Read stories of how members of our team are faring
during lockdown in our Notes
from Home series. Here, Appraisals Specialist Georgia Grunfeld
takes stock of the time spent at home so far, which for her have been spent
discovering new walks, brushing up on cooking skills and attempts at lockdown
DIY.
Georgia Grunfeld: It is difficult to write about my experience of the lockdown for fear of seeming glib, flippant or reductive. For many people this has been, or will be, an unimaginably hard time. For most, even making the adjustment to life at home has been tough, particularly as there is no clear finish line yet, and even when one does appear, we are not sure what the world might look and feel like once we emerge.
For the time being, though, I am really enjoying the
gift of time that we have been given. Without our daily commutes swallowing hours
each week, and the possibility of spending time in pubs and restaurants after
work and over the weekends taken away, I’ve appreciated these new hours to play
with.
Here are my notes from home; a list of things that
have given me a lot of joy over the last few weeks:
I recently moved into my partner’s flat in Archway. It
is on the first floor of a converted Victorian house, with an open-plan
kitchen, dining and living area at the front of the building, with two large
sash windows that flood the room in morning light.
Living with one’s partner for the first time is
already a nerve-wracking transition to make and this was certainly heightened
by the prospect that we would be each other’s only company for the next few
weeks… that our home would suddenly become our office, a yoga studio, a place
for all our meals, a place to relax, to read, to watch films, to daydream, to procrastinate
and to socialise in (online, of course). Trying to carve out a new routine was challenging,
to learn how to work from home and most importantly how to separate the working
day from our evenings took trial and error, but we are beginning to find some
rhythm in the madness.
Last weekend we painted the kitchen. It was a job that
we had been meaning to do for months. We ordered the Little Greene primer and
paint, cleaned the doors, removed the handles, polyfilla’d the holes that were left,
sanded them down and then painted non-stop until the middle of Sunday night. On
Monday morning we woke to find ourselves living in a flat that felt lighter,
brighter, airier and cleaner. It is a real pleasure working from here now, and
we feel inspired to make a few more gentle improvements.
Whilst we were waiting for the paint to dry in between
coats, we went for a meander through the streets just north of our flat. We
walked past some handsome Victorian and Edwardian redbrick houses, their living
rooms filled with plants, and some with studios and greenhouses tacked onto the
ends of terraces. They were filled with people working and reading by windows or
smoking on small precarious balconies. At the end of one of the streets we
found ourselves at an entrance to the Parkland Walk – an old, disused, railway
track that now forms a pedestrian route from Highgate all the way to Finsbury
Park. At that point, excited that we had discovered something new, we realised
that we never go on walks in London, just for the sake of it; we always have a
destination in mind. We verbally tacked this onto the end of our newly forming
list of things that we have enjoyed during lockdown and vowed to continue exploring
when life goes back to normal.
Our windowsill has become our garden, our balcony, the
place we clap from on Thursdays, the place that we sun ourselves at until the
light disappears behind the terrace in the afternoon, and a perch from where we
watch the world go by. We now know what our neighbours look like (not such a
common thing in London), we have waved at many bus drivers and have had
conversations with family and friends from it. Last week a man shouted “I bet
you wish you had a swimming pool up there”, whilst others have warned us not to
fall off.
I feel as though people should start noting down the
things that they see from their homes. A friend of mine recently posted some
photographs that he had taken from his kitchen of his neighbours sitting on
their front steps and talking, with a caption that read ‘I seem to have woken
up in the 1940s’. We have also noticed a newfound sense of community. Last week
we spent half an hour with other Archway residents trying to rescue a cat from
a tree, and it has become rare to be able to sit on our ‘balcony’ without
striking up a conversation with a passer-by. I recently, and quite shockingly,
saw a man’s dog being attacked by another dog but a couple of days later he
walked past and reassured us that both he and his dog were fine – a big relief.
Cooking has become a real pleasure, since now we have hours in the evening to cook slowly. Flavours are allowed to deepen without the need to get dinner on the table in a rush, and the act itself has become a way to be creative and experiment. There have been some disasters, naturally, but some real triumphs too. Whilst we haven’t started soaking chickpeas overnight, or making pickles, or even planning ahead particularly, I have learned how to make good rice for the first time, and we have been playing with various recipes from various restaurants, with fresh ingredients from our organic veg boxes.
Of course we are guilty of indulging in some of the other
clichés too – we have ordered watercolour paints which remain, for the time being,
untouched; we have bought a puzzle which only my partner has attempted so far;
and I hand drew and wrote an Easter card to send to my grandmother which still remains
unsent (there will be another attempt!). I have been meaning to make my own
clothes, tidy the bedroom, clean the bathroom, plant a window box, make curtains
and take more photographs too. So, who knows how my future Notes from Home
might read…
LifestyleNotes from Home- 转载自：The Modern House
- 语言：English
- 阅读原文
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发表于 2020-8-4 07:39:54
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