Lockdown lacuna

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

I am one of the lucky ones. The lockdown has hardly affected me. What ‘work’ I do is from home anyway, I rarely go out (save for a daily walk), I don’t have holidays, and ‘social distancing’ comes naturally to me. Okay, I haven’t set foot inside a shop since March, but that’s a ‘pleasure’ I can easily live without, thanks to the nice Mr Bezos and his army of minions at Amazon.

No, I am not going to bore you with another one of those ‘my life in lockdown’ posts. I merely wanted to point out one effect the lockdown has had upon me.

For the last fourteen-odd years I have regularly written, either here or elsewhere, about the latest happenings in the world of family law, including news, speeches, legislation and, above all, cases. When I ‘re-opened’ this blog back in February I had intended to keep it regularly updated (well, at least once a week) with posts about family law things that interested me.

And for a time it all went swimmingly (with more than a little help (and not for the first time) from the ever-wonderful Marilyn Stowe).

But then along came a certain sub-microscopic infectious agent from the east.

The family law factory, like so many others around the world, has been hit by lockdown. Production has virtually ground to a halt. Yes, there is a trickle of news, important new legislation is still creeping through parliament, and we still get the odd Covid-19 protocol-approved remote judgment published, which we eagerly seize upon.

But the pickings for family law hacks such as myself are slim. So the updates here have been fewer of late, for which I apologise.

Quite when ‘normal service’ will resume, and what that will look like, is of course anybody’s guess.

For now, I will continue to write what I can about the few family law titbits I find that are of interest to me. As for the rest of my time, I shall spend it like most in lockdown: looking for that thing I always wanted to achieve in life, but never found the time to do. And then not doing it anyway.