Day 2

To shower, or not to shower? That would appear to be the question. Normally – bathroom permitting – not an issue at all, but given that for the first time I will be moving a total of four metres (mostly vertically) to get from my bed to my work station, is it really worth the hassle? And then, with all this social distancing going on, personal hygiene is not the priority it once was, surely?

I say ‘for the first time’ because, although this is Day 2 of distancing myself socially, emotionally and spiritually so far from my workplace that I do not plan to go near it for the next three months, embarrassingly I had to show up there yesterday, having forgotten on the last working day PC (Pre-Covid) to take the charger for my laptop home with me.

When I was there, I went into town to get a few essentials – cigarettes, cat food, a wireless mouse – and did my civic duty by not attempting to buy any toilet roll. There wasn’t any anyway. Belfast was a bit of a ghost town, a smattering of pedestrians about the place (maybe the rest of them are still at work passing the virus on to each other?) and any shop or business I went into had weird new rules about queuing a metre behind each other and only approaching the till when summoned. As a practised eavesdropper, I can report that 99.2% of the conversations concerned bore-oh no-virus: not much material there for the novel.

Even if I do – bathroom permitting – have a shower, another quandary then presents itself: to bathrobe, or not to bathrobe? Do I really need to go to the bother of getting dressed to sit in my own study in the middle of the countryside with a laptop on my knee? But the boss might decide to do one of those video-conference calls, and the bathrobe is a bit tatty. I could probably get away with it by making sure the camera only shows me from the neck up.

I am beginning to appreciate how much Covid-19 has affected our lives. Normally I do not do any thinking at all in the mornings – late afternoon is much better for that kind of stuff, I find. It’s usually just wake up, cigarette, coffee, second cigarette, diabetic drugs, shower, second coffee, third cigarette and into the car and off to work. Oh, I usually get dressed at some point in the routine too; generally after the shower. But here I am this morning stuck in the whole shower/no shower, bathrobe/no bathrobe conundrum. As they say, life will never be the same.

Mind you, it is only 6.26am, so maybe I should just go back to bed for an hour or two? The laptop isn’t going anywhere (now that it’s fully charged) and will still be waiting for me when I re-wake up at a more respectable hour. Problem solved! See you tomorrow.