The Bluestocking: To the moon and back gerbil style.

[Boiledbeetle]

Previous thread of chat and general madness below

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5506124-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-spring-is-sprunging-and-mns-name-generator-can-do-one

Women: from an orderly queue at the bar or take a seat and grab a passing gerbil.

Men: turn left at the end of the road, keep walking until you find the Staunch Ally.

Bar gerbil a full fat coke please and a packet of Scampi Fries please.

My life in Lockown hardly changed. But whilst I hadn't left the house much before it I only left the house for medical appointments.

My first appointment, It was probably April, May time, at the height of the madness (had to be seen in the flesh rather than via video) at the doctors was bizarre. Most of the chairs taped off, skeleton crew of staff, no patients other than me in the building. Everyone in full PPE.

It honestly felt like I was in some sort of pandemic apocalypse film. It was the most surreal experience I've ever had. I honestly felt like I'd left my house and stepped into some parallel universe.

Crikey, that was a lot to go through when the country was losing its mind. I hope you've made a full recovery.

Gynae investigations are also very undignified. About 3 years ago I had a dodgy smear and the whole thing ended up snowballing through a series of investigations - one thing would turn out to be fine but they'd want to check something else. I felt as though I was on a conveyor belt. It was horrible, even though I turned out to be fine.

So much love, support and commiseration to anyone who had to run the full gamut. Like cake, for example, who I hope is recovering well.

The thing I found the most strange was the tiny groups of cordoned off DC in the playground. We had max 20% of the pupils in each day, and they had to play in the same groups they were taught in.

It was actually lovely when they all came back and the playground was deafening again.

Some of them, though, were very anxious, and others had gained a lot of weight.

@EdithStourton Yes thanks, I've got through all the checks OK. And yes, it's ALL undiginified. The day I realised the op was going to be 'transvaginal' was 😱, too. The MN phrase 'up the foof' was heavily used for about 3 years, until everything was over.

That's a good reminder that whatever I'm going through, it could always be worse and too often is for too many people. I find smears excruciating enough, I'd hate to go through what you did Android. Lockdown icing on an awful experience.

I was working from home but went to the lab regularly to keep things alive and it's astonishing how strange a big building like this is when it is basically empty of people. It makes all the same noises (like shaking incubators or the hum of freezers) but they sound differently when nobody is around. One day I walked down a corridor and just where there is a 90 degree bend I met someone coming the other way. We both jumped out of our skins.
I was glad when we were all back in the office/lab. I'm quite a social person really.

I was lucky enough to have excellent consultants, nurses & radiographers & a room of my own in a private hospital. It was as good as it could possibly have been. Could've done without it, though.

ETA: Hope you're doing well, Cake.

Other than the tune and rhythm she's doing really well 🤣

I was allowed to collect the post at the building where the company I worked for was based. This meant that whenever I got stir crazy, I could get in the car and drive 45 minutes up a main artery out of London and 45 minutes back. I knew when I was feeling "normal" when I started singing to the radio. Sometimes that took over an hour.

We went house hunting in 2021 during the lockdown which was weird. Walking by the river in March when it was utterly deserted. Trying to calm down DSD who was terrified we would be stopped by police on the drive there and back, even though we were exempt (and we weren't stopped). But we had had a forced lockdown and didn't go out for two months from December 2020 to February 2021 because she was medically vulnerable. She still gets Covid vaccinations.

Back from church. I'm glad to report that the traditional (though not liturgically prescribed) ritual of the sacristan totally failing to light the paschal fire with the first two lighters he tried went according to custom. With a bonus of the fire having gone out again ten minutes later when the priest needed it to light the just-blessed candle. But nobody set anyone else on fire or dropped any of the holy water.

This is so interesting. I've been a Christian for years but I don't have any experience of these things!

I've always seen the Easter fire lit first thing Easter morning. Although, as you say Deano it often defies all attempts!

I shan't be going to sunrise service tomorrow: its at 6.45am up on Dartmoor. Bit early for me.

Large Baileys please gerbils and a hot cross bun (I haven't had any irl yet).

Storm Dave* (?!) has decided to pay us a visit. It's a bit noisy but nothing like as bad as expected further north. I hope those in its path in Scotland are OK.

*Whose idea was it to call a storm Dave? 🙄

Dave was a bit rumbunctious earlier, and evidently 18.000 homes and businesses have lost power, but it seems to have calmed down now.

I think that I've blocked out a lot of lockdown, but I get some of it coming back in flashes.

My SIL had her hysterectomy for endometrial cancer postponed by the hospital and finished up losing a section of colon as well - not because of a spread, but because another condition had caused the uterus to adhere to it.

Her brother would have come up for DH's funeral, but I told him to stay where he was - he was her support system and was also caring for his wife who had had a stroke.

DH's kids decided not to come up - for medical reasons, I was told - and his daughter didn't want her adult child to come up for it. I understand why, but I don't think I'll ever get over that.

A few months later, I had a weird lump on my finger removed. It turned out to be benign, fortunately. Then I had the same symptoms as my SIL, but it turned out that I was okay.

I did a bit of supply teaching eventually and the school was still not back to normal. I can't remember the timeline properly - my memory of that time is so vague - but I recall that many people at work were still masked up and the various departments were all still segregating themselves.

The funniest bit for me was when the school was so short-staffed that the region's pedagogical experts were unwillingly drafted in to cover...One woman looked at my timetable and said "Oh. I refused to cover that class!"

Pedagogical experts indeed!

That sounds awful WAW. I'm so sorry.

Just reading through the accounts of lockdown, I realise that my experience was really quite benign. I wasn't able to see my family for four months as I lived further away then and various members were shielding, but I was living in a small village with a very strong community. I was heavily involved in voluntary work helping to run a small community shop and although we weren't able to open fully, we did run a delivery service, which was not only beneficial for the villagers, but enabled us volunteers to get out and about each day for more than the one hour allowed purely for exercise and to have some social contact, albeit at a distance. I am convinced that having that opportunity kept me on an even keel and my sympathies go to those who were more isolated and whose mental health is still affected.

Ours is at 7.30, so not really sunrise...

Ours is at 10.30 so definitely not sunrise 🤣

Mine was pretty benign too. I was renting a studio flat & worked from home, bubbled with a couple of friends, went for early morning walks on the local heath & finished saving up the deposit for buying my own place.

Before lockdown everyone in my office had desktops & it was taken for granted that we went in 5 days a week. By the end of it we had laptops & WFH had become the norm. Otherwise I couldn’t have started fostering cats once I’d bought my flat & I’d never have met Kitty.

It was very much about the timing though. A year earlier & I’d have been lodging in a small bedroom with limited facilities & terrible WiFi. Six years earlier & I’d still have been living with my ex.

WAW, that must have been horrendous.

I was so lucky to live in a place where I would see people I knew just by chance out and about, and we could stand the prescribed distance apart and have a conversation. At one point a small group of us gathered and then someone observed that technically there were so many of us that we were breaking the law.

Thank you.

@AuntieMsDamsonCrumble @EmpressaurusKitty

DH's ex basically broke the law until singles were given permission to move in together. All through, she and her boyfriend spent half a week in each other's house. No one bothered them about it, though I was faintly amused when I heard that her boyfriend's adult daughters moved back in with him. I got the impression that she wasn't too happy - both young women had separated from their husbands during lockdown, so it was logical that they'd have moved to their dad's.

One of my cousins had a daughter who was working abroad when Covid hit, but she managed to get home to her parents in the UK before we locked down.

DH's granddaughter actually moved to an EU country whilst both countries were in lockdown, in order to do her term abroad and then moved back with her mum for Christmas. She opted not to go back abroad and finished the year back at uni, in a bubble with her housemates from the year before.

DH's death at home was treated as unexplained by the police because it had happened during the night and they couldn't speak to the local surgery to confirm that he was 'under the care of a doctor'. [Similar had happened to a neighbour a few years earlier, so I wasn't surprised when that happened, although the way it was done was pretty awful.]

It was several hours, about 6 in the morning, before DH was taken away and I recall being a bit baffled when the police asked if they could take me anywhere.

I phoned round people later that day to inform them and one friend offered to let me stay the night, provided I left "early in the morning before the neighbours see".... I declined.

The whole thing was quite bizarre when I think of it, in terms of how isolation rules were applied.

Right! Which gerbil do I need to speak to get a cocktail? What was that one that we use to drink in the '70s and '80s? A [Something] sunset? There was orange juice, grenadine....Can't remember what the booze was. Tequila, maybe?

Sunrise! Not 'Sunset'! I think...