Quarantine Blog - Day 7

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -  J. R. R. Tolkien

1 minute, 11 seconds and 37 split seconds. That's how long I managed to hold my breath for. 43. There are 43 spots on my favourite pair of boxers. I learnt that I could fit a whole slice of toast in my mouth at once. I completed my game of Civilisation yesterday, after well over 20 odd hours of gameplay. The anticlimax was similar to looking forward to a McFlurry at McDonalds, only to be told the machine is broken…which happens a lot. Oh sorry Guerns, McDonalds is this place you go to get Big Macs, McNuggs and Diabetes, all in record fast time. UK Friends and Family, imagine a place where crime is relatively low, a place that has a strong community spirit, a place that has some of the most beautiful and accessible scenery. Sounds a little like Utopia right?…now imagine that place doesn’t have KFC, Nandos, not even a god damn Greggs. No wonder the average life span here is so high, nobody’s ordering fried chicken on Deliveroo 3 times a week. Please don’t judge me. Honestly in England you get drug dealers on certain street corners, over here it’s black market fast food dealers. They’ll be stood on some dodgy looking pier like:

“Hey man I’m looking for some Whopper?

Nah, that’s some old shit, I don’t do that no more. 

What about some PERi-PERi Chicken?

Oh so it’s chicken you want. You want some of this new stuff on the block, it’s called 14 Piece Bargain Bucket with mix n match of 2 large fries or sides. Careful though this stuff’s highly addictive.

Ok, yeah. Do you take card?

Yeah I take card.

Can I get a VAT receipt?

A what?

Oh shit the feds” (Benny Hill chase ensues)

While I was university, I used to treat coming back to Guernsey as my own kind of fast food rehab. I’d put on some much weight eating dominoes on the regular, well large mostly…with stuffed crust…that I’d come back home and just lose it all by not really doing much at all. Because it was essentially like going cold turkey, and I don’t mean that cold turkey was all there was to eat. Also everything is within cycling distance. I’d cycle to work, I’d cycle to my friends’ (yes I have more than one), I’d cycle to the inner workings of my mind. I still can’t believe how much people drive here. My work commute in England is a 45-60 minute drive and that’s a short commute compared to most. You could drive around this island twice in that time. But I’m not here to judge, especially seeing as I do genuinely order KFC on Deliveroo 3 times a week, when its a 5 minute walk. 

Sometimes people ask me why I left Guernsey in the 1st place. Well I moved away from Guernsey because i wanted to see the world not the the same 7 beaches, I wanted to taste the foods of different cultures, meet all these amazing new people. So far I've seen Aldershot, Croydon and Luton. I’ve eaten mainly at chain restaurants over the last 10 years. And in 2020 I saw my dog 3 times as much as any person I know. You could say I'm a jet setter. 

You may be able to tell that not much happened to me yesterday, shocking revelation I know. What we did speak about yesterday were our plans when we get liberated from our confinement. We’ve already planned a pub crawl. I feel naughty just saying those words, it gives me shivers...pub crawl…ooo…pub crawl pub crawl pub crawl…*passes out from sheer arousement*. People of UK have not been in an unrestricted pub setting for 10 months or so, and I completely understand my privilege to be able to do that in a just little over a week. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t super excited but also extremely guilty. It’ll feel so weird ordering at the bar, not having to constantly look at the watch to make sure we don’t overstay our allotted 2 hour slot, not putting on a mask when leaving the table to go to the toilet. What I’ll try not to do, for my UK friends, is plaster it all over social media. Because I, like many of my friends from Guernsey who are also no longer on the island, found it so hard to watching Christmas parties, summer BBQ’s, even just having people round houses over the last few months. It came from a place of jealousy but also of longing to interact with people freely. I’m not saying don’t enjoy yourself, if you feel good and want to post something then you do you boo boo. I’m a big boy, I got over it, I didn’t cry myself to sleep for weeks. What I’m saying is just be aware of the situation elsewhere, then you can truly appreciate the good work everybody has done to keep this island rocking and rolling.

I’m just looking forward to being back in my Guernsey home, house, it’s not my parents, it’s mine, they just occupy the spaces while I’m away, and they paid the mortgage I suppose. The house address even sounds so exotic compared to my UK address:

Weslake, (not a motorbike engine…)

Les Landes Clos,

Landes du Marche,

Dans Le Vale, (yes I added the Dans le) 

Isles de Channel

Zheh Ee-Grehk Seese Huit Dah Zhee  

In the UK it’s:

10

Prewetts Mill Apartments,

Mill Bay Lane,

Horsham,

West Sussex,

RH12 1ST

This is also the address you can use to send all your fan mail, free products for boosting on my Instagram page (all 95 of my followers would love it), as well as any monetary contributions you may wish to make. If I’m not in they will be left in the safe hands of our apartment building’s concierge. I’ve made it sound really posh having a concierge, it’s not. If you want posh, I used to live in Surrey. You knew when it was school prom season because you’d see a vast number of limos and hummer limos about, I've never known anything like it. I may or may not have turned up to my sixth form prom in the boot of a car with vodka stains down my trousers. Disclaimer: Do not do that.

It’ll be great to see the family. They all seem to be a little hard of hearing recently, I can only imagine it’s like trying to watch a tv, when somebody is using a hairdryer. You see the lips moving but you just stare bewildering at the screen or in my family’s case at the person speaking to them. My parents were/are genius’s, as kids at Christmas, they'd give us an Argos catalogue and sit us down at the table and say just find what you want and write it down. I know now why this was genius. Because we'd never get what was on that list, they'd totally ignore it. Why do I know this? The whole costumer experience point of Argos is that you buy it from the store. This was before internet shopping and delivery. You know when you'd have to leave the house on the weekend at 4am to find a parking space. Guernsey doesn't even have Argos. Pure genius. I can only hope to reach that level of wit and intelligence.

We have 2 Nicks’ and 2 Chris/Criss’ss’s’s’’s and a Sarah in this household so it gets confusing. We have renamed ourselves, Nicky, Niche, Mr Cris, Fluffles (myself, I’ve no idea why they call me this), and Sarah, Sarah’s was a tough renaming. Last night it was Nicky’s chance to impress us with his masterchefery. He made us a vegetable Lasagne and it was, and I cannot emphasise this enough, bloody marvellous. I told Nicky the best I could do for him as thank you is put it in this blog. So here it is Nicky. Well Done. Other than that, it was same as always, have a few drinks until I could get to sleep at 2am.