Happy Birthday x 2 - 27/03/20

Today is mine and R's birthdays. I am now 41 and today R turns 40!! Obviously Lockdown is not the best time to have a birthday and all of our plans for celebrating the big 4, 0 have gone out the window. We both had to resort to giving gifts of whatever we had lying around at home because we haven't been to the shops all week and non-essential shops are closed anyway! Luckily for R, I found a 40th birthday card that he had presumably bought for me last year but not given! I was really impressed that R, E and F all made their own cards for me, E using a collage style that I love and F recreating a character called Greg which he drew from the Draw with Rob tutorials online. Rob Biddulph is an author/illustrator and is doing tutorials for children to follow during Lockdown. Great results too; well done F!

I was obviously a bit apprehensive about today because of the association it has with my 40@Forty. However, life is so out of the ordinary at the moment, and today was so bizarre; this was the least celebratory birthday we've ever had and so any thoughts about the project quickly dissipated as I tried to focus on not feeling glum. Clearly if anyone here should be feeling down today then it's R who should have been properly partying if there were any level of normality left in this world..! We gave him a box of Quality Street and some deodorant and he only had a few cards to open that had come in the post. The children also gave him a hand-decorated paper plate each...his real present when the world gets back to normal is a Pottery Party where he and the kids get to decorate a Plate and have a glass of Fizz! Hopefully this will happen later in the year and can be something for R to look forward to. I know the children are excited about it...He is also supposed to be seeing David Gray in concert tomorrow in Birmingham with his Dad but that was postponed when it was announced that there was to be a ban on mass gatherings.

We had our daily walk to Pig Leg Lane Nature Reserve this afternoon and then sat down for some family board games which was great fun. We had our first play of a game I picked up years ago in a charity shop. The game is called 'Journey Through Europe' and the board is dated 1980 so is 40 years old like R! We also played another 80's game called 'Enchanted Forest', a family favourite that I remember from my cousins' house circa 1987! Finally we played a few quick rounds of Harry Potter 'Dobble' which brought us firmly back into the present day. It's good fun but I hardly know any of the symbols so I was pretty hopeless! Not to mention the wine I'd enjoyed, probably a few hours too early!

The real treat for today was the Indian Takeaway ordered for our birthday tea. Unfortunately we are yet to find the perfect takeaway here on the island so it is always a bit hit and miss. Today, perhaps unsurprisingly was a Miss for me...the rest of the family were happy though so it wasn't a complete disaster.

It was announced today that Boris Johnson has tested positive for Coronavirus and is self-isolating with mild symptoms.