Being one of the ones who got to go to school was kind of nice in the beginning. I was really lucky I could be with other children and I got to play football every day! The P.E. teacher got permission to play a different kind of football game; just little amounts of people, playing 3 or 5 a-side. You couldn’t cross the half-way line, so no tackling; social distanced stuff. You passed between your team and scored from the halfway line (although sometimes we crossed the line to shoot when the teacher wasn’t looking!). It was actually quite fun.

I didn’t do much footy at home, there’s not much space for it in our garden. But my brother spent a lot of time doing tricks and keepyuppies (keepie uppies). He started lockdown on around 500 and by July he was doing over 1000. Him and his friend kept sending videos to each other of their latest record. It was something to keep them going I guess, but back then I could play football at school. I did see my friends on ‘House-party’ quite a bit, playing the games, trivias and quizzes on it. We also got inventive with it and made our own games, agreeing together to change the rules and create something new.

We did do a lot of artwork at school in the beginning and I like the creative stuff because I’m a doer and time goes by more quickly when you’re ‘doing’. You always get to do something different so the days feel less repetitive. The best was the massive Marble Run that we made from bricks, tubes, all sorts of bits and pieces. My friend and me started it and others added to it, working in twos, so we all got to build it together, in a social distanced way.

We were all years mixed together then because we weren’t very many children. You got closer to people you kind of knew before from other year groups. Then when more children were allowed back to school, from this one big class we got split from the inside, and us year 5’s were separated from the friends we had made in year 3 and 4.

I don’t mind lots of rules, but I don’t like it when the rules change, I like to settle into stuff. When the split happened everything changed again, like when you have a new teacher. Suddenly we had a one-way system, and we all had to queue for ages at one sink to wash our hands. There was a lot of washing hands all day. With more kids in it was harder to social distance and there was no more football. It was all quite annoying and I felt unsettled.

When I go back to school I’m hoping it will be like it was before the holidays, I hope it won’t be back to normal-normality. That feels like years ago. It‘ll be winter soon and people always get colds and flu. Coronavirus is a bit like flu so I think it will come along at a similar time. Then there’ll probably be another lockdown and everything at school will have to change all over again. At least if we went back to part-normal it wouldn’t be so much change to cope with.

I’m just off to play my first official football match, actually it’s a tournament. I usually play CDM (central midfield defender) so that keeps me busy on the pitch. Hopefully we’ll win some of our matches and that will make for a nice memory.

By A. Mitchell, age 10 yrs, August 2020

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