Lockdown week 8 - Thursday

Today was Mr L's birthday, which probably made the day sadder than usual. Getting older (at our age) is never all that great anyway, but normally we would have the Edinburgh family round - if not on a Thursday, at least tomorrow and/or the weekend. And Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter might well have come up from London. Seeing the little ones growing and becoming more and more interesting every day is a great compensation for time passing. Now I just think - our time, particularly with Big Grandson, who'll be 9 in July, is running out - in the sense that when he's not very much older, going to Granny and Grandpa's house will be less of a pleasure and more of a duty. And then Little Grandson - we'll be lucky if we survive long enough for him to remember us at all, let alone remember us as faintly useful members of society. We don't have time for all this isolation from them.

Anyway, enough gloomy maundering. Mr L got some nice presents, which was lucky, and we have each other, and also the family on the end of the phone and sometimes on video, so we're much better off than many people. And we have health and a reasonable amount of strength, so off we went up the hill to the golf course - still golfer-free at the moment, hurray - and admired the profusion of red campion which is flowering at the moment.

It was a day of intermittent sunshine. I tried to get a picture of the sun shining dramatically on Arthur's Seat when the rest of the town was in shade, but by the time I put the code numbers into my phone - getting it wrong the first time, as I so often do - the sun had gone behind a cloud there and was shining on us.

It was still shining on bits of the Pentlands, though, so I took another photo of them.

Can you see the white ships on the horizon? They're cruise ships, moored in the estuary, empty (of passengers, though I imagine they have some crew) since the beginning of lockdown. Normally they don't moor anywhere for any length of time, but just cruise the world.

This is really all very very strange, isn't it? On the radio and tv there's great speculation that everything may be permanently changed once (if) we get back to normality. They wonder if we may have got out of the habit of going to the theatre or concerts, or taking planes, or if maybe far more people will be working at home in future rather than commuting to offices and sitting together in the same room but at their separate computers. What do you think? I'm inclined to think that maybe the last bit might be true - if people are managing to work satisfactorily at home, or if at least they might be able to if their children were at school, then maybe we'll become much more of a home-working nation. This would certainly cut down on traffic congestion, but would it lead to lonelier workers? Almost certainly, especially if they almost never met up with their colleagues.

Son-in-Law 2, the actor/singer, is doing various things in isolation over the internet, with and without his improv colleagues. They're called Showstopper The Improvised Musical - which is just what it sounds like - unlikely but actually very good and hilarious. But you can't improvise music together on the internet because of the time lag. So they're doing it separately and then SIL is editing them together. If you've got time on your hands, you might like to seek them out. They're doing very fun things on Facebook particularly. But it's a terrible time for actors and musicians - all their gigs wiped out for the foreseeable future. When will people feel like going to a theatre and sitting side by side with strangers? Not any time soon, I shouldn't think.

Well, Mr L is watching the latest Star Wars film (courtesy of Son and DIL) so I think I'll just go and have a nice soak in the bath and then read my book in bed. Tomorrow is another day. (Mind you, it's bed-changing, house-cleaning day, so hmm. Woo hoo and I don't think.) And we have lots of cake left.