Sunday.

A day of rest (technically) and one on which the boredom definitely started to set in.

Highlights

• The salmon for dinner, with cauliflower and broccoli in blue cheese sauce… definitely a highlight, although I am still wondering why Peter’s dish included a cob of corn, and mine did not?

• The staff who go out of their way to be positive – from the cheery nurse who arrives at our door to take our temperatures each day, to the Army lady guarding the ramp who commented on my (I just want to drink wine and bake Christmas cookies) T-shirt, to the lady on reception who picked us the Chilean wine from our stash, because she’s from there… they all understand that this is not easy, and that a cheery comment makes a huge difference

• One should of course be grateful that our booking to exercise on The Ramp was in the morning, before the horrible wind and rain storm that battered Auckland later in the day arrived! This morning the barrier at the bottom as again set up up against the end of the incline, and we made it our mission to nudge each cone just a little bit further out into the flat on each lap, as a public service to the inmates who had the booking after us. I called it the magically meandering road cone… and we certainly gained about a metre without being noticed by the not-so-watchful eye of the private security guard on duty, which was a small win for personal freedoms!

• Clearly, the instruction to not touch the walls is being taken with a large pinch of salt by our fellow inmates (or maybe they would argue that they are only touching the chalk that they’re using to write on said walls…. tempted to get an order of pavement chalk to add to the display!

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Lowlights

• Boredom, definitely the boredom.
  Which caused me to reflect on the unavoidable fact that boredom has nothing at all to do with having nothing at all to do. My “to do” list is still very much there, with a range of large and small tasks that I could easily tackle. No, boredom is actually about motivation, about simply not having the interest in doing anything at all. Well, at least, not anything that I can do locked in a hotel room. Ended up watching Master Chef, which somehow slightly assuaged my need to cook!

Observations for future inmates

Having access to a wide range of news (local and international) is fantastic – you’ll have more time on your hands to be more informed about the world around you than ever before. But do not, under any circumstances, get sucked into reading the comments – evidence of how many stupid, ignorant and uninformed people there are in the world.

In fact, I was slightly worried that the steam coming out of my ears would be interpreted by the nurse as a raised temperature! Just as well she doesn’t measure blood pressure!