Coronavirus – Resetting our lives after COVID-19

Coronavirus – Resetting our lives after COVID-19.

Coronavirus has really put everyone on planet Earth in a spin.  We are being told to stay inside, buy only what we need from the supermarkets, cancel travel plans, stay away from friends and generally live in a completely different way than we already do.  But here are a few thoughts I would like to share with you.

Everywhere people are running around like tornados or chicken without heads.  No one has time to cook food from scratch relying instead on takeaways and processed foods. Children spend less and less time playing outside with friends choosing to play on their tablets and phones and squabbling with their siblings.  Parents are under stress to give them all of the toys and games they want, to provide them with constant snacking and grazing after school and on weekends and find it hard to say ‘no’ them on anything.  Well, this was so 2019!!

This year, 2020, has brought a new way of life, a new way to look at our lives. We now have time to take stock and slow down.  An invisible enemy known as COVID-19 took over our lives at the beginning of the year and has forced everyone deep inside their own homes coming out only for food and essentials.

We have been told this action could last many months and with no end currently in sight possibly even longer. So what do we do now?  Apart from the initial inconvenience I have started to tackle projects in the house and the garden that I have been too busy to do before.  Moving a compost heap or putting up brackets to hold hanging baskets full of tumbling mini tomatoes, sorting out clothes that are either too small or worn out and putting them aside for the charity shops when they open again.

Fortunately we are still (at the time of writing) allowed to attend our allotments.  This announcement was such a great relief as the allotments are private, places of solitude and somewhere to get our daily exercise and fresh air.  Mr R has done an enormous amount of groundwork at our allotment, busy getting things ready for the eventual planting when the weather warms up.  This should be about the middle of May and I fear we may still be in lockdown so it will be vital to still be visiting the allotment on a regular basis.

What should we learn from COVID-19?

Here is my list of lessons we should learn as a nation and as a human:-

Slow down and as the saying goes – smell the flowers.  Learn to appreciate beautiful things that we rarely see when we rush past.  How often have you seen something and asked “how long has that been there?” only to find out it has been there for ages you were just in too much of a rush to notice it.

Stop having to have food out of season.  We are currently treated to every fruit and vegetable available from around the world all year long however this is currently costing us much more than they are worth in terms of global warming.  I remember when my children were little. Satsumas came out just before Christmas, they were delicious and sweet and a real treat, even ending up in Christmas stockings.  Now you can get them all year and they don’t have that special status and they are certainly not as sweet!

We are running out of vital medicines and amongst the list is the basic painkiller.  Paracetamol and Ibuprofen are both produced in large quantities in China. As China has had an extended lockdown we are running short of this basic medicine.  We need to produce this and others here in the UK again.

Britain was once a nation of engineers and manufacturers.  Present day we have lost most of our manufacturing because there are places in the world that can make things cheaper.  However a crisis like Coronavirus, where there are supply problems, leads us to the conclusion that we should manufacture more here in the United Kingdom as we used to.

It seems to me that the appliances and gadgets we buy which are made abroad don’t last as long as they used to. The culture is to just throw it away and buy a new one. Most of the time it is cheaper to get a new one instead of paying to have the old one mended.

Children want to have the latest toy or video/X-Box/Nintendo Switch game.  They are glued to their tablets and the television or computer screen often at the expense of going outside in the fresh air.  Hopefully this crisis will encourage children out into their gardens. Once restrictions are lifted they can go back into their local parks and leisure opportunities to re-connect with their friends. Children can then play simple games with their imagination to make dens and bike runs.

We could all grow some of our own food.  Even a small balcony can accommodate a pot with tomatoes or runner beans and those without any outside facilities can grow fresh herbs on an indoor windowsill.  If there is the opportunity of a bit of outside space there are many vegetables which will grow well in large pots and troughs.  Growing our own food cuts down our individual carbon footprint significantly. I am fortunate to have an allotment where Mr R and I grow most of our vegetables during the UK growing season.  We more often than not have loads more than we can eat or turn into chutney or jam so we love to share with our friends and neighbours. Rhubarb chutney is on my ‘to-do’ list!

A lot of all the food consumed in the UK comes from overseas with a large percentage of that coming from the EU. As long as borders are closed we are limited to what food we can get now. Deliveries are slowly coming only out of some of the EU countries at the moment!

Here at Kitchen Talk and Travels HQ we are cooking smaller amounts and putting less on our plates, making the fresh food we have go further and make more meals.

So let’s all start growing, preserving, fermenting, curing, and baking what we can and cut down on our reliance on imported foods.

These are just some of my thought on the current situation.  Please leave a comment on how the Coronavirus has impacted you, your family and your life and any comments on the thoughts above.

Stay Safe!

UPDATES:

{UPDATE}:

Four months after the initial shock of lockdown people are gradually getting out again, meeting friends and family, having a drink at the local pub but what have we learned so far?

• We must not take our family and friends for granted as we have learned how tentative life can be – hug your people while you can.
• How easily we can adapt to different circumstances and ways of life – we are now wary of large gatherings and suspicious of strangers when they get too close to us.
• Learning new skills like cooking from scratch and baking bread involving the whole family in the kitchen.
• We have added words and phrases to our vocabulary like social distancing, covid compliant, air bridge and bubble.

{UPDATE 2}:

We are now at one year since the whole lockdown started. The lockdown was forced on us since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown 1 started on 23 March 2020 and today 23 March 2021 we are still in a total lockdown with easements happening slowly in small steps to ensure we get it right this time and do not have to continue to stay home any longer than necessary. We have started a huge vaccination effort which is making a huge impact to our daily lives however COVID-19 will be here with us for some time. We are not able to predict when we will get back to ‘normal’ or if we will ever get back to the ‘normal’ that we knew. 

COVID-19 is here to stay so we must all continue to do our part to stop it spreading.

How have you been affected by this pandemic?

Please leave a comment below to tell me how you have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

All thoughts and opinions in this post are my own.  I was not paid to write this post.