It's been an extremely long, and intensely weird, four months since I last saw my younger daughter. We were last in Manchester about the middle of March, a week or so before the lockdown was announced, and, like so many families around the country, we've had no chance to meet up again till now.
Once lockdown rules started to ease, it was fairly easy to see my elder daughter because she lives comparatively close by - we've met in our gardens, and once on a rainy day sat at opposite ends of a room.
But with my younger daughter living much further away - two hours - it wasn't possible to just 'nip round'.
She lives alone, so when restrictions were relaxed allowing the creation of 'bubbles' with another household, it was obvious that she'd be better meeting with local friends who she could see regularly rather than with us. Add in the fact that, due to my husband's health, we're staying home and keeping our interactions with the world to the minimum, and things looked tricky.
But this last weekend we decided the time was right to go.
The months apart have seemed interminable, but once we were back together they just melted away.
Our plan had been to go out to the local park (outside is safer, they tell us) but that got ditched in favour of an afternoon of chatting, playing Scrabble, and being rubbish at Mario Kart. Good family fun that I miss.
My daughter always encourages me to step out of my safe comfort food zone, so with lunch there was her own recipe fried chicken, and stuffed vine leaves, and for dinner instead of eating out (I'm still not comfortable with that) we had a wonderful spread of Indian food delivered from Bundobust - including tarka dhal, bhajis, paneer tikka, and, my favourite, bundo chaat. And as so many family celebrations have been missed we had cake - an excellent sticky ginger one, the remains of which I finished at home the next day with a late, late birthday present bottle of Foxhole gin. 
The weather for the day decided to play 'pathetic fallacy' with sunny blue skies on our drive north, and heavy rain as we returned. I'm not quite as depressed as that though as I'm hoping we'll all be able to meet up comparatively regularly for a while, even if we're all keeping an eye out for the dreaded second wave of the virus.
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