Lockdown diary, day five

A very peculiar day today: I'm aware that it's the weekend because I am not working but in general it is like a Saturday without the usual social side of Saturday, and tomorrow will be even worse.

My wife is using up her remaining annual holiday and I have been working at home, and we took the government advice about consolidating out essential shopping to minimise trips out of the house, so unless we make a shopping trip in the next few days, none of the family will have left the curtilage of our property during the five days from yesterday (Friday 27th March 2020) through to Tuesday.

It is difficult to fine words for how unusual that is. In many respects it seems like normal life is on hold.

Today was supposed to be Swimathon 2020 but that had to be postponed because of Coronavirus. I sitll intend to take part in the event at some stage, and my fundraising page for Swimathon 2020, raising money for Marie Curie Cancer Care and Cancer research UK is still open at

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/chris-whiteside2020

However, today's tragic news both in the UK and Italy underlines the need to follow government advice to Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save lives.

Both countries passed unwelcome milestones today: the death toll of people who have died after contracting COVID-19 passed a thousand in the UK, and passed 10,000 in Italy.

We will get through this, but just about every human being on the planet is going to have a very difficult few months.

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