Driving Experience

I’ve been driving for years. It was my way of commuting for a very long time, but the biggest thing I’d ever driven was an estate car.

Five years ago my husband and I brought a campervan. When I say we bought it, he bought it. While we had had a Volkwagon camper when we were first married, that was really a day van. This time around, we wanted something bigger. After checking out a lot a different van configurations, we worked out what we wanted. That came down to a fixed double bed, a table for me to work at, and a bathroom for when hubby gets back for playing outside and needs a shower. That meant a big van. Not silly big, but 6 meters long. Here it is.

Though I can legally drive this van in the five years, I’ve only ever dared to do two short drives around Pembury Park, and one drive from pitch to exit point in a campsite in Keswick. I’ve wanted to drive more, but the sheer size of the bus makes that a cary prospect and I’ve never before driven on public roads.

Today I did!

Hubby drove us up to Llangors Lake in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), which meant that I got a good view of the roads. Between there and home, we had motorway (about a mile of), good A-roads, reasonable A-roads, and some B-roads that narrowed in places. Basically, everything but twisty country lanes. The terrain included residential roads and mountain roads. So I surprised my hubby by saying that I wanted to drive home, but he’d have to do the reversing onto the drive. Mostly this last is because we live on a shared drive and I didn’t want to risk other people’s cars because I know in our car that that reverse onto the drive can be tricky even in a smaller vehicle.

So I did it, I drove home. All the way. I’m proud of that. I’ve never driven anything that size before, and I did well. I even did the reverse.

The funniest thing about the reverse was that my hubby said, don’t worry about the reverse, you’ll never do it in one. I did it in one. He wasn’t amused, impressed yes, but annoyed that I did it first time when he’s rarely able to do so.

Absence Explained

Sorry that I’ve not been around much lately, but I caught Covid while I was on holiday. I got so bad my husband had to bring me home early, so we missed 5 days away.

It was just as well though, because we were in the campervan, which only he can drive and the day after we got home, he succumbed to Covid too. I’ve heard some people say that Covid is just a bad cold. It is not.

I’ve had proper influenza before. You know the kind where you literally can’t get out of bed, can’t eat, sweat even when you’re cold and basically become delirious. Covid was closer to that. After eight days, I started testing negative, but I’m now 19 days in, and not feeling a whole heap better.

While I am improving, I’m still struggling, particularly to breathe. My chest is so tight. I do something for a few minutes and then I’ve got to rest for an hour. I’ve never been so exhausted, and I’ve worked full time while having two kids under 5 and doing a part-time degree.

The worse however, is the Covid Brain Fog. This is a real thing. I can’t concentrate for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I can’t hold a thought for long either. As someone who writes for a living this is a major issue. It’s also why I haven’t been blogging or doing much on social media, I just can’t keep up. Then there’s reading, well, there’s the not reading. I’m doing a blog tour due up on the 10th, so I have had to power through and read the the book, write the review etc, but it all took a lot longer than it should have.

As I said, I’m getting better, just not there yet. But what this does mean, is that when I get back to blogging, I’ll be blogging about our trip and visiting various cities and attending Bloody Scotland, even if I will be several weeks late for it all. Just wanted to let you know.

Staying Home

Today I should have woken up on the Wirral. We had a long weekend away planned, but for obvious reasons, it was cancelled.  Work however is – rightly – asking that we all take whatever time off booked otherwise there’ll be a rush to cram holidays in at the end of the year which would be unmanageable from a business perspective.

We were going to take the campervan for a couple of nights away in the ‘luxury’ of a campsite. Oh, how glamourous the lifestyle of the depressive writer, huh?

Okay, it wasn’t a hut in the Bahamas with a private beach, so it’s not a longed for dream holiday.  Though I have to say if we’re talking dream holidays, Bahamas doesn’t do it for me. I’d go Scandi to look for the Aurora, seeing the Northern Lights is on my bucket list, one of the few things that I am really keen to see before I die.

So, I don’t have the most expensive tastes in, well, anything. I love amethysts, but don’t like diamonds. I love white wine, but you can keep the Champaign. I do insist on solid gold jewellery, but that’s because silver against my skin looks really odd.

My point in this is that my husband and I are missing out on a holiday we’ve been looking forward to. So, I understand why people are upset by not being able to go on holiday. But hearing people wailing because they want to go to Ibiza or wherever they’re supposed to go, when that could mean spreading or contracting a deadly virus, annoys the hell out of me.  Yes, it’s horrible missing out, but surely it’s better not to invite death to your door?

My word count’s running out, so my rant ends here.

Getting Out

After seven days pretty much staying in the house, not wanting to go out, but occasionally having to: food shopping, craft shopping, doctors. I got out today. We’ve had this weekend booked for camping in the Forest of Dean for ages. It’s not tent camping, though we’ve done that many times. We’re in the campervan. Yes, okay so we’re a bit middle class (or more likely upper working class) and we have a campervan.

I’m saying “we” not “I” because I’m with my husband.

To be fair, he offered to stay at home if I wasn’t up to it.  And I wasn’t sure I was. But sitting on the couch in the house doing nothing is not helping me. So, we came away.

It is nice to be somewhere else, a different view out the window. Though as I write this it’s 18:46, and it’s pitch black outside, so no view at all.  I’m also totally without internet connection, so it this gets out today, that means we went up to the campsite’s bar to get onto their WiFi.

We went up for lunch, and there were too many people, I felt quite uncomfortable. When I say there were too many people, I should specify that the place was more like 25% full, but when you’re struggling to cope with your own company, that’s a crowd.

My thing for today, that I haven’t done in ages, was read a physical book. I’ve been all audiobooks of late, but I need to get out of my own head and read something.  The book I picked was “we are never meeting in real life” by Samantha Irby. Have read only one chapter, but it’s made me smile and I need more of that.

General feeling today: unsteady, tears just too close at times.