From the depths of despair on Sunday to the airy heights of elation yesterday (Monday)...

Such swinging emotions are how it's going to be for the duration of this emergency, I think.

Yesterday, we successfully shopped...

Until astonishingly recently, this would not exactly have been blogworthy material. But these days, if you're able to get together a few days' supplies, without a queue, without a worrying press of people, and with a reasonable supply of goods to choose from, it is a small triumph.


And... we made arrangements for longer-term accommodation.

By the end of Misery Sunday, we had decided that the least stressful way to proceed would be to stop wondering when/if/how we could get back to Malaysia in the near future, and just ride things out here in the UK for a while. And our kind landlords have agreed that we can stay on in our Cromer apartment, with the squirrels, and the wood pigeons, and the pheasants, and the jays, at a reasonable long-term rate.

This is a massive relief, as it puts an end (for the time being at least) to the will-we won't-we that was so doing our heads in.


We also organized ourselves a UK telephone number. The theory here was that this would enable us to get onto a supermarket delivery roster (although the first attempt to do so drew a blank).

I was under no illusion by the end of yesterday that the day's state of euphoria would last long, especially as various friends are reporting somewhat worrying news. But I'm happy to take solace even from temporary sources at the moment.

The lockdown announcement by the British PM yesterday evening (summarized in this article today) doesn't change things for us much. We've been actively avoiding groups of people for more than a fortnight now, and a week ago we stopped visiting even quiet cafes. Our exercise routes keep us well away from all but a handful of dog-walkers (and from now on we'll stick to shorter circuits, to give the maximum number of people the chance of solitude, as it were).

Spring is still springing beautifully, and a couple of walks lately have taken us past interesting vestiges of the old railway line.






But the weak link is shopping, and that's what I woke early this morning worrying about. If we can't get onto a delivery roster, we're limited to what we can forage for, and lug home, ourselves. So we need -- in a socially responsible way, of course -- to do a bit more contingency planning in case one or both of us gets sick.

Someone else was taking delivery of a grocery order this morning, and I hotfooted outside to find out which supermarket it was from. I think the woman it belonged to thought I was going to intercept it...

"It's OK," I said cheerily. "Just finding out who does deliveries here. It's a bit tricky to get on a list."

"Well, we've lived here for ages," she said, pointedly.

Ouch... Second-homers have been a real problem in places like Norfolk, and I'm sure that for many people we too will fall into that pesky category. I'm not going to have the "we're here because we can't go home and can't go elsewhere" conversation with every random stranger I come across, so I guess we'll just have to take these things on the chin...

It seems, however, that there just isn't enough delivery capacity at the moment, as this second supermarket can't accommodate us either. All slots are booked for the next three weeks, and you can't book further out than that...

Just breathe...

On TV the other night, Terry Waite was asked for his tips for surviving isolation. "Don't try to control what you can't control," he said. "Just focus on one day at a time."

It felt as though he was talking right at me...