So the day starts as follows. Awake around 6.30am, that’s when Clair’s alarm goes off. Pip the dog, by this time, has managed to quietly get on the bed during the dead of night and starts to stir, wanting her walk. I manage to fight her demands off until about 7am.

With the new rules, I have got a new route. Instead of walking her on the streets through housing estates, I take her across fields, nickname for those fields are ‘cow pat’, titled as such, because during the summer those fields are occupied by cows, who leave humongous cow pats. Obvious I know! After the fields I have to cross the main road, which actually still seems very very busy and then we go down a dirt track towards the water tower. Not really a tower as such, it’s just where the water company has their pumping station. It is on a slight hill, which means we both, Pip and me, have to exercise to get up the hill. I have to say she manages much better than me. We then walk a tiny bit further on to a bit of farm field, which is like a dead-end. We turn around, retrace our steps down the track, but have to walk on the pavement alongside the main road and then back through a housing estate, back to our house.

In the last couple of days we noticed, Pip and I, because she has this nose that can smell and detect anything, that the farmer left huge mounds of manure. He’s obviously getting ready to plow the field and sow something. Over the years we have walked there before and it’s about time that he’s sowing something because the fields have been resting for at least 3 — 4 years I think.

Then back and breakfast for us both.

I had another very long call with my Taiko drumming teacher, testing the Zoom set-up across his laptop and iPad, to evaluate sound quality for remote teaching. We were reasonably happy that this worked, but the unknown is whether the participants with their individual technology set-up and practice drumming equipment will be able to follow the teaching and then relay their understanding to the teacher. Tomorrow we will test what the result of that will be with another drummer.

In the evening we heard about the support for the self-employed in the UK and very disappointed to hear that they are offering 80% of their profits over the past 3 years. Now I know and you know that self-employed folks will try to minimise their profits each year so they can limit their corporation tax bill. This is a well known fact and therefore the UK Government are trying to get away with having to support very few self-employed at the end of the day.

My situation is even worse. Sure I am so-called self-employed but my company is actually a Limited company, however I do not fit into any of the announced support packages and therefore I am not eligible for any support whatsoever. Okay I can defer tax payments, but that will be virtually nothing, seeing as business has dried up!

Hey ho, so be it. This too will pass…

[embed]https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-on-coronavirus-25-march-2020[/embed]

Michael de Groot