Coronavirus is here, for who knows how long. It’s scary and unknown and people are crying out for information and reassurance around it. There’s constant updates on social media, however the validity and accuracy of many of these is questionable, with the many hundreds of armchair experts sometimes drowning out the actual experts and common sense.

I have no doubt that continually refreshing my Twitter feed, hasn’t done me any good at all – I don’t think it’s really left me any better off. I spent a lot of yesterday feeling quite anxious about everything and I know that my obsession with checking Twitter wasn’t helping. Today, when I was back to work, I felt a lot better because there was the distraction of work and it’s made me realise that I need to be more disciplined and not check my phone every few minutes, however hard that might be.

This brings me back to the reason I started crocheting, although granted there wasn’t a worldwide pandemic at the time. I wanted to spend less time looking at a screen and crochet, or crafts in general, helps with that. The repetitive nature of a simple granny square is very relaxing, and a complicated pattern with lots of colour changes is great for completely distracting you from everything else that’s going on around you.

With the advice around ‘social distancing’, and that life is going to be very different for the foreseeable future, there will be lots of time to get make some good progress on my current crochet projects. These will also be a good distraction from social media, something to concentrate on that isn’t reading conflicting advice and opinions, and debates between armchair experts that frequently drown out the sensible, balanced and scientifically proven advice.

Coronavirus is going to be a bit part of everyone’s lives for a long time, and things are going to be uncertain – events will be cancelled, working patterns will change, people we know will get ill. However what is important is that we do what we can to look after ourselves, look for the small things that aren’t affected and that we can control. Crochet (and craft is general) is one of these things, an outlet for anxiety and something to focus attention on that isn’t social media. I’m absolutely not saying that I’m going to quit social media, what I am saying is that I’m going to try to take a much more measured approach to looking at it and having a distraction, like crochet, will help with that.

Take care of yourself, who knows what the next few weeks and months will bring. However we will get to the other side of it.