One last quick mile for this busy week today…
…because, for weeks and weeks now, in accordance with government guidelines, Geth and I have only left the house to go running (daily exercise) or walk/run to the supermarket/pharmacy/bank (picking up household necessities and/or daily exercise). As such, we’ve never been more than two or three miles away from home, and all of our excursions have been on foot.
Not today, though, oh no. Today we were able to drive to B&Q. It was SO EXCITING!
B&Q shut all their branches at the start of lockdown, but have gradually reopened about 200 branches over the last couple of weeks. Like most households, I expect, we have found that spending all our time in the house has meant that we’ve noticed a lot of things that need doing around the house and garden, and so hardware and the like has started to fall under the banner of ‘necessities’. Furthermore, I’d not driven the car since we returned from our Inverness trip on the 11th of March, and I know cars shouldn’t be left to sit idle for too long. As such, we felt that a B&Q trip was wholly justified. I originally intended to go last Sunday, but we decided against it when we realised that everyone else in Newcastle would probably have had the same idea. It turned out to be a good thing we waited, as by the time we were ready to go this morning, our preferred (i.e. easier to get to) branch had also reopened.
It was really nice to get out for a short drive. I always sort of worry that I will forget how to do it if I don’t get in the car for a couple of months! The queue outside B&Q wasn’t too bad – around about a twenty-minute wait, which is fairly standard for big shops at the moment – and we probably added about three or four items to our shopping list while we were waiting, as Geth was people-watching to see what other shoppers were buying.
B&Q haul in full:
- Four bags of gravel for the garden (the original thing I’d planned to go for). The gravel we put down last year has moved around over the winter and exposed some of the webbing underneath, so we need to make the gravel layer a bit thicker.
- A new hard broom for sweeping up in the garden. The house did come with one, but it’s very threadbare!
- An aerial cable for the TV, as we’ve been rejigging our setup and need a longer one.
- A new interior door handle to replace the one that infuriatingly and irreversibly loosened itself the other day.
- A couple of small bayonet incandescent lightbulbs for my globe lamp. I already had some LED ones ordered from Amazon, but due to the current situation they’re not scheduled to arrive for another couple of weeks, and I’m getting fed up of that lamp not being on, so these will do nicely in the meantime.
- A pot of paint for repainting the downstairs bathroom, which is going to be a summer project. It’s the smallest room in the house, so it’s a good place to start with the repainting (one day, I will no longer have any magnolia walls. One day).
- Some Polyfilla for a bit of uneven wall in said bathroom. I already had some from years ago, but it’s probably turned to stone by now.
- A roll of masking tape to help with my abovementioned painting adventures.
It was a fairly straightforward trip (and something I wouldn’t have thought twice about pre-lockdown), but it felt like such a novelty! I really hope it won’t be another seven weeks before I get to drive somewhere again. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I’ve spent the rest of the day getting on with a few housework and admin tasks, and am now looking forward to the weekend. Longer runs and even longer videogame sessions await 🙂 I’ll be putting up a couple of review posts over the next couple of days, and will be back to tell you all about my weekend on Monday.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Revo – ‘The Land Of Radiant Flowers’
And One – ‘So Klingt Liebe’
Thought Beings – ‘Echelon’
Rebecca Black – ‘Friday’
The Lancashire Hotpots – ‘The Firewall Song’
Bee Gees – ‘First Of May’
