I’ve been writing this diary for over a month now and I’m conscious I’ve largely spoken of my feelings and my reaction to news and events but not gone into great detail about what my day consists of. So here goes:

I was awake aound 5.30 this morning and was onto Twitter and Facebook before writing up yesterday’s entry on my iPhone. Writing this takes up a fair bit of time so I didn’t get up till after 7am. I wasn’t writing for all that time, however, I did grab the odd bit of shut eye. So I got up, grabbed myself some cereal and a cup of tea, tarted up what I’d written, copied it to my personal blog and put links in my Facebook timeline and one of my pages.

I then got on to working on a client’s website (that I built) for whom I also do customer support. I was working on improving the website’s visibility on Google, hoping to drive more traffic to it. We had an online meeting at 9am with the website being the main talking point. Afterwards I carried on with what I was doing which took me through to late afternoon. A Zoom meeting was scheduled for 6pm where our Big Local group would be discussing our role in the Coronavirus crisis hitting our town.

Big Local groups were set up by a charity called Local Trust which gets its money directly from the National Lottery. Our area was chosen to receive £1 million and our group was created to deliver that to community groups and businesses in the area. I was voted in as chair person 15 months ago even though I didn’t put my name forward (you had to opt out rather than in). I had never done anything like this and never saw myself as a chair yet the very first meeting I chaired I managed to introduce new etiquette into the meetings. 2019 was a tumultuous year with deep divisions in the partnership nearly breaking it apart. I managed to steer it through those trouble waters with the help of colleagues and we came out stronger for it.

At around 2pm I had a conversation with our community development worker ahead of the meeting before getting back to the website. I completed that work by 5pm and played my guitar until the meeting. The meeting went very well and we have some exciting stuff coming up — I’m looking forward to being instrumental in helping the community at this difficult time. At 7.30 we closed the meeting, I made myself a cup of tea, listened to Stafford Live and did the clapping thing at 8pm, after which I put the bin collection out and took my daily exercise.

Stafford Live is one of these online open mics. Stafford is where I come from so I did a gig last weekend and enjoyed it. The guy who played tonight said he had some songs on Spotify so I looked him up. That got me to remembering I have some songs on Spotify so I looked myself up and played the album. I never pushed it at the time because I wasn’t sure how good it was after some luke warm reviews. But its actually pretty decent. There goes another opportunity I missed.

That’s not a typical day because I don’t have typical days. But none of it was unusual. So I’ve made myself another cup of tea and am finishing this off before retiring to my bed chamber. I did dabble in social media throughout the day but not to any great extent. I have no morals to pass on and won’t clutter this with external news, I’ll just bid you goodnight and stay safe. I just need an image to finish this off — and a title.