Maybe I should rename this blog 'Diary of a Lockdown Year' in homage to Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year ....
Now I've actually never read Journal of a Plague Year, but recently I've been reading about the English Civil War period. and just before the crisis struck, I thought I should and ordered myself a copy as a birthday present to myself, along with Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down.
Well, the World Turned Upside Down arrived pretty quickly, but Journal of a Plague Year ... Who knows?
I suspect that BookDepository have sourced the Defoe book from the UK rather than Australia and the general shutdown of communications has impacted it.
Certainly, I sent my UK passport off for renewal a couple of weeks ago before everything went to shit, and it took two weeks to get there, rather than the more usual four or five days using International Standard post.
So grumbling aside, how's it going?
Yesterday our supermarket was full of fresh veggies, today it was a bit more sparse, but they had most things except potatoes.
There was kitchen roll on the shelves, tissues but no toilet paper. Rice was still in short supply but they did have some of the massive 10kg sacks favoured by Asian families, and there was some pasta left on the shelves.
I'm taking this as a sign that we're coming to the end of the panic buying disruption and the discouragement of travel means we're no longer seeing tourists going to or from their holiday accommodation stopping off to pick up supplies.
There's a few more people about, but I'm putting that down to it being the end of the week, but most people are being pretty good about social distancing.
Traffic's definitely down, and our street, which people use as a cut through at busy times is more or less deserted - no cyclists or early morning joggers either. The other odd thing is there are no planes.
We lie under one of the flight paths from Melbourne to Sydney and Canberra. While you never hear them it's not unusual to look up and see the vapour trails.
Not this week. Melbourne/Sydney is one of the busiest routes in the world and it looks to have stopped almost totally.
The internet's been holding up pretty well which is good.
Some mornings there's been a bit of a dip first thing - between about 7 and 8am, and sometimes things like authenticating to gmail have taken a bit longer than usual but most services are holding up...
Now I've actually never read Journal of a Plague Year, but recently I've been reading about the English Civil War period. and just before the crisis struck, I thought I should and ordered myself a copy as a birthday present to myself, along with Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down.
Well, the World Turned Upside Down arrived pretty quickly, but Journal of a Plague Year ... Who knows?
I suspect that BookDepository have sourced the Defoe book from the UK rather than Australia and the general shutdown of communications has impacted it.
Certainly, I sent my UK passport off for renewal a couple of weeks ago before everything went to shit, and it took two weeks to get there, rather than the more usual four or five days using International Standard post.
So grumbling aside, how's it going?
Yesterday our supermarket was full of fresh veggies, today it was a bit more sparse, but they had most things except potatoes.
There was kitchen roll on the shelves, tissues but no toilet paper. Rice was still in short supply but they did have some of the massive 10kg sacks favoured by Asian families, and there was some pasta left on the shelves.
I'm taking this as a sign that we're coming to the end of the panic buying disruption and the discouragement of travel means we're no longer seeing tourists going to or from their holiday accommodation stopping off to pick up supplies.
There's a few more people about, but I'm putting that down to it being the end of the week, but most people are being pretty good about social distancing.
Traffic's definitely down, and our street, which people use as a cut through at busy times is more or less deserted - no cyclists or early morning joggers either. The other odd thing is there are no planes.
We lie under one of the flight paths from Melbourne to Sydney and Canberra. While you never hear them it's not unusual to look up and see the vapour trails.
Not this week. Melbourne/Sydney is one of the busiest routes in the world and it looks to have stopped almost totally.
The internet's been holding up pretty well which is good.
Some mornings there's been a bit of a dip first thing - between about 7 and 8am, and sometimes things like authenticating to gmail have taken a bit longer than usual but most services are holding up...
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