the tech though - I struggled to get the phone to accept the new FitBit, I think because it had connected to the iPad already without me realising it. Eventually I installed it on the iPad first, then finally the phone played ball.

And that was when it all went wrong. I forgot the rest of the day! I had good plans too - dinner was a lovely looking plateful, we played a game his evening....sigh. Maybe I will try another day - I had a feeling this might happen!

Robyn

Day 71...

I’ve been keeping to my aim of taking a nightly photo of the moon - this is last nights. There is something about staring up at it - for a start it’s beautifully clear through the camera lens and while it changes a tiny bit each night, essentially it’s the same thing I’m looking at night after night. Then actually photographing it at all takes decent technique - I shoot handheld rather than tripod mounted so I have to ensure that I have a good solid stance, elbows tucked in, frame the shot and squeeze the shutter on a long outward breath to hold as steady as possible. It makes me stop and think about my photography is a way that few other subjects do. We are due a change in the weather from tomorrow though - I suspect tonight may have been my last moon shot for a while (I just went out and took it while I was in the middle of writing this - had to go out to the road for the first time in the cycle as it was hidden behind the trees!).


Social media has been full of people posting black squares today - it’s intended to be white people showing solidarity with the black community, but a lot of BAME campaigners are calling it out as just being an easy way to make it appear that they are doing something, while actually doing nothing.  This has arisen following the murder of George Floyd by a Police officer in the USA (if you are reading this in the future, and wondering about who Floyd was, then google him, it’s important) - although far from the first death of a black man at the hands of white police officers, it seems to have been a tipping point - American People of Colour are no longer willing to live in fear and are determined to affect change. There have been protests - many of which appear to have been dealt with very heavy handedly. There has been looting and rioting, property has been destroyed - which is awful, but nowhere near as awful as black people routinely being murdered just because of the colour of their skin. There is to be a “socially distanced protest” in Harlow tomorrow. I’m considering going - but also wary. I can’t imagine it will stay socially distanced if a lot of people show up - and I’m incredibly cautious about getting caught in a crowded environment right at this moment. Selfish - perhaps, but I do have to consider my own little family bubble, it is not just me that it would put at risk. I AM trying to speak up on social media - re-tweeting things, linking posts into stories on Instagram - in a bid to help amplify the black voices that are out there helping to educate. I’m leaving hashtags to others - this should not be a trendy bandwagon to jump on, forgotten in a heartbeat when the next cool hashtag comes along. This is not about ME - it’s about THEM.

Robyn

Day 70...

Celebrating the end of week 10 with a little slice of normal this morning. An early alarm, out to the car, and a drive to RAF Lakenheath - just an hour north of here. Three glorious hours sitting in the sunshine photographing USAF F-15s as they screamed off the runway. Admittedly not *quite* as good as little Red jets at Scampton, but right at this point in time those are out of reach, so time to make the best of it.

It all felt quite odd. Getting up ahead of MrEH, making my morning brew in an insulated mug, driving onto the motorway, driving for more than a few minutes at a time...all things I’ve not done for 10 weeks, which used to be entirely commonplace. Once at the base social distancing was being nicely observed by the majority, and those that clearly weren’t fussed about it themselves weren’t imposing that on others, so all good there. It was busy, but not unpleasantly so - and the quick look I took across at the official viewing area suggested that was much the same.

It felt quite amazingly good to be back to doing something I love so much - and also as though there really is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Robyn

Day 69...

Today’s long walk - to the former RAF Hunsdon,  somewhere we have been promising to visit for a long while, nice to finally get round to it. Out to join up with where we headed for home last week, followed by a walk up the other side of the valley to pretty much the highest point in the area - you can see why they chose it for an RAF airfield! A beautiful memorial to those based their who lost their lives during the war, and we were glad to finally get to pay our respects there.

This week will be about working on rebuilding some habits I think. So to start with - a list of 5 things  to aim for:
- Better sleep habits
- A trip out just for me
- a couple more runs
- Stretching!
- Getting back to setting out the next days clothes the night before

Starting tomorrow with a trip with the camera - Lakenheath USAF base, where they have been conducting regular flying. I’m really missing my aviation photography at the moment - I’m obviously way too far from Scampton to go there, even a Coningsby trip would be too far at the moment, but Lakenheath is under an hour away and is somewhere I wanted to get to more often anyway so this is the perfect excuse.

Robyn

Day 68...

Today, we should have been travelling from North Uist to Barra for our last day in the Hebrides. Although we have re-booked our trip for later in the year, I currently have no confidence that we’ll be able to get across even then. Worse, it feels entirely uncertain whether visitors to the Islands will be welcomed even when we are allowed to return - there is a huge amount of hostility from some currently towards those who are expressing that they want to visit when it’s safe to do so. We absolutely will NOT go over until we are assured it is safe - but it appears as though even then there may be those who will try to take the law into their own hands where visitors are concerned.

It’s going to be an issue from both sides - there are many on the islands who rely on tourism to make their living. This year is already going to be a desperate struggle for them. It’s going to be a tricky tightrope to tread - balancing the risk against the need to return to a degree of normality “at some point”. Making those who are regular visitors and have been for many years feel as though they are not welcome to return simply means more space for new ones - those who don’t understand how serious the virus could be in small islands with no ICU facilities - they are the people to be scared of encouraging, not those of us who understand the dangers.

We’ll wait and see. In 2 weeks time we will have clearer view I think - both how the easing of lockdown is going in Scotland, and also in terms of the general feeling around re-opening.

Robyn

Day 67..

The gravestone above belongs to my Great Uncle - Uncle Bob. Probably one of the people who had the greatest impact on my life when I was a child - Bob loved nothing more than spending time with his great Nieces - there are 4 of us in total. I am the oldest, followed by Vicky, Diana and Kelly.  He was a wonderfully kind man, who instilled into me his own love of the countryside - the wildlife, the surroundings - something that now, I’m so grateful for. He loved exploring anywhere unusual, or new - and he also had a secret love of all things related to aviation. One of his ultimate ambitions was to fly on Concorde - something he achieved not that long before his death. This was the reason why when the opportunity arose I seized the chance to have his name put on the tail of a RAF Red Arrows jet - in the last few years he has been literally all over the world on the tail of XX322 - Europe, across the U.K., and throughout the USA & Canada too. Of all of those locations though, probably the one that Bob would have been most pleased about was the display at Swanage Carnival in Dorset a couple of years ago. We holidayed in Swanage several times when I was small - I have wonderful memories of us walking down to see the steam trains in the morning - he would have loved the idea of flying over the place!

It feels really strange to think that we had to say goodbye to Bob over 20 years ago now. I would have loved for him to have met MrEH - they would have got on like a house on fire! Bob would also have loved the adventures I have had in aviation over the past 5 years or so - he would have been excitedly waiting for the next instalment I suspect, and eagerly awaiting the next batch of photos. He would also have loved hearing about our Hebrides trips - somewhere that I’m pretty sure he would have loved!  I was the last family member aside from Auntie D to see him before he died - and I have vivid memories of our last conversation. I suspect Bob knew all too well that he didn’t have long left, but still he was cheerful, interested in hearing all I’d been up to. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the 25 years of my life that I did, with him in it.

Robyn

Day 66...

Today has featured bread flour - lots of it. We found Sainsbury’s well stocked this morning - I was able to get both wholemeal and an organic flour for sourdough in there, then a little later on we popped into Lidl for a couple of bits for my parents (our local Lidl clientele have zero concept of social distancing, so Mum is sensibly avoiding the place like the plague!) we found that they had plenty of ordinary strong white. We are now well stocked for bread flour!

Also, as you can see from the photo above, an unexpectedly high amount of walking. Having done Sainsbury’s and back this morning (a little over 4 miles in total) we went out again this afternoon for what was planned to be just a little amble at Amwell - and ended up walking a stretch of the Lea Valley walk that we’d not previously covered - the “gap” joining up the stretch down into London which is the Lea Valley walk proper, with the stretch from Amwell to Hertford that we had also covered before. Another 8 miles plus there, giving me a total of 15 miles today. The feet are feeling it a little now!

The other “unexpected” that you may also be able to see from the photo above are the multiple cracks that have appeared in the screen of my Fitbit. Before you ask, I have no idea how they got there - it hasn’t been dropped, and I can’t recall anything more than average daily life knocks or bumps, so I can only assume that perhaps it’s a couple of scratches than have now developed into cracks. I now have to make the decision whether to say that this one has done over 3 years, I have had my money’s worth, and replace immediately, or chance making it last a bit longer. I know the model I want to replace it with, and that has now been superseded by a newer version, so the risk is that by leaving it longer I may then struggle to get one. Decisions to be made.

In other news today, the big one is that we will be able to meet people from outside our household in groups of not more than 6 outdoors, from Monday. From my perspective it means that now a socially distanced dog walk with both my parents might be workable. From what we have seen of the family groups out and about for the last few days it’s rather appeared that a number of people have already been doing that anyway, so hopefully it won’t increase the likelihood of a second wave.

Robyn