April 6

John often asks me why I get up early in the mornings, even if it is the weekend or school holidays.  There are two reasons: one is that it is the only time I have to myself the whole day and I can get quite a lot done.  The other is that I love early morning.  I love the dawn and watching the sun rise, that feeling of newness that lies over everything.  The garden is flooded in a beautiful golden light that highlights millions of delicate spiderwebs strung between branches and leaves.  Looking to the right, there is something primeval about the lush green, the great cluster of trees that leads down to the bottom of the garden.  The birds are already up and busy and it is easy to close your eyes and imagine a jungle setting with parakeets flying about and monkeys swinging from tree to tree.

I usually work in the lounge; it is my favourite room.  There is a strong, warm feeling, especially in the morning and I love writing here.  This morning when I woke up, I thought about all the people who live in flats and tiny houses without gardens.  It must be terrible to be confined to one room or to be in an abusive relationship with nowhere to hide.  I imagine many people just have the tv on all day or don't even bother to get out of bed.  When my mum was 13, she spent a year in a sanatorium with TB.  She wasn't allowed to get out of bed and so for the rest of her life, she hated staying in bed.  I think I have inherited this from her.  I don't like unmade beds and I don't think I have ever slopped around the whole day in my pyjamas.  I find there is something very depressing about it.

Ellie seems to have lost interest in playing the piano.  Partly, this is just Ellie who gets very excited about something and then isn't interested.  Partly, it's because she is stuck with the same song which is why I feel Sian should have shown her how to play the piano step by step.

John goes shopping with Ellie.  They are not stopped on their way into town, but on their way back, a roadblock has been put up and the policeman asks them where they are coming from and where they are going.  Not sure how this helps anyone.  John is very generous and buys me four PLASTIC 200ml bottles of gin.  He has worked out that this is cheaper than buying a large bottle.  The label isn't even stuck on straight and all that's missing is a brown paper bag to carry it around in.  Sigh.  The Lives of the Rich and Famous.

April 5

It is Sunday - at the end of a week of Sundays - and everyone is bored.  I take Sian and Ellie out for a drive around Burnside.  They are excited, although Burnside on a Sunday during lockdown is much the same as Burnside at any other time; quiet.

When we come home, my suggestion that we wash the car falls on deaf ears.  I take the girls to see John.

'This man,' I say, 'who occasionally walks through the house, is your father. He can also be called upon during moments of extreme boredom.'

The result: John offers to do some woodwork with Sian and Ellie.  Ellie is going to make a secret compartment and Sian, a shoe rack.

In the afternoon, Sian, Ellie and I watch 'Sad Cypress', one of my favourite Poirots.

And that was Sunday.

April 4

About four years ago, I gave my family food poisoning by not boiling some butterbeans enough before making them into burgers. We laugh about it now and joke about The Great Butterbean Murderer and The Case of the Poisonous Butterbeans or Death by Butterbeans.  However, it was not at all nice at the time and we were all violently ill.  As a result, I have been very hesitant to use any beans that don't come in a tin.  Recently, when thinking of how to survive if we weren't able to go to the shops, I bought some nyimo beans and today I decide to give them a go.  I have soaked them overnight and changed the water three times and now I put them on to boil.

I am doing really well with my writing when I make the huge mistake of stopping.  I have found this often when I write, although I have failed to learn a lesson from it.  I get into this lovely comfortable state when everything is going well and ideas are just flowing and then I make the terrible mistake of deciding to have a cup of tea.  This time, when I come back, John is using the laptop and, even though I hover about like a mosquito on a mission, he ignores me completely. 

I decide to use the time to look up the names of roses.  My main character is a gardener who loves tending a rose garden.  The difficulty that I have is that I need to mention the names of roses, but, because the story is set in the 1930s, I have to use names that were around then.  This may sound very picky but, believe me, there will always be that Know It All who writes and says: 'Dear Ms Rheam, I'll have you know that hybrid roses were only introduced in Rhodesia in late 1952, fifteen years after the time in which your novel is set.'

It takes two hours to get the laptop back by which time it is necessary to start on the nyimo bean supper.  I decide I am going to make burgers out of them, but the mixture turns very soggy and they look more like grey omelettes.  I throw in flour and give one to John to try and he suggests they 'need something' so I throw in an apple and the mixture turns soggy again so I throw in more flour and so the process continues.  Supper seems to take an inordinate amount of time to make and I begin to wish we were all raging carnivores - a piece of meat is SO much easier to cook.

Everyone tries the burgers rather hesitantly as though they are going to suddenly choke and writhe around on the floor.  By 9pm, we are all still alive though and I have got my laptop back.  Just in time to go to bed.

April 3

The day begins with the news that alcohol is to be banned as people are buying it and then drinking in groups.  It seems a very roundabout way of addressing the problem and is only likely to make the sale of alcohol go underground and become expensive - but it won't stop people drinking!

John sets off into town to see if this news is true - I have rarely ever seen a man so bent on a mission.  I work on my book and the girls take turns playing the piano.  Sian has been teaching Ellie how to play and she is doing well, even if the lessons are somewhat haphazard.  Ellie's first lesson begins with her using both hands and includes things such as b sharps.  I'm sure I remember starting with one hand and the tune was cdcdcdc cbcbcbc. 

John comes back from shopping, totally deflated.  There was a roadblock near the Trade Fair entrance and he had to wait fifteen minutes for the policeman to get down the line to him only to tell him that the centre of town is closed.  This means he couldn't get to the vegetable shop we usually use and had to go to the much more extravagantly priced Food Lovers' Market.  Prices, he says, have shot up astronomically since Monday, although the rate of the bond to the US$ has come down.  I just think that retailers here cannot imagine prices coming down.  

At Spar, one of the employees says he has never seen alcohol go so quickly all his years working there.  I wonder if this no alcohol ban isn't a scam put out by a brewery to get everyone to panic buy.  I can just imagine that Delta Beverages is owned by the Honourable Minister of such and such and he thought it might be a great way to boost sales.  Personally, I don't feel that the Zimbabwean government does anything at all with the interest of the people at heart.  There is always, always, always an ulterior motive.

April 2

I find the directive that we are not allowed to take any exercise outside our homes or walk dogs a bit extreme.  When we people go for a run or a walk, they don't usually do it in large groups or stop to talk to others.  Ironically, there could be no better place for social distancing than Hillside dams as hardly anyone goes there during the week at the best of times.  

Instead, people are still allowed to go shopping.  At one shop that has closed its doors but provides an ordering service, there was a great clump of people all vying to get their orders first.  They may have arrived by car, they might have been on their own and they might have been wearing a mask, but they certainly weren't queueing and they definitely weren't a metre apart.

In the warning from the police that was forwarded to me, the public is warned that there will be roadblocks and at these roadblocks, our licence discs will be scanned so the police will be able to tell how many trips to town we are making and whether it breaks the lockdown rules or not.  Now, I simply cannot believe that ZRP has this kind of technology.  This is a country where every government department generates handwritten receipts for everything.  And when I say handwritten, I mean to say painstakingly handwritten for those receipts contain everything from full name and address to document numbers to date of issue and time of day.  To get car clearance to take your car out of the country, you take it to the drill hall where you fill in a form and come back in a couple of hours in which time the man in charge has supposedly looked through all his records, which are not kept on a computer, and checked if your car is stolen or not.  In reality, it is just a formality.  I don't think anyone has any idea at all whether your car has been stolen or not.

April 1

It is April Fool's day and I know that Ellie has been planning a host of practical jokes, so I put the clock forward so that when she wakes up, it is past midday.  The joke backfires on me as Ellie bursts into tears when I tell her she has slept through the morning and April Fool's is over.  For the rest of the day, as I feel so mean,  I submit to having plastic eyeballs put in my coffee, pepper and chilli sauce in my tea and a 'cracked screen' on my phone, amongst various other practical jokes.  Ellie asks if it can be April Fool's day all day as we are stuck at home. Agreeing is also part of the penance I pay for upsetting her earlier.

It's my last day of 'school'.  From now on, I am going to concentrate on my writing and finishing a proofreading course I started in January.  

My publishers write and ask me for a photo of myself for my new book, All Come to Dust.  The one they were planning to use is not of a high enough resolution so I ask John to take some pictures of me.  It is a painful exercise with John telling me turn one way and me saying that I'll be looking in the sun if I turn that way and then him getting annoyed with me as every photo has me either squinting or looking as though I've just woken up. I don't like photos and I am not photogenic at all. People have told me it's because I am too self-conscious, but actually the worst photos of me are the ones people have taken when I have been unaware.  I don't know how it happens, but it always looks as though I have been pulling a face; my teeth are sticking out or my mouth is pulled to one side, my nose scrunched up, my eyes looking in different directions.  It is all just far too weird.

Sian stands at her bedroom window, making faces at me which doesn't help.  I try my hardest to look sophisticated and authorly, but it does not work.  Any attempts to look 'mysterious' or 'literary' only make me look like I have been at the gin. Eventually, John manages to get a couple of photos which I send off to my publishers. 

March 31

My life, I feel, is approaching a crisis.  I am so inundated with messages and e-mails that I am struggling to do anything else except plod through endless jokes, warnings, videos, games, discussions and general banter.  Something has got to give so I take the plunge and remove myself from a number of whatsapp groups and unsubscribe to various emails.

I have written about this before, I know, and little has changed since I did so (why did no one follow my advice?). In Zimbabwe, whatsapp groups are used for everything; it used to be that every group was flooded with 'petrol messages' so at four o'clock in the morning, my phone would ding and there would be the message: Fuel at Trek, 3rd Avenue.  Taking swipe and cash.  Short queue.'  Of course it's a short queue!  It's frigging four o'clock in the morning!  I did learn that the best thing to do is mute certain groups, an action that has partly backfired because I tend to miss out on the valuable information that actually is put on those groups while trying to dodge all the other stuff.

On the second day into the shutdown, everyone is stuck at home and bored and of course the one way to communicate is to pick up their phones and forward millions of jokes.  I spend a lot of time wading through rubbish and deleting it and I just feel that it is taking up an inordinate amount of time.  There is also something very odd about the disparity between some of the messages.  On one hand, there are all the coronavirus jokes, on the other dire warnings about certain doom.  I even get a message inviting me to a worldwide meditation to lift the world into the fifth dimension.  I didn't even know we were in the fourth.