疫情期间的家居生活

Read stories of how members of our team are faring during lockdown in our Notes from Home series. Here, Appraisals Specialist Georgia Grunfeld takes stock of the time spent at home so far, which for her have been spent discovering new walks, brushing up on cooking skills and attempts at lockdown

DIY.

It is difficult to write about my experience of the lockdown for fear of seeming glib, flippant or reductive. For many people this has been, or will be, an unimaginably hard time. For most, even making the adjustment to life at home has been tough, particularly as there is no clear finish line yet, and even when one does appear, we are not sure what the world might look and feel like once we emerge.

For the time being, though, I am really enjoying the gift of time that we have been given. Without our daily commutes swallowing hours each week, and the possibility of spending time in pubs and restaurants after work and over the weekends taken away, I’ve appreciated these new hours to play with.

Here are my notes from home; a list of things that have given me a lot of joy over the last few weeks:I recently moved into my partner’s flat in Archway. It is on the first floor of a converted Victorian house, with an open-plan kitchen, dining and living area at the front of the building, with two large sash windows that flood the room in morning light.

Living with one’s partner for the first time is already a nerve-wracking transition to make and this was certainly heightened by the prospect that we would be each other’s only company for the next few weeks… that our home would suddenly become our office, a yoga studio, a place for all our meals, a place to relax, to read, to watch films, to daydream, to procrastinate and to socialise in (online, of course). Trying to carve out a new routine was challenging, to learn how to work from home and most importantly how to separate the working day from our evenings took trial and error, but we are beginning to find some rhythm in the madness.

Last weekend we painted the kitchen. It was a job that we had been meaning to do for months. We ordered the Little Greene primer and paint, cleaned the doors, removed the handles, polyfilla’d the holes that were left, sanded them down and then painted non-stop until the middle of Sunday night. On Monday morning we woke to find ourselves living in a flat that felt lighter, brighter, airier and cleaner. It is a real pleasure working from here now, and we feel inspired to make a few more gentle improvements.

Whilst we were waiting for the paint to dry in between coats, we went for a meander through the streets just north of our flat. We walked past some handsome Victorian and Edwardian redbrick houses, their living rooms filled with plants, and some with studios and greenhouses tacked onto the ends of terraces. They were filled with people working and reading by windows or smoking on small precarious balconies. At the end of one of the streets we found ourselves at an entrance to the Parkland Walk – an old, disused, railway track that now forms a pedestrian route from Highgate all the way to Finsbury Park. At that point, excited that we had discovered something new, we realised that we never go on walks in London, just for the sake of it; we always have a destination in mind. We verbally tacked this onto the end of our newly forming list of things that we have enjoyed during lockdown and vowed to continue exploring when life goes back to normal.

Our windowsill has become our garden, our balcony, the place we clap from on Thursdays, the place that we sun ourselves at until the light disappears behind the terrace in the afternoon, and a perch from where we watch the world go by. We now know what our neighbours look like (not such a common thing in London), we have waved at many bus drivers and have had conversations with family and friends from it. Last week a man shouted “I bet you wish you had a swimming pool up there”, whilst others have warned us not to fall off.

I feel as though people should start noting down the things that they see from their homes. A friend of mine recently posted some photographs that he had taken from his kitchen of his neighbours sitting on their front steps and talking, with a caption that read ‘I seem to have woken up in the 1940s’. We have also noticed a newfound sense of community. Last week we spent half an hour with other Archway residents trying to rescue a cat from a tree, and it has become rare to be able to sit on our ‘balcony’ without striking up a conversation with a passer-by. I recently, and quite shockingly, saw a man’s dog being attacked by another dog but a couple of days later he walked past and reassured us that both he and his dog were fine – a big relief.