Surviving. Just.

And so we reach week 4 of the lockdown. The Black Death is raging outside and people are dropping like flies. Like a lemming, I watch the daily government update for a chink of a speck of a slither of... hope. But I just get more depressed every time. Just looking at Chris Witty is enough to put anyone off - he actually looks like the virus. As for the succession of ministers - well, they never answer any of the questions, except for Ms Patel, who just gets angry. Not that the questioners are any good either - Peston struggles, as always, to get through a sentence without daft pauses in all the wrong places, while the others.... enough. I need hope from somewhere else.

So, I start playing Scrabble via FaceTime with Steve, Rach and Tom in Cheltenham (my brother's family). Hope there... for a while. I win the first game too, with ZESTY. But then they start getting serious and Steve hammers in a 100 pointer with his final 7 letters and wins spectacularly. I shall never look at a caribou with anything but utter hatred in future.

I start cooking serious meals - like stir fries, mashed potatoes with spicy chicken and spaghetti with proper sauces which I throw together. Hope there. Then I burn my thumb... and it is back to the packets. I do some gardening and plant lots of seeds, but something takes a liking to the first seedling sprouts and levels the lot in one apocalyptic night. I start editing my father's science fiction book (one of my last promises to him) and find myself wandering (in my feverish mind) the streets of 14th century Britain looking for King John's treasure. Hope there... until I start to realise that my dad did not really understand what inverted commas were for. Any commas, in fact. I pull a book off the shelf and started reading. It is by an author called Colin Bateman. The first page produces two chuckles, so lots of hope there. Then, at page 5, hope begins to drain away - the book is about a failed author trying to hawk his books... unsuccessfully. Sigh. So, I open my door at 9 on Thursday evening and started clapping, only to realise I have missed the moment by an hour. My sad claps echo up and down an empty street. A neighbour, 3 down, laughs. I close the door and head upstairs to my one place of guaranteed hope. Always my last resort through the years when things get tough.

I rustle around in a cupboard and pull out my bear. I'm not ashamed to say that I give him a hug and then place him in pride of place in one of my front room windows. And there he is now, looking out on a sad world and radiating a tiny beam of hope on any small child that happens to be passing... and counting bears or rainbows.