Children are more resilient than we give them credit for | Rick Jackson

In fact, they started early for Holly, as parents of Year R pupils at her school were told of a positive Covid-19 test, the first such result for the school.

We picked our confused children up at lunchtime, explaining about how the virus hasn’t gone away and how we need to keep everyone save.

They couldn’t understand why they couldn’t say goodbye properly to their teachers and why they couldn’t sing at the levers assembly on the last day of term.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for all involved at our wonderful school, where like many others, they’ve gone above and beyond to make sure the children are as safe as can be.

Special presents to say thank you to their teachers had to be left at the school to be dropped off, as the teacher too had to enter a 10 day quarantine.

Plans have either been put on hold or cancelled.

Children have been left upset as their siblings are allowed out to play, go to the shops and do activities but they aren’t.

We forget how this impacts on children too.

But I think they are far more resilient than us adults.

Holly just gets on with it – laying in the garden on her monkey bars, Barbie and Ken have been getting plenty of sunshine and a new paddling pool has also helped.

It’s us adults that are struggling.

Coming up with ideas to fend off boredom or deflect a possible World War III conflict over who gets the green play-dough.

As both Sarah and I have been fully vaccinated and test three times a week, we find it hard to keep her home, but we do understand the bigger picture.

We make sure our children do too.

Not everyone will obey the quarantine we know that.

Some people do 50mph in a 30 zone, that’s life, but we’d rather stick to the speed limit.

It won’t be long before we are camping in Weymouth, exploring Marwell Zoo and skimming stones on Stokes Bay.

Deep down, we are thankful we haven’t seen the worst of Covid, unlike many. So for that, we are t hankful.

T hunderbolt and lightning...

I ’m sure many of us are a bit bleary eyed at the moment. It’s been a long time since we’ve had any spectacular thunderstorms and now we’ve had two in the space of a week!

Many of us also have bedroom windows wide open in the vain search for a guff of wind, so any thunder will be difficult to miss.

Twice now our bed has been full, with Sarah and I sharing it with two children and a dog! I found Sarah gazing out of the window on Monday night in awe at the spectacular display Mother Nature was putting on, only for the loudest clap of thunder heard in years to rattle the house and our bedroom door fling open with scared kids!

We counted the seconds between flashing and bangs and explained how god was moving around his furniture – stories passed down from generations.

A new found respect for farmers

We’ve just finished watching Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime. Many listeners were telling me to do so and thank goodness they did, I’ve not belly laughed at something on the telly in ages.

Clarkson is an intelligent man, but plays the buffoon brilliantly. He’s owned his Chipping Norton farm since 2008 but has decided to farm it himself. He has the help of 21 year-old Caleb and 72-year-old Gerald, who has such a broad accent no one can understand him.

His farm manager Charlie tells him what to do. Yes it’s very funny and yes it’s daft in places, but this show brings us awareness and an all new respect to what our farmers do and how much they still need our help.