Covid Christmas

 

I had plans to do a lot of blogging over the Christmas holidays, but unfortunately 2020 had one more surprise in store. You have perhaps heard of the ‘new variant’ of covid that is sweeping through southern England. Well, that’s where I live…

Three weeks ago, my wife got covid, as did her mother, father, sister, grandmother, aunt and uncle. This represents four different households, that briefly became connected through the need to help grandma. Thankfully, I can report that everyone seems to be recovering, even 91-year-old grandma, though she remains in respite care.

The one bright spot in all of this was that I appear to have escaped – either because I had the virus and never expressed any symptoms or potentially because I had it earlier in the year. (Knock on wood. It’s possible, of course, that I’ve just been lucky so far). This meant that I was able to look after the kids while my wife was completely out of action.

So, it was a muted Christmas, spent in isolation, my wife unable to even taste her Christmas dinner. Still, the kids had a great time, and maybe a calmer Christmas day was not such a bad thing for them.

Strangely, this all meant that I got more painting done than I expected. Since I completely abandoned any attempts to work, I kept my paints set-up on my desk for three straight weeks, and grabbing little breaks here and there to add a colour or shade was one of the things that kept me sane. I’ll be showing off some of that work in the days to come. For now, you’ll have to settle for this dwarf. It’s Reaper miniature. I bought it because I thought it looked like a ‘heroic scale’ version of the Khazad Guard from the Middle-earth Strategy Battlegame. I’m not actually sure why that was an important consideration to me, but it was. Anyway, it’s a very nice figure, and I really enjoyed painting it. There are several variations of this figure available, so if you want to construct a small army of them you could.

Hopefully, with my wife 75% recovered, I can get back to work, including doing some more blogging, but with England going into another lockdown, it means home-schooling and all the difficulty, disruption, and challenge that comes with it. It’s going to be an interesting year!