Isolation things to do and done

At least you can without being harangued.

Were my mother to still live in her old house, which was not just large but also nicely secluded with neither garden nor driveway visible from the road, and no nosy or difficult neighbours, then we'd be tempted to go and stay for a few days.

However, she downsized to a modern house in the middle of a new-build edge-of-village estate about six years ago and you have no privacy on those estates. No-one can come and go without everyone knowing. Normally we see this as a good thing with an aging parent, as it means if anything happens to anyone, lots of people immediately rush to help. Now it's not, because whilst most of the neighbours are pleasant, one of them, whose back garden fence borders the far side of my mother's driveway, is an absolute nightmare and a full-blown lockdown stickler.

My brother-in-law went around to drop off some shopping and was standing by his car pulled into the drive, talking to my mother who was at her garden gate on the other side of the car. Crazy neighbour man comes rushing out of his house yelling at them that they were breaching lockdown rules yadda yadda yadda... He later bothered to print off the government's social distancing rules and shoved them through my mother's letterbox. Mum was horrified, although she then quickly discovered he'd done the same to pretty much all the other neighbours at one point or other. Her neighbour on the other side, a retired senior policeman, told her to just ignore the nutter...

But in summary, annoyingly, since the nutter's upstairs windows overlook Mum's house, garden and driveway, there's frankly no way we can do a visit until it's actually fully permitted.