(Sunday, 5 April 2020)
One thing that occurred to me recently is just how quickly I have become ‘institutionalised’. Notwithstanding the couple of days of plot loss, I have become aware that our days have just started to feel normal and have largely acquired something of a comforting pattern.
I haven’t left the house since around day 3 or 4 (Hofer plant day mission) and Mark last left the house 10 days ago to do shopping. Other than a couple of dog walks during which we have either seen minimal, or no people, we haven’t actually experienced anything approaching ‘normal’ life in weeks. Today, of course, marks the completion of Week 3 of lockdown. Our days have taken on a new routine, different jobs, different activities etc but a sort of calm, quiet new routine nonetheless.
Under more normal circumstances, our days start with a frenzy of activity. Mark leaps out of bed at 6.30 every morning, into the shower and is down making the guests’ breakfast in 15 minutes. How he does that is beyond me, but we’ve already talked about that so best not go there again.. suffice to say on the days that I do breakfast, my day starts at 5.30! 🙄 😬
I generally stay out of his way until he has finished his ablutions and give the furious activity going on in the kitchen a wide berth, doing whatever routine admin I can on my ipad perhaps a bit of cleaning or tidying upstairs and come down with the dogs around an hour later. More PC based admin usually follows with the odd popping in to say hello to the guests in the breakfast room.
After breakfast service, there is the clearing away, chatting to guests and helping them with planning their day etc and then usually time for a quick coffee before any check outs. Once the guests have checked out or gone out for the day, rooms are serviced or changed over and the laundry cycle started. We usually try to get all this finished by midday… sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Then we sit down and eat breakfast ourselves. Technically, it’s lunch by then, but we still call it breakfast.
If we’re really lucky, the incoming guests of the day do us the favour of abiding by our check in opening time of 14.00hrs and we actually get to enjoy the only 2 hours of the day that we are supposed to be able to call our own. 🤞 You’d be surprised how often they don’t… ‘oh, we just wanted to drop off our luggage’…. ‘oh, your times don’t fit in with our plans for the day’… ‘oh it took us less time to get here than we thought’… ‘we just thought we’d see if you’d let us in early’…. yeah, thanks for that. 😤 😢 🙄
We actually had some turn up at 9.15am once and thought we were most unreasonable not to grant them entry. Perhaps they expected us to evict the current guests who were still occupying the room and were in the middle of their own breakfast. Honestly, you do wonder what goes through their minds! 🙄 😝
You can see how the novelty of not having to do that, but instead be able to get up in good time (I’m still largely waking around 6.30 give or take) and have all those extra hours in the day has quite a calming and peaceful effect on our days. It’s no wonder we are getting quite a lot done.. we have around 6 extra hours a day at the moment! 😂
Yesterday’s extra 6 hours were spent with Mark continuing with ‘Project French Drain’ and me doing some cleaning, sorting and sticking up a bit of willow type privacy fencing stuff.. mainly to make it look a little nicer and less see through so the dogs aren’t quite so excited by the appearance of next door’s grandchildren when they play hide and seek! 😉 😆
The day ended with an aperitif in the sunshine, followed by a nice relaxing sit in the garden. Even after the sun set, the evening was around 18 degrees… courtesy of the foehn wind that was blowing. It was all rather pleasant, with shades of summer evenings.
Stay safe everyone xx
