Jack of All Trades, Mother of Two

I’ve always regarded myself as quite a self sufficient person anyway. I don’t like to rely on others and I’m happy with my own company. I’ve been a single parent for over fifteen years now so I’ve had to learn new skills, wallpapering was an education, and do many things that fell outside my comfort zone. Self sufficiency with regards to food though, is something that never really appealed to me until last year. Brexit scared me. I read as much as I could about it to try and educate myself. It seemed reasonable to expect a level of disruption with food supplies and, if we left with no deal, to have widespread longer term shortages particularly of fresh food.  I had some spare cash at the time so I decided to see what I could manage to grow. I was desperate to do anything I could that might protect us against the worse case scenario.  I invested in some fruit trees and bushes. These gave me a small harvest last year but I saw them as a longer term investment. I tried growing pot

When Lin Manuel Miranda wrote the song Yorktown (The world turned upside down), he was writing of a time of war and revolution with political orders being overthrown. He certainly wasn’t considering a global pandemic. For the last few days though, the song has been going round and round in my head and I think it is fair to say that for many of us across the globe, the world really has turned upside down.  I live in the U.K. and I can remember starting to hear in early January the news reports from China. It was terrible but seemed so far away at the time. As Covid-19 started its insidious creep across Europe, I started to feel more concerned. We cut out a few planned trips to London in February and I made sure my youngest daughter had  hand sanitiser for school. Then it started to get worse through March and picked up speed like a steamroller out of control on a hill. My oldest daughter’s firm introduced home working. Company after company announced closures and panic buying hit t