Always choose kindness

With days dripping into each other and home and work life merging into one, it has become a daily struggle for most of us to do our day-to-day tasks. It’s in times like this I have to stop and remember what the first lockdown has taught me. 

Lockdown 1.0 came at just the right time for me. It helped me escape from the never ending cycle of self-employed work. It allowed me to stop and notice things I’ve never noticed before, such as all the beautiful blossom trees that appear in April or how many times I get to solute the magpies while singing “one for sorry, two for joy” on my daily walks. allowing me to appreciate all the things that were staring me in the face, but I just never made time to see. 

Lockdown 1.0 gave me a chance to see beautiful things, but it also gave me the chance to miss people dearly. People you never thought you wouldn’t go longer than a week without seeing. The words ‘miss you’ had a whole other meaning when you’re 7 weeks into a global pandemic. 

As the weeks went on, the words missing you, thinking of you, carried on, except they no longer had the same comforting effect as they once did. I had to do something to show my sister Rachel they weren’t just words I would put on the end of a text or say at the end of a phone call. I was truly missing her, and I wanted to brighten up her day in any way I could. 

I sat and thought and just like that it came to me, I knew what would cheer her up! Thinking back to when we were younger, we used to love sitting on my Grandmas’ wall waiting for Pete, the ice cream man, to come up the street. We used to always order the same, a vanilla cone with strawberry sauce. Pete was the best ice cream man, from the kindness of his heart he would make a clown face from sweets he’d cut up and put it on our ice cream. Sometimes, he would even let us have (free) blue philatelic mice and ride in his van while he turned it around in the street.