The timestamp on the photo above is 2nd March 2020. I think when I took it I had some idea of a post about the approach of spring, even though it was still quite cool and extremely wet out.
The one below was taken in late February in Hammersmith - that crowned figure is actually at the rarely used entrance to Hammersmith Town Hall, and I know I had a post in mind about how the old town hall building actually makes more sense if you consider that this side - which now faces onto a motorway - was the front, and the entrance everyone now has to enter through (which connects to a bleak annexe which required, when I worked there, the public to either try and struggle up to reception on an escalator with whatever they happened to be carrying - a buggy, a broken leg, all their worldly goods if evicted - or to snag a passing member of staff who could use their pass to get them into the lifts) was actually the back.
Anyway they're refurbishing now, and hopefully it will all be much nicer and much more accessible.
I've described it as late February. It was actually February 29th - leap year day - which I started with coffee at the Costa at Kew Bridge, before going into the Musical museum which I had heard about but never been to before and where I had a lovely little tour with an elderly volunteer guide who set lots of the various mechanical musical contraptions off for us and finished up with a Wurlitzer formerly belonging to the cinema in Kingston. They have tea dances there in the museum apparently, and show old films. There's a cafe which I made a mental note to go back to at some point when I hadn't already breakfasted in Costa.
Then I walked down to Gunnersbury, hopped on the tube, got off at Ravenscourt Park to have a nosey at how the Hammersmith refurb was going, took the underpass beneath the motorway and walked along the river.
It was, as I think you can see from the sky in the pictures, a beautiful, bright, cold day. The Thames Path was busy with joggers and pubs and dog walkers, and so was Hammersmith Bridge, which is closed to road traffic at the moment. There was a small display explaining how a cycle and foot bridge was going to be put in temporarily so people could still get across the river while they repaired the road bridge.
At Craven Cottage there was clearly a match about to start - hundreds of fans outside and more on their way, walking up through Bishops Park in the opposite direction to me. At Putney Bridge, where I got on the tube again, there's a secondhand bookshop which has been in business 27 years to my knowledge, and probably longer, and which used to have a sign telling customers to post the money through the door if the shop itself was closed. I turned over a few books, thinking about buying them, but ultimately didn't.
And then, for the third time that day, I got back on the tube and came home, agreeably tired and quite pleased, and didn't write a blog post at all. I'm sporadic at best. I had posted the day before. And most of all I didn't realise, at that time, that I had had a remarkable day. That my old normal - both on weekends and weekdays - of hopping on and off the tube, in and out of shops and museums, moving through crowds of people - was about to change. It was known that Northern Italy had been hard hit by the coronavirus, and anyone returning from those regions had been asked to isolate, and I had taken a phone call at work from a summer school who usually had a lot of Chinese students (we told them it was a developing situation, and to follow HMG advice). But at that point only one British person had died - a passenger on the Diamond Princess - and it still seemed as if it would (or could) be contained.
The weekend after my walk in Hammersmith I met up for a longer walk with my aunt Angela. As usual we congregated at my cousin's house to pick up the dog and have a cup of tea. We speculated with her whether her mother (also my aunt, and Angie's sister) would still be coming over from Southern Italy for part of the Easter holidays, or if flights would be cancelled. There was talk of Italy being in lockdown, of restriction of movement from north to south, but flights and trains were still taking passengers.
I think it was the week after that when my aunt came out of the big Sainsbury's in Collier's Wood (I waited outside with the dog) saying how eerie it was - the shop like something from a film, the shelves empty. She had wanted eggs and I think some other things. I had wanted toilet roll.
So I got the toilet roll from the Esso garage near home, and gave her three of my eggs in the interim. We discussed visiting the Hayward Gallery on the Monday, and she offered to give me a charger for a surface laptop, as my manager had suggested taking mine home every night in case I needed to isolate at short notice and the charger weighed as much as the laptop. I said yes please, although there had been a compromise arrangement, where I left it in an accessible drawer.
I was considering going to Two Temple Place on the Sunday as well (it's a beautiful building that only hosts one exhibition a year, and they're always worth seeing) but was too lazy.
Monday, as I was leaving work, my manager rang and asked me if I'd taken my laptop. I was mildly annoyed as I was going to a gallery and was almost at the exit, but turned around, went back up and got it, and passed on her message that we were to take laptops and work from home on the Tuesday. That was because she had been watching Boris' speech.
The Hayward was lovely, restful, and not very busy. Mondays never are, in galleries, but this was exceptional. The cafe had me and one other person in it. I remember thinking I shouldn't touch things in the shop unless I was buying them, something I used to be told often as a child but have unlearnt along the way. I think I said, for the first time 'I'm not worried about catching it, I'm worried about passing it on', as if I needed an excuse to be cautious.
I remember my hands felt dry because I'd been washing them so much. Not only when I went to the ladies, but every time I made tea or coffee, or entered a building.
The exhibition was about trees, and my aunt and I sat in front of a huge screen where a birch forest - or rather a good mimic of one - rustled and swayed, and the leaves budded and greened and grew brown and dropped.
Tuesday I worked from home. I have not been back to the office since.
