Lessons Learned in Lock-down

A few weeks ago I shared a few thoughts about life in lock-down. At that point I’d been working from home for four weeks and living in lock-down for just under three. Now we are into our sixth week of life in lock-down and it’s all starting to feel a lot more normal and familiar. In my last post I was still reacting to what was happening, whereas now I feel a bit more able to reflect on the current situation. James and I have spent a lot of time on our daily walks discussing if and what the world will learn from this period of time and how it might adapt accordingly. But I think there’s a lot that we can take which starts with us as individuals before we start to think about what big businesses and governments might learn.

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Twelve non-fiction book recommendations for life in lock-down (or any other time…)

When I was younger, I would devour book after book after book and the vast majority would be fiction. I would never consider looking for non-fiction books to buy, asking for them as gifts or getting them out of the library. I had a few, such as my trusty encyclopedia which I would happily sit and flick through but my main interest was always reading stories. That all changed rather suddenly in my early twenties. Whilst I still very much enjoy fiction, I’ve found myself reading more non-fiction than ever before. I have a long list that I want to read and I find myself gravitating towards non-fiction new releases in bookshops.

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A few thoughts on life in lock-down

I’ve been mentally writing this post for four weeks now, for about as long as I’ve been working from home. If I had sat down and started writing it at any point before now, it probably would have been very different on each one of those days in that four weeks. As it is, this post won’t be as coherent or logically structured as some of my usual posts but will be a little more personal, focusing more on some of my thoughts and feelings. Believe me, there have been a lot of those over the last month.

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Travelling whilst fear of Coronavirus takes over

I’ve recently come back from a long weekend in Madeira and in many ways the entire trip was overshadowed by Coronavirus despite us having no issues on our trip. This post isn’t about how to travel whilst there’s a global pandemic, but is just to share some of my personal experiences in what has become a very strange time for many of us. Our trip was booked back in 2019, well before the virus had spread worldwide and it had been deemed a pandemic. It was only in the week before we flew that I imagined we might have any problems at all. Italy had closed down, more countries were closing borders and there was widespread criticism of the UK’s approach. However I knew we were travelling to somewhere with no confirmed cases, nobody I was travelling with was displaying any symptoms and there wasn’t anything at the airport (other…

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