Blog #35: A Personal Blog
If you’ve read any of my other blogs, you know that they’re not personal blogs. An account on Instagram called simplepolitics posts daily updates about the COVID-19 situation in the UK, plus some occasional updates in other areas of the world, but the UK is their main focus. I always credit them at the end of my blogs as I just want to help spread updates about the current pandemic.
I have two personal blogs, one is the introduction to my blog and in another, I talked about how I personally felt about the closures of schools in the UK and the cancellation of my GCSE exams.
So today, I thought I’d write another personal blog. This one is going to be about lockdown and how I’m finding it.
Schools closed on Friday 20th March and Boris Johnson announced lockdown measures on March 23rd, which was 57 days ago.
In “Blog #17: Closure of Schools (My feelings)”, I spoke about how I felt hearing my exams were cancelled and that schools were closing until further notice, so I won’t talk about schools any more.
So, it’s been 57 days since the UK has been in lockdown and as a 16 year old teenager, it has felt like so much longer, especially as I have a boyfriend whom I haven’t seen in person since schools closed and miss dearly. And although I’m dying to see him, I know that we both have to continue isolating and following the MP’s rules.
However, if it appears that lockdown could be extended for a much longer time or an official message is put out, we both may have to consider meeting whilst social distancing. We’ve said that although it’ll be extremely difficult and heart-breaking, if it comes to it, we might want to consider it so we can see each other.
I’ve had a mixture of good and bad days, as I’m sure most other people have as well. But it’s important to stay positive and maintain a sense of hope, otherwise getting through this will seem much harder.
In one of my other personal blogs, I talked about my daily routine that I do during weekdays. Although that’s stayed the same, there are some other things that I’ve started doing.
Before lockdown and COVID-19, I had an out of school drama group called Pauline Quirke Academy (PQA), where I had three classes I would take: Musical Theatre, Comedy & Drama and Film & TV. As well as these sessions, we would learn songs for events, learn and rehearse for shows/performances etc.
Because I’m unable to attend this drama group now for obvious reasons, they have released a PQA Virtual Academy. So the person who runs the PQA group that I attend (PQA Norwich) does an Instagram Live Video every Saturday morning at 10 AM, he does shout-outs that students send him prior, explains what the workshops are etc.
The workshops can range from competitions to learning a new song or dance, filming something funny or even learning how to do drag makeup. We’ve been very lucky to have some West End performers teach some workshops, such as Lauren Drew (Heathers UK and Six), Liam Doyle (Hairspray) and more.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Minecraft with my younger sister recently, which I used to be very into when I was younger, so it’s been very fun to get back into it again. I also play a lot of Call Of Duty, I have Modern Warfare (the most recent COD), Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3, WW2, Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered. I think so far my favourite campaign to have played has been either Advanced Warfare, Modern Warfare Remastered or WW2.
Among those games, I have WIPEOUT OMEGA, Driveclub, Gran Turismo, Sonic Forces, Minecraft Story Mode and Batman Arkham (I’ve not played this).
I’m trying to read more as well - I’m currently reading To Kill A Mockingbird and the copy I have is my mum’s copy from her English Literature GCSEs, so as I read, I get to see the various annotations she’s made. I also have Jane Eyre to read, which was a book given to me by my grandma for Christmas.
So that’s all for today, I think. Thank you for reading! :)
