Today the Cundill Family are musing on...

​​They say your greatest strength is always your greatest weakness also: in my case this is a stubborn refusal to follow the crowd. Having disdainfully eschewed the panic-buying of toilet paper, the Cundill household began to run dangerously short of this commodity in the first week of lock-down.

​Our loo-roll stocks were becoming so dangerously low that the cat had temporarily suspended her usual habit of following me into the bathroom,
 
I feel we’ve all learned a little from this. In true “home-school” spirit, my kids, Peter (6) and Andrew (5) have been learning some maths: ONE sheet for ONE thing and TWO sheets for… well, enough said on that score. By contrast, my husband, Alan, has been learning psychology: his wife is an eejit who spends far too much time being judgy in the supermarket.
 
Myself? Well, mainly I’ve learnt that old friends are worth their weight in gold. It was friends from university days, now living in Aberdeen, who discerned our hour of need. They made an emergency ration available, which tided us over until last week when, to my joy, I found the shops had been restocked. If people weren’t social distancing from me in Aldi BEFORE I did my little celebratory dance in aisle 3, they certainly were AFTER.
 
I guess the old adage is true: make new friends but KEEP THE OLD! Because it’s not just the loo-roll that’s stronger and longer. 

First-world problems aside, the Cundill family are surviving lock-down tolerably well. Somewhat surprisingly the Tooth Fairy proved to be exempt from Social-Distancing rules: One presumes she wore appropriate PPE, since she visits a lot of houses and messes with people’s mouths, yet nobody here has shown any symptoms of the virus (as yet). Peter’s other top-tooth is precariously wobbly as well, so we may have to risk her visiting again before the lock-down ends. 

​The good weather has made it socially acceptable for me to chuck the boys out into the garden for most of the day, thank goodness! They are certainly keen enough to get away from me after our obligatory hour-a-day spent pouring over the latest one-syllable “CVC” (consonant-vowel-consonant) adventures of Biff, Chip and Kipper. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you simply haven’t lived!)

​I’m fortunate that both boys are still “Early Stages” for their learning, so none of the schoolwork is too onerous. (Torturous, oh yes, but not onerous.) It’s also useful that both boys are fascinated by mini-beasts and nature in general. I’m sure others have noticed that there has been some sort of population-explosion of ladybirds in the past week, so we’ve done a lot of stealth-numeracy work by collecting up as many as we can find in the garden and counting/adding/subtracting the number of bugs/legs/spots and so on. There has also been a lot of baking… too much really as I am now out of flour! (Can you make scones with loo roll?)

​We did paint the requested rainbow for our window, and then added a poster on Sunday of some palms. I suspect there will be a new offering for Easter Day, so feel free to take in the sights of Willow Tree Way on your daily constitutional. If you catch the right time of day, you may well find two small boys on the front lawn amassing ladybirds. 

​With best wishes to all,
Henna.