Lockdown life seems now to have begun to put strain on even the most resilient of folk myself included. Cravings for putting on nice clothes & eating out seem to be gripping even the biggest homebody amongst us.

Given my penchant for road trips when hubby mentioned he needed a drain cover I leaped at the chance to drive out to get it. My daughter thought it would be fun to come along for the ride & so we found ourselves whizzing along the motorway singing our favourite tunes at loud volume. Even the torrential rain didn’t dampen our spirits & as we neared our destination we spied a drive through Starbucks that was actually open.

You may recall from a blog or two ago my experiences at builders merchants haven’t always been positive but in comparison this place oozed with enlightenment. Weaving around performing a sort of strange socially distanced dance around trying avoid poking an eye out on a protruding pipe or come within ‘spitting distance’ of one another in order to place a heavy metal grating securely inside my car was bordering on comical. Left me wondering if I should have filmed it for Tik Tok?

Feeling buoyed up we retraced our steps & drove to the Starbucks to join the queue, excitement building as we crept towards the board displaying all the delights on offer. Ordering & eating out alone in Fort Lauderdale pre lockdown hadn’t felt difficult yet as I feebly tried to enunciate my order clearly to a speaker on a stick in a Swindon carpark it felt I was participating in some terrible ordeal.

Having recently broken a front tooth I was grateful for the degree of anonymity of remote ordering. Under Lockdown rules unless you are in imminent danger of exsanguination or asphyxiation all appointments are off.

Home application of a precarious dental patch in place I reeled off the order for a tooth friendly non toasted cheese toastie & included several abortive attempts to pronounce my daughters choice of beverage correctly. I imagined the servers eyeballs rolling in her sockets at my oratory failings but quicker than you can say ‘ruby flamingo frappuccino’ our meal in a bag was ready.

Paid & parked we sat in the carpark tucking into the goodies watching the queue ebb & flow in front of us. Feeling almost high with the fact we had ‘eaten out’ & my tooth was still in tact we drove on to complete the mission to deliver a dozen eggs & potted herbs to my son & his partner.

As I write & despite careful eating I am on my second go at DIY dentistry with no real idea of when a professional one will be possible. I consider myself fortunate that as a former nurse who keeps a comprehensive first aid kit I actually had some of the repair product recommended by the dentist.

However the repair was not straight forward and way off what the product is properly intended to do. It certainly wasn’t to be found in any You Tube videos on home dentistry I came across (who knew this was such a thing) & was in a position to order more of the stuff in case of further need. In light of this discovery I regret missing the opportunity of making a potentially viral video involving the use of icing tools doubling up as dental probes.

All joking aside this has planted the niggling notion that there may be a great number of others less able being left to cope with simple yet troublesome medical issues that left will be much harder to fix.

So I bid you all adieu & say safe.