Don Your Way: When lockdown date night is pushing a trolley around Sainsbury's!

Freezing cold weather, snow and ice, Christmas but a distant memory and of course, still in the depths of lockdown and all the joys that brings, whether it be crawling up the walls with boredom or tearing your hair out at home schooling.

We've all forgotten what eating out is like, trips to the pub seem like something from an another era and with football matches, concerts, cinema trips and well, basically, fun, still a long way off, there’s not much to alleviate the monotony as one day slides into the next.

At least last time round there was sunshine and warm weather to enjoy on our leisurely strolls. Now it’s all dark nights and the risk of taking a tumble on a patch of black ice.

It comes to something when the highlight of your week is a trip to the local supermarket to push a trolley around to stack up on the food essentials.

But for many of us, my partner and I included, wandering up and down the aisles offers a rare glimpse into the outside world and a brief respite from staring at the same four walls, day in day out.

Fortunately, we can work quite happily together from home, whereas I'm guessing some couples will probably be slinging keyboards at each other by now, having endured nearly a year under the same roof (although my fondness for listening to PopMaster on Radio Two’s Ken Bruce show might be enough to invoke grounds for divorce in my other half if this goes on much longer!)

With literally nothing to do outside the home, an evening in Sainsbury’s is about as good as it gets for a date night at the moment. And they are even clamping down on more than one person at a time, so maybe that’s another avenue of enjoyment that’s about to be closed off.

The encouraging news is that the vaccine roll out continues apace, our only way out of this.

And maybe then, poking and prodding at the onions and trying to find the milk won’t be our only highlights of the week.