100 Days of Lockdown.
Olivia John, who has been doing an internship with us through Go Wales, writes about her first 100 days of lockdown.
Being a student during lockdown is quite a scary experience, one minute you’re going to lectures, seeing your friends every day and going out, the next, you’re stuck inside, and life has been completely changed. Most students went home, but some student either choose to stay in Swansea and some have been forced to stay here due to family pre-existing illnesses, lack of space at home or do not have an additional home. I fall into the category of staying in Swansea based on my mother’s pre-existing health issues and the lack of space for me to do coursework. Luckily, two of my housemates stayed here, since we knew we were going to be spending most of our time inside, we quickly decided that we needed to do something in order to keep us sane. We created an activity jar and we wrote a bunch of different activities and each day, we pulled one out and would do that activity the following day. Once we emptied the jar and based on government rules, we would write more activities and continue to do daily activities.
Some of our activities have ranged from daytime to evening activities, we made sure to mix it up because we knew if we did them the same time it would start to become tedious and repetitive.
I have had some personal favourite activities, one being ‘Come Dine with Me’, but we would each do a course and then pick a winner, we did these on day 5, day 51 and day 76. I loved doing this activity because firstly, I’m getting a three-course meal from only making one course and secondly, it was nice to spend an entire evening with my housemates.
We also joined the Tik-Tok bandwagon and tasked ourselves with learning some of dance crazes that have taken over social media, this ensemble of activities showed me I really cannot dance, and my rhythm is awful!!
Some child-like activities have been surprisingly super fun, on day 6 we made a slide on our stair case, using duvets and an old wooden plank to make it faster, on day 8 we made playdoh using flour, vegetable oil, table salt and warm water, and of course, we have done a lot of arts and craft which has been really relaxing and for me personally, having an hour just to unwind and chill has been needed on some of the days.
My all-time favourite activity has been day 61, when we took a walk all together. Since the previous lockdown rules were that you could only go for a two-person walk and there’s three of us, so we usually go for individual walks. We ended up walking to Mumbles and went rock-pooling and rock climbing. This ended up being our longest house activity, but I loved it.
We all decided once we get to Day-100 we are going to stop doing activities every single day, we decided this because we feel it is going to get extremely repetitive and we are being optimistic in that lockdown rules will become even more relaxed.
I have been posting our daily activities on my Instagram and Twitter account, I did this so I can look back on this crazy time and also, if someone is struggling to keep occupied it might help someone out.
