I feel such a fool...

The atmosphere in the house today has not been good... I woke up really late, so I was annoyed with myself. This will have to stop otherwise I'm going to find it very difficult to get back to normal waking times later in the week!

I went downstairs to find Sophie had set up her laptop on the kitchen island, and she wasn't in a good mood at all. Her manager hasn't been as understanding as she'd hoped about Sophie working from home and had sent her niggly email, almost blaming her for the amount of work that needed to be done in the office. We all agreed that if we'd known for one minute about having to take PCR tests on our return and then having to self-isolate, we'd never have booked the holiday.

We had arranged for the tests to be picked up today but when it got to 1pm and the postman still hadn't called, we started to worry. The time was ticking away and ideally, we needed the results back on Tuesday to allow us to carry on with normal life.

I then went onto the Royal Mail website, and to my horror discovered that they don't collect test kits! You have to take them to a specially designated postbox, and there was one in Mawsley, barely two miles away. This meant we could have dropped them off on Saturday! We had received six long complicated emails from the company we'd used for the testing and I just hadn't seen the bit about the postboxes. I felt like an absolute fool and was so angry about it.

Keith and I sped over to Mawsley and dropped them off, and shortly after we got back, the postman knocked on the door to collect them. He knew nothing about the special postboxes and would have happily taken them for us. It's a good job I only paid 60p each to get them collected!

Later in the afternoon, I had a text from my friend Lynda asking how we all were. I mentioned we were cooped up in the house awaiting the test results, and she said she hoped we'd have better luck than Fiona who had waited over a week for hers, after a short cruise she'd taken, with just one day spent in France! 

I immediately texted Fiona who confirmed that she was still waiting and this was now well over two weeks since she'd returned! I was horrified! She had used a company called Rainbow (ironically chosen by Which? as one of the best) and was trying to get her money back. They'd had to give up on the self-isolation and were doing lateral flow tests every day.

This was not good news at all and I think it will be a miracle if we get the results back within the next couple of days. I am going into work on Thursday no matter what and will take lateral flow tests every day.

So, today has been somewhat trying and we are facing at least one more day at home. At least I wrote all my Christmas cards out today, so that was something! I now need to post them! And I ordered my Mum's Christmas present!

After dinner this evening (toad-in-the-hole) we watched a Danish film called Another Round, starring the gorgeous Mads Mikkelsen. When it was showing at the cinema I wanted to see it, but I'm quite glad I didn't pay to go and see it... it was a bit slow!