Back to blogging

It's 10:30 on a Sunday morning. The sun is shining and the sky is blue with a high of 21 degrees expected later today. This can mean only one thing: a high pollen count. Earlier, I vacillated between opening the windows to let in a breeze and keeping them sealed shut to keep out the pollen before ultimately deciding that fresh air was much more important. I've taken a Clarityn tablet as a countermeasure.

I left the house for the first time in a week yesterday, and for the first time in months, I deviated from my usual home-Waitrose-home trajectory as we ran errands for a friend of N's who is vulnerable to coronavirus-related complications and is properly self-isolating.

It was a sunny day and there were a lot of people out and about. Long lines snaked outside Kobo on Upper Street -- a tiny sliver of a cafe where we sometimes get takeaway coffees -- as well as outside the hipster butcher on St John's Street. There was no sense of crisis, just people engaged in a new normal.

We walked down Roseberry Avenue and turned onto Farringdon Road where we passed Betsy Trotwood, a pub I seemingly only frequent around this time every year. I would have liked to have stopped for a pint on the way home but, as with everywhere else, it was closed.

We picked up medication from Boots and some supplies from Sainsbury's and dropped them off at E's. Errands finished, we came home, read our books, and cooked a delicious supper of foil-baked salmon with gochujang.

Things I'm grateful for: leaving the house and walking in the warm spring sunshine, the opportunity to be useful to someone else through errand-running, N trimming my fringe so I no longer have errant strands of hair poking my eyeballs, being able to wear a face mask outside without feeling self-conscious. I had bought a pack of surgical masks last year while I was in the throes of a hay fever attack and desperate to prevent any traces of pollen from entering my nasal passages but always felt too self-conscious to wear them outside. Now, it seems perfectly acceptable to do so. Between self-isolating and mask-wearing, maybe I won't have a miserable, hay fever-ridden spring for once.