Looking back over the last entry on the 29^th, it seems a lot longer ago! What a whirlwind couple of weeks it’s been.

We had a lovely New Years Eve, with a relaxed morning and plenty of Zoom calls in the evening. It was Thursday so we had our usual ‘bad movie Zoom call’ with Rachel and Stu and then at about 9 jumped off and transferred across to a different call with Peter’s cousins Bryan and Paul and some other friends. We enjoyed this ‘virtual pub night’ and had plenty of chats right up until the countdown at midnight. I thought all the fireworks had been cancelled so it was a pleasant surprise at midnight to cheers our champagne and hear fireworks exploding from all around. Some of them even seemed to be legal displays, although there were plenty of street fireworks as well. We had a bit more of a chat afterwards and ended up calling it and going to bed at about 2am.

Unsurprisingly the next few days were very quiet, with just a few walks and a lockdown haircut for Peter! However we were watching the changes in government position on primary schools returning every day. Secondary schools were staying closed to prepare for mass testing but primary schools were supposed to go back as per usual, despite the rising cases. On Wednesday 30^th the government announced that ‘many’ schools in Tier 4 areas would be staying closed, but of the majority of boroughs in London that were staying closed, mine was not one of them. This decision was met with a huge amount of backlash as our borough had just as high cases as many that were being closed, and on Friday night (at 6pm!) they backflipped and decided to keep all schools in London closed for the first two weeks of term. Although a relief, this also caused a huge amount of anxiety around the amount of work expected to be done between Friday night and school beginning on Monday. Luckily our school had a curriculum day scheduled for Monday anyway so I just tried to push it out of my mind until then.

On Monday morning I headed in to work on a surprisingly empty train and with very little idea of what the day would entail. After a whole-staff briefing in the morning, we headed back to our classrooms and spent most of the day creating a timetable and planning what learning would look like for the next two weeks. We had a productive day and by late on Monday evening when I got home, I was feeling prepared for the next day’s home learning – which was lucky, because that’s when Boris Johnson did his next (ominously pre-recorded) briefing announcing the national lockdown until mid-February. Luckily we hired a new support teacher (Sophie) in the last week of December, because she is teaching the children who are at school while Bec and I teach the remainder of our classes at home.

Tuesday was my first day of remote learning and was a surprisingly smooth day, with only a few technical glitches. The children were engaged and excited to be able to see each other’s faces and we received positive feedback from a few parents. However, there were almost 20 children at school, almost a third of year 6 so at the end of the day I got an email from leadership asking me to come up with a roster for the year 6 team so that there’s at least two of us at school each day to support Sophie and break duties. As a result of that, I was in school for the rest of the week, teaching online in Bec’s empty classroom. Luckily the trains were reasonably empty for most of the week and I feel relieved that I’m at least able to have two days at home.

I can’t believe we’ve only been back at school for one week, as it feels much longer – the school-days go quickly and the online classes are a bit manic, but there’s a lot of marking and planning to do, so it made for a long week. As a result (and obviously also because of lockdown) we had a very quiet and restful weekend. Plenty of reading and puzzling, a couple of walks around Wapping and in to St Dunstan-in-the-East gardens, some delicious cooking and a bunch of episodes of Peaky Blinders!

PS: How could I forget my highlight though - it finally snowed! It has been forecast every few days for the last couple of weeks but hasn't actually happened, although they've been getting a lot of it up north. Finally on Thursday morning, I was walking to the station and it began snowing with actual fluffy snowflakes! I only had a couple of minutes to stare around excitedly and take a video before I had to run to catch the train. It also snowed briefly on Friday night, but it was a bit more sleet-y, not quite as magical.