Dear Boris,

Lovely to hear from you after such a long time and thank you for getting in touch. Yes, it has been challenging at times but you know how we always make the best of things. After hubby lost his job, well unavoidably made redundant which sounds better, we struggled a bit but with a true Blitz spirit I am sure we will get through.

The food bank’s been a great help but some of the things they say down there about you are really unkind. I know how having young children makes it difficult for you to always be on hand to make those tricky decisions about things like lockdowns and a big thank you for getting round to all these things in the end when there is so much else to do.

Sometimes I worry a lot about things and that keeps me awake at night realising that we can’t pay off the credit card anymore and worrying how the children sometimes cry because they’re hungry and I wonder if you are being kept awake by little Wilfred. I hope you’re making sure that he has enough to eat. Make sure that you and Carrie have plenty of food because you need to be fit and strong to lead us out of all this and a bit of belt tightening will do us no harm.

I also hope you enjoyed your trip to Scotland. We used have wonderful holidays there before all this started. It was funny when Dominic went to Barnard Castle because that is very near the old people’s home where my mum was living. We all laughed and said he could have given us a lift and Darren my 14-year-old could have had his eyes tested as I know he needs some new glasses to get his homework done but that’s another expense. It is a shame that Mum died of Covid shortly after along with almost everyone else in the old peoples home after they sent that infected old lady back from the hospital and it would have been nice to see her before she died but as we know asking people to restrict what they do can help to save others.

Thank you by the way for the computer which arrived last week. Because of those unavoidable supply problems, well we all encounter those don’t we, school only seems to have 20 laptops although there are 400 children there. Still, looking on the bright side, we get alternate Mondays. Of course, there were lots of arguments over laptops until we found out that our Internet connection won’t allow for more than two people to be online at the same time. Silly of us really as we should’ve known and we are still looking forward to universal broadband and faster speeds like they have in London and you promised but I suppose us country bumpkins probably couldn’t even cope with all those megabytes!

I’ll have to sign off now as it’s time to go and queue for the food bank. Sometimes, there are so many people down there that I’m sure they can’t all be needing food. Like your friend said, there are probably loads of lazy, shiftless people just getting food because it’s for nothing as well as some illegals. Funnily, I saw a nurse there last week. I thought well surely she can get enough work and enough pay to keep her and her family but she was crying when she got her bag of groceries. I expect she was just a little bit stressed and you dont need money to be happy.

Oh, by the way, if you write again next year you may find we’ve moved. Hubby says we cannot really afford the mortgage and the building society repayment holiday, that’s a funny way of putting it really, isn’t going to last much longer. It’s been nice to have a bedroom for each of the kids but I know that other people are worse off and we can move in with dad if we have to as since Mum died he’s got a bit of space. Funny how things turn out!

Anyway, take care and write soon.

Yours,