The sun is shining outside and although I really am not much of a fan of U2 at all, the Unforgettable Fire is on in the background. It is one of the best tracks any Irish band have done, although that’s because I think it’s a beautifully layered piece of work.

So, this morning I discovered the supermarket would open half an hour later than it used to on a Sunday morning, the hard way, by being there at the time it used to open. The one growth job lately is crowd management security in supermarkets. They have several in my supermarket, one for access to the place at all and then, someone keeps an eye on the lottery machine and the queue for the tobacco stand. The bakery is still closed but you can get most of what they have on the inside. It did not take long at all for the stocks of baguettes to go down. And the toilet paper was all gone again. I’m kind of glad I got some on Wednesday during my previous ninja raid. The food side of things was more normal; still out of a lot of cured meats, but better on the vegetable side this time. For a Sunday morning, it wasn’t bad at all. I really only went because I needed milk but I sorted out stuff so that I wouldn’t have to go again until I got to Wednesday. It’s extraordinary how we are adapting to these forced changes.

A few years ago, the Green Party in Ireland were talking about banning freezers. I thought of them this morning. I live without a freezer; I have a fridge and an ice box, and that’s it.

I’m not in the business of hoarding, but until last week, I did not cook that often. Now I don’t have a choice because canteens, sandwich bars and restaurants, they are all closed. I live on my own and I made certain decisions around the whole lifestyle thing, things like not owning a car, reducing my electricity consumption; public transport being the way to go, and reducing waste. I wasn’t doing that great on the plastic bottle and can front plus I had residual guilt about coffee capsules. The whole self-isolation/lockdown process has made a complete mess of this. Some of the food which previously came in paper bags is now coming in single use plastic. Because I’m working from home, my electricity usage is going through the roof. And because I live on my own, I have to manage the whole food thing alone while trying desperately not to waste food or water. This is hard when you’re not spreading the environmental cost across a bunch of people. Trying not to hoard. Trying to arrange things so you don’t have to go to the shops too often, and trying to live healthily in what are unhealthy conditions.

Here is where a freezer would actually help. Things can be frozen. Vegetables can be frozen. Our supply chains, toilet paper aside, are generally fine at the moment. I hope that continues; I hope the supermarkets continue to stay open. A freezer would also help reduce food wastage and it would allow someone like to me to cook for 4 people and freeze for 3 and not need to go to the supermarket quite so often.

I have personal considerations about housemoving sometime in the next 6-9 months if life gets back to some sort of normal so I’m reluctant to do stuff like buy a freezer – another reaction to Covid-19 dancing around the population – right now. But I think used correctly, a freezer is borderline essential for managing certain environmental concerns and I note that a lot of the energy wastage in the world at the moment is bitcoin mining related, and for this reason, I think the Green Party probably was wrong to suggest that freezers be banned.

No one agreed with them anyway.

One of the things that is frustrating about social media in a time of, well anything really, is how polarised people get. Leo Varadkar received a video message via twitter yesterday from a child who was asking about risks relating to the tooth fairy. I’m interested to see that his response was measured, and age appropriate for the child, and also factored in some of what the world needs – ie, that we are searching for a vaccine.

The thing is, there are a lot of people who don’t like Leo Varadkar because he is Fine Gael, he is not their tribe. Instead of seeing the humanity of that answer, there are cynical whatabouteries. I’ve never been a great fan of his party’s general right leaning towards the interests of the well off but I think at some point, we’re in the middle of the emergency; he may not be the leader you want, but he’s the leader you have, and compared to other leaders you could name, the parties in Ireland are shutting up about most of the party political nitpicking and dealing with the emergency. I mean, I am as cynical as the the next person, but sometimes, it is just not appropriate. He’s doing pretty much okay. And while you may complain about the lack of testing; you also need to bear in mind that in general, Ireland is doing better on testing than a lot of other countries, including that one where the leader refused to accept this was a serious problem until sometime lately.

And you see this played out across a lot of debates on the social media platforms. It’s not what someone does that matters, but what tribe they belong to. The world is no longer quite that simple.

For myself, yesterday I packed up all the work related electronics – I need to unpack it again shortly to photograph some screen messages – and cleared my desk so that I could make a mess of it using sewing stuff. I’ve been fascinated on pinterest by sewing machine covers. There are some stunning ones and I’ve a bundle of fat quarters here to make one for myself. As a training run though, I decided to have a go at making a tea cosy. I actually went out and bought the supplies (so more fat quarters of fabric and a pile of cotton batting, also needed for the sewing machine cover) a couple of weeks ago so I was good to go, whenever I could find the time. As I wasn’t out browsing the stationery shops, swank tea shops, the craft shop, or having coffee or lunch somewhere nice, I took the time to do it yesterday. It’s not perfect but:

This is for my parents. It’s supposed to be a caravan. The colours were chosen so that they would not get too dirty, too quickly. As always, there are good things and bad things. The door is done really nicely; the window less so. I like the colours and I’m reasonably pleased with how the bottom band fitted around the edge. Do not look at the stitching there though; it’s desperate. But a) I did better top stitching for the most part, and I learned how to do new stuff. Still afraid to try and make my own clothes. This will go to Ireland as soon as I can go with it. In the background you can see my new Samsung screen, one of my many. many pairs of scissors and a bit of my sewing machine. And I have lots of scraps left for my scraps quilt project. All told, start to finish, it took 3.5 hours. I believe this counts as “very bloody slow, how useless are you” in quilting terms.

I had notions of doing a sewing machine cover in the shape of a VW campervan (there are a few on pinterest) but I have something similar in mind. I still have a bunch of bags to finish out too, so not short of stuff to do.

If I am honest, being told to stay at home isn’t a big deal for me. I am generally somewhat solitary but use modern tools to maintain contact with the outside world. The part I struggle with, and what I find incredibly hard is the lack of distance between work and home life. If I always worked from home and had configured a home office to do that, maybe it would be easier. But work has taken over that corner of my living room that is my creative space; where I sew, where I paint, where I write and it feels all wrong. One of the reasons I find it hard as well is not just this encroachment on my life – it’s the straight up collision between finding this hard and knowing that I am lucky. I think I saw a report the other day that said 14,000 people had lost their jobs in Luxembourg when the hospitality sector was shut down last week. We deal with the immediate needs; I think when all this is over, people can go out and live differently again, we will still have problems as people adjust to this sudden huge change and back. I do a lot to try and manage the mental health side of things as well. It’s okay not to feel okay. It’s okay to be angry. Just don’t trash the place in frustration. I think that even when people are no longer dying in huge numbers daily, we will still have trauma to deal with as people come to terms with one giant “WTF was that that just happened to the world?”

I’m in Luxembourg, one of the richest countries in the world. I’m working from home for the foreseeable and glad for the right to be able to do so. The Luxembourg government ordered that all the restaurants and cafés and pretty much any non-essential businesses apart from groceries, pharmacies and banks should close. A lot of people cannot work from home and a lot of them today aren’t working at all. Not sure whether post offices are affected but I’ll try to find out. I have a Seanad vote sitting here when I find someone to sign the identity paper that came with it. It would be pretty annoying if my first time to exercise a right to vote in the Seanad got stymied by a virus.

I went out for a walk after work this evening, and after I had been to my local grocery store to get food – they were clean out of pretty much everything but they did have a reasonable selection of pizza. Hopefully tomorrow they will have some meat and a few more vegetables. They had installed their response to social distancing. They painted a yellow line on the floor, a bit like at passport control, and confused the hell out of many of their customers who did not know where they were supposed to stand. The queuing set up will take a while to get used to, I think, and I’m going to struggle because they make you stand right with the display with a whole pile of chocolate miniEggs for Easter. The temptation to just get some chocolate is Almost Too Much To Bear. The supermarket was curiously full of parents with children too. It was like being at Mass on Christmas morning with a lot of excited children’s voices.

The walk though, that was strange. There was no traffic; the odd jogger giving me 2 metres and practising their social distancing. Every ten minutes, a bus went by, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so few cars. And you could smell things. You could smell the pile of woodchip that they’ve spread somewhere near one of the schools not too far from where I live, and the wood that some workmen had thrown in a skip near the supermarket. Normally I would not notice these things, but in the quiet…it’s seems like every sense is a bit more intense.

We’re really right at the start of this experience I think. I hesitate to call it an adventure; and anyway elements of it I hate. But it’s going to have the oddest impact on the most mundane parts of my life. My electricity bill is going to completely sky rocket. I’m here all the time, and computers which were switched on maybe two or three times a month are now on at least 5 days a week. And there’s a screen. And I use so much more of my internet data allowance. And I’ll drink so much more water. All because I am here.

All day long. Mostly listening to Icelandic soft piano music in the background, except for the inevitable conference calls. Why am I using so much data again? It’s lonely. My weekend reading list filled up with “how not to go crazy while teleworking” but to be honest, the biggest issue for me was how to stop working. The odd thing reminds you. The need for bread and the fact that if you don’t get there in time they are out of bread. There might be a few rolls left if you’re lucky. If you don’t need bread, it’s possible you miss normal knock off time.

We have the tools to stay in contact; I keep a chat window open with my team and they are great. It’s not really the same as dropping down the corridor to them, but hey, we do it. And I stay in contact with a few other people who work elsewhere. We swap stories. One of my friends said that one of his joys was that he could work on a Windows machine again (heh). The world has discovered – once more – when something must happen, it will happen.

I saw a comment on twitter during the week that people should, if possible, journal what this time was like; historians in the future would value it. And to try and handwrite it as handwritten papers tend to last longer than digital records. This stunned some techbros on the thread actually. This, I don’t really see as journaling the experience of what might turn into much more of a lockdown, more a mind clearing exercise for me.

It’s hard to say what normal will be when all of this is ended. I don’t think we’re going back to how life was 3 weeks’ ago. In some ways, that might be attractive. Walkers could very easily take over the streets given how few people will be driving. It’s hard to say how many airlines will survive the complete and utter standstill in travel that is coming. It’s hard to imagine how long this is going to take. You try to predict it based on experience elsewhere but it’s not getting normal in Italy any time soon.

I like to think that maybe, there will be some recognition of the need for all of us to work together and that the ability to do this, the will to do it, will stand to us later on. That the need to refocus ourselves will cause us to take that step back and smell the sweetness in the air, from two metres away, of course.

In the meantime, we take each day as it comes.