Well in the strangest lottery I have ever unknowingly been entered into my name was plucked at random from my general practitioners to receive a covid 19 test. So in a weak moment of curiosity combined with the sense of doing ones civic duty I agreed to take part.

Parcel arrived & I got to grips working out what to do, the trickiest part seemingly was to master the ‘origami like’ box construction as the cardboard seemed determined not to co -operate.

Rising early on the allotted day I began the procedure that basically involved copious hand washing & poking a stick down the back of my throat & up each nostril. Twizzling it 5 times & putting in a tube to send for analysis. Box sealed & collected it was time to complete the online survey.

I’ll be honest, up until this point I felt it was a useful thing to be doing however I began to have doubts when trying to answer the questions. For example one asked if I had been out & about & own up as to whether for ‘essentials’ but visits to pubs & restaurants? Honestly the chance might have been a fine thing. Unless I had been inhabiting a different time & space continuum to that of the author of this quiz all these places have been shut many never to reopen. Equally baffling was the one asking me to whether I thought I had actually had previously contracted the condition.

I suspect that unless one had contracted the severe form requiring hospitalisation then it would be very difficult to differentiate between covid symptoms & other infections with similar symptoms with any certainty. Anyway the result was that I was negative on swab day so now I know for certain that for 24 hours I didn’t have it. As for any other day it’s back to guessing along with everyone else & wondering how this kind of testing & data collection is informing us in the longer term.

As the lockdown eases so we can expect to get out more but in reality this is still a slow process. No word from the dentists surgery yet but the makeshift tooth repair is still holding which is good but will be interesting to see what he makes of my handiwork when I finally to get the call. Maybe its the upside of having to wear a mask outside!

All this ‘me time’ as enabled me to go mining to see if there are any nuggets of creativity lurking within. So far I have drafted the lyrics to the perhaps aptly named ‘Isolation Song’ & now working on the music all the while trying to work up the courage to record it in a sort of ‘warts & all’ video. Its not the first song I wrote that is still lying around & I revisit it occasionally but to be fair the second is closer to being finished.

I have also been practicing my juggling & unicycling but perhaps its currently safe to say that I am unlikely to be running away to join a circus anytime soon.

Stay safe everyone what ever you are up to.