As I do every day, I start the day with a dog walk, with the famous ‘Pip the Dog’. We had a fairly peaceful walk to the new fields and no real dog interference there, but on the way back it was a different experience.

There is an alleyway that I have to go down that connects one estate with another, after coming off the fields and a cul de sac (dead-end) road that leads to the alleyway. First there was a chap with a sausage dog and he walked quite slowly, so I had to turn around and walk backwards with Pip and make her sit down and prevent her from growling to that dog and she did SO well. Then another woman with a larger dog came out of the same road. After they cleared I thought it was safe to carry on and then a jogger with his dog appeared and he was going directly towards us, so had to back track even more and then cross the road to get away from them. Pip during all this was ever so well behaved, normally she would have lost it to see a jogging dog.

Then we walked down the alleyway, which is quite narrow and then a woman on a bike came down it, so I had to stand to the side with Pip to let her through. It was obvious that she wasn’t a cyclist, she wasn’t wearing a helmet and seeing as no bikes are allowed down the alleyway, she was either aware or oblivious!

After all that it was peaceful to carry on home, which we did.

Saturday is Clair’s day for doing house cleaning at her Mum’s who is isolating for 3 months, because of underlying health conditions, she’s 78 years old. We had done most of our normal washing yesterday and today, seeing as it was going to be warm again, I washed both of Pip’s dog beds. They dried super quick as it was so hot. Probably the hottest days we’ve had actually.

I also washed floors, the kitchen, lounge and bathroom, their hard floors all had a thorough wash with the mop and bucket!

I chatted on FaceTime to a friend Petros, who is an engineer, originally from Cyprus living and working in the U.K. it was great to catch up with him and hear how he’s getting on with being in isolation. Actually he’s doing pretty good, well done Petros!

I also produced two Taiko drumming tutorial videos that James my Taiko teacher recorded on Thursday. Both have been uploaded to YouTube and embedded into the Taiko West website. Following that. I emailed 4 students using HubSpot to give them their login details, so they can access the online tutorials. Super happy how I can use Hubspot to insert snippets with key data from their data in Hubspot. Thanks Hubspot!

After all that hard work, I sat down and watched another episode of one of my favourite series on Netflix, Ozark. I’m on their 2nd series and it has taken a very unexpected turn, fascinating!

After all that time to cook some food for when Clair gets home and catching up with the latest U.K. COVID news briefing. The very sad news is that here in the U.K. we had the largest one-day death toll, compared to any other EU country, even bigger compared to Italy, who posted some very large figures. We’ve now had around 10,000 deaths in the U.K., which is so sad for all those families and very worrying in terms of the trend. The trend is upwards and it may likely continue for a number of weeks, we may not even be at its peak.

Stay safe folks and stay home as much as you can.

Oops, I nearly forgot, look below what Clair made, a crocheted rainbow to celebrate the NHS! Well done darling, it looks amazing!

Michael de Groot