Grace, who was on holiday in South America, was able to secure a flight home, but will now be spending the next two weeks self-isolating to ensure she does not have coronavirus.
Pat Patt will be writing a column for The News every day, revealing how she is passing the hours.
I’m sure ours isn’t the only home with jobs that we know need doing, but which never get done.
Both Jeremy and I are pretty untidy people, so some of our cupboards (not to mention the shed) are messy disaster zones where we can never find what we are looking for.
While we are stuck at home, doing some major tidying seems like an excellent and productive way to pass the time.
This morning Jeremy tackled the hall cupboard where he keeps a lot of his tools.
He found lots of containers and sorted all the random bits and pieces that were all jumbled up into some form of logical order, before returning it, neatly arranged to the cupboard shelves.
While he was doing that I did some sewing and made a couple of outfits for Tiffany.
I have one more to do which will be more challenging but hopefully my skills are improving.
My son had requested two door snakes so I cut out some suitable sized fabric and jazzed it up a bit with fancy stitching.
I asked Grace to make some snake eyes which she did, but unfortunately I stuck them on the fabric at the wrong angle so they look benign and sleepy rather than reptilian.
One of the neighbours had kindly picked up some star anise in the supermarket and got her son to drop it in the mailbox so Grace found what she hoped was a suitable bottle of wine in the cupboard and prepared some mulled wine to have with our jacket potatoes at teatime.
Jeremy tasted the wine to make sure it was okay before she started and pronounced it to be a good drop, so perhaps we should have drunk it neat, but the warm spiced wine was lovely.