Self Isolation Day 2

Have already eaten one of the children, and am convinced the moon is speaking to me.

Look, it’s not so bad here. Life’s pretty much normal, except the kids are home and my wife is home. I’d forgotten how much of a racket they make. I’ve a surprisingly decent schedule of work on, so there’s obviously some wheels still turning (or, at least, those wheels have yet to grind to a halt).

Kids ended up doing a bit of school work, but it was a fairly light – just a bit of home work. “It’s not fair, the whole point of homework is to reinforce what you learn at school, there’s no point in doing homework if you’re doing school work at home” – a reasonable point, somewhat destroyed by the fact it’s literally half an hour of work.

As anticipated the schools are closing. God, Boris looks out of his depth, the only thing I think we’ve got going for us the scientific advisors seem to be doing the heavy lifting. We’re now at a point were Universal Basic Income is brought up in the house of commons (today by the SNP) and not just instantly dismissed (makes you wonder if we can do it now in this time of crises, shouldn’t we have been doing some of this stuff years ago?)

Anway, officially schools are closing on Friday, but largely in NI the schools have closed for a couple of days (or at least are getting by on minimal staff as everyone who has the least bit of the sniffles takes the precautionary step of self isolating). We, me, Nathan and Annette have all had a bit of a sore throat and an occasional cough which is just enough for you to think “well, I’ve got this thermometer here, no harm in checking” about twelve times a day. (Pretty sure it’s the regular old whatever that goes around normally)

Our flat has a shared common space, and that’s less than ideal, and we don’t have a garden the kids can roam around in, which, again, less than ideal, BUT we do have four rooms. The kids bedroom, and my studio room, our bedroom and the living room (plus a balcony, kitchen and bathroom). We evolved a dance now, through the years of the kids growing up. Like we all seem to prize our alone time (Nathan, especially – as a baby we’d marvel at how he’d stop crying AFTER WE STOP HUGGING HIM and just put him on the ground – never seen the like).

So now, I usually take up my studio room (of course), my wife works in the living room up until dinner when we all share that space, then in the evening I might go in there with her, and our youngest, Nathan will slip off to his room to the playstation. Then, when Tom goes to bed, Annette’s in bed, Nathan will come to the living room, curtly ask “can I have the living room?” and I’ll get up and mooch off to my room.

The boys can enjoy being in the same room, but sometimes they need to go to different rooms and you might find Nath sitting on the chair in our bedroom, Tom playing the playstation in their room. OR Nathan playing the playstation and Tom in our room playing the Wii U (good idea to open up all your old games consoles and liberally dot them round the house connected to every TV you can find).

Yesterday I showed you my studio, today I’ll show you some of the original art I have hanging up in it:

I love all of them, the Cully Hamner, Jesus Redondo and Chris Sprouse page were from my mate Johnny (who I hope is ok, I haven’t seen him in years!)

The Jerry Paris piece was a commission for my 50th birthday. Jerry was my guiding light when I was a teen and was adrift in teenage hormones and anxiety over loving comics but ashamed to be reading them, I’d pick up copies of Computer and Video Games (C&VG) with Jerry’s art in it just to keep looking at comics. I live off ink.

The John McCrea piece is special to me to, John’s an absolute hero of mine, and we’ve known each other for over 30 years. The page features Justice-1 and when I was a kid, my Uncle Paul and I built that ship out of computer punchcard. Now, in memory it was pretty much an exact scale model. But come on, it was computer punch card.

Anyway, stay well everyone. It’s easy to let the whole thing overwhelm you. You can still go out and go for a walk, and enjoy a sunset. Those things haven’t changed.