Diary of a family in quarantine #7

Smiths Beach residents Lisa and Tim McLure and their kids Evie and Angus, both at Cowes Primary, share their lockdown lowdown in this week’s regular quarantine diary.
Lisa is a personal trainer and hairdresser and here is her update:

“My favourite word is discombobulated and that is definitely the word of the week. I’m finding everyone is feeling a bit discombobulated. We have all got used to a new normal, of being safe in our little bubbles, but now they’ve moved the goal posts and while it’s great to start getting out again, there’s a bit of hesitancy with it. It can be a bit disconcerting.

I think back to when I first started talking to the Advertiser weeks ago and I was a borderline alcoholic and resentful of Tim going to work. Yet now we’ve found a strange sort of rhythm, like Stockholm Syndrome – we like each other, then we don’t, then we do. I still text Tim occasionally and tell him I don’t like his children very much.

But now we’re allowed to leave the house and it’s whoa, a weird sort of freedom, kind of allowed, kind of not allowed. I’m half-half about easing restrictions, which is the same for a lot of people I’ve spoken to. A lot of my personal training clients say they’re keen to get back to normal but afraid of getting back to normal. Even in this morning’s PT session a client was saying she was out of sorts all week and couldn’t figure why and not getting anything done.

It’s definitely nice to have people now allowed to visit, but I’d have been happy for schools to go back next term. As a town we’ve come together as a collective and it was interesting seeing the amount of people visit the island as soon as restrictions were lifted. 

Everyone was here in their droves. I don’t begrudge people owning a holiday house here, paying rates and visiting or staying. But we had one woman come into the salon last week and tell us she was sick of Melbourne and came down to the island for the weekend and wanted to get her hair done. At the same time in the salon we’re working incredibly hard to sanitise everything and only let a certain amount of people in at one time, yet here was someone treating it as if everything was back to normal. That made my hackles rise on the back of my neck a bit.

I’ve only been walking with one friend lately and yet you’ll see a really big group of visitors down the main street.
It’s a hard one to tackle. We’ve all been trying to do the right thing but people pour down here and potentially bring it with them.

Discombobulated

So I think it’s important all the locals support local businesses. I was discombobulated this week also because I hurt my neck, had a big headache and couldn’t train Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.

I went to the physio in Cowes and Michael said he’d been treating a lot of people with sore and stiff necks, especially because parents were sitting more, leaning over school work, or using their phones, laptops or ipads more, or just sitting on the lounge incorrectly.

I don’t use computers for work and so I’ve clearly been putting pressure on my neck. My clients usually say they have knee, ankle and wrist issues, but now they’re saying it’s hips, necks and shoulders.

So in my PT studio we’ve been doing a lot of resistance band work, as well as kettle bells, to strengthen the muscles in those areas.

Otherwise the past week has been fine, the kids have been pretty good – although I’ve found Angus especially will say everything is fine, he’s done the work, and then I sit down at the computer and ‘hang on a minute’, it’s not the case.  So we had to get his teacher to give him a talk.

We’re so lucky to have the teachers at Cowes Primary – they’re brilliant and really care about the kids and want them to be happy.

The new kitten Eric has settled in. He’s king of the house. Audrey (the dog) has stopped trying to eat him. Although at 3am the other day they both decided to have a great old time dancing round the house. (Audible sigh).”