Your Name: Andrew Russe

I’ve really enjoyed being locked down. I’ve never been that sociable anyway, so a good excuse to never leave home has been most welcome. I’m lucky to have a house with a garden. I might have felt a little different if I’d been stuck in a flat. On top of that I’m very happily married. The additional time we’ve been able to spend together in the last few months, far from putting a strain on our relationship, has been a big positive for us.

I’m also lucky to have a job that hasn’t disappeared or taken a nosedive. I work for an IT company that develops and sells Insurance Management Systems. If anything, I’ve been busier since the lockdown started. We’ve managed to move almost our entire operation to home-working.

I really didn’t think I would take to working at home so easily, nor did I imagine that it could actually make me happier. But the transition has been almost seamless and productivity is up. It has not been lost on us that most of our workforce is actually a lot more efficient working this way. And learning to communicate via Zoom has made us better at listening to each other – we find ourselves working together more effectively. All this has meant that the Company is now actively looking at how we can move to doing this permanently. Which is fine by me.

Working from home like this, I have more energy, life is more relaxed. I feel so much happier, contented, and hopeful about the future.

This newly recovered energy and positive outlook has also helped to free me creatively. In my spare time I regard myself as a musician and songwriter. I’m a home-musician, I haven’t played in a live environment since the late 90s. Since 2015, I hadn’t really made very much music at all. The pressures of life and work, the death of a friend, giving up smoking, an operation – these all added up and I kind of lost interest.

However, the desire to create was just starting to come back when all this newly reclaimed energy and time suddenly became available. In my case, the lockdown itself hasn’t caused or inspired the creativity, but it did help make the space for me at just the right time. I started recording again around Easter and haven’t stopped since.

I place all my music on a website called alonetone. It’s a platform where you can share your stuff online, for free, without any advertising or popups. It gives you a place where you can post your new song and send a link to your Mum without her getting confused or inundated with adverts, spam, or requests for money. And she doesn’t need to join the website or give away her details either – anyone can stream or download for free.

I’ve compiled the following PLAYLIST HERE for this year’s burst of creativity, all of it post lockdown.  Some are brand new songs. Some are old songs that I’ve finally got round to recording.

Edith Finally Gets It is my first Lockdown Diaries offering. It’s about our perceptions of how others might feel.

So that’s me and my lockdown experiences. Improved working, improved quality of life, and a bunch of new music that I’m quite proud of. Oh, and too much to eat and drink.

Whatever the future brings, I want to embrace and enjoy it… but I really do need to figure out how to eat less of it!!

Your Name: Kathleen Linton-Ford

I am a Streatham based artist having lived here for 26 years.  I paint and draw equestrian art and I love what I do.

Lockdown has been hard for many people and families and so I thought it would be wonderful to create drawings to colour in for the children in my local Streatham neighbourhood.

Please see my drawings which can be downloaded by right-clicking the images below, or they can be found on my website.

Website: www.equestrianart.online/

Facebook: www.facebook.com/yaheya.pasha.9