Walks

I felt better, today. I've been feeling a persistent, low-level anxiety, which I think started on the Friday when they closed down the bars and restaurants but was definitely in place after Johnson announced the full lock-down. 

A few things have helped me: staying off Twitter, most definitely. I gave that up almost straightaway. And then after some ludicrous articles in the Independent and the Guardian, I stopped reading all the papers except for the FT, which has a nice, solid approach to what's news. And it's helped seeing the supermarket shelves well stocked, too. 

Perhaps the best thing has been my afternoon walk with Dan. Even on the days that he's at his mum's, he comes up to the house in the late afternoon and we set off as soon as I finish work, usually doing three or four miles. 

He's great company and, as the days have gone by, we've also found ourselves quite happy to walk along in silence at times. When we do chat, it's about all sorts of things: we wonder about the courses of the becks as they disappear under the roads, whether the sheep at Underley know to use the bridge to cross the stream or whether they just move around their field in a kind of ovine Brownian motion, and point out anything else that catches our attention.

Today Dan spotted this notice - which I must have run past a hundred times - alerting passers-by to the fact that the field was under twenty-four hour CCTV surveillance. In fact, there are two of these signs! We entertained ourselves for the following ten minutes speculating what led to the signs being put up. 

He's been doing four hours of musical practise a day, so we talk about that, and he and Abi are using an app to keep their screen time down, although this hasn't prevented him from joining in the current fad for cropping one's hair, as you can see. 

I want him to know it's OK to talk about anxieties so I've mentioned to him how I've been feeling although I wouldn't want to worry him so I've not made a big deal of it. One day, though, I will tell him just how much these daily walks have meant to me. 

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-10.4 kgs
Reading: 'Kraftwerk: Future Music From Germany' by Uwe Schütte