My Quarantine Routine: Tom, a marketing consultant and blogger in Brighton

Today marks three weeks of lockdown and the novelty has definitely worn off. Although we know we need to stay home to stop the spread of the virus, being trapped inside is hard. Today for My Quarantine Routine, we’re with Tom Bouret, a marketing consultant and blogger who writes about travel. Tom is used to lots of trips abroad and plans his blog three months ahead so he is already thinking about content for July, even though he can’t go anywhere.

Tom is isolating at the home he shares with his girlfriend Raquel Mitchell, which overlooks the Brighton seafront, where he can go for his daily walk. He’s trying to continue work while learning to work out at home without disturbing his neighbours and he has committed to following a 10-step skincare routine every night. This is how he spent 9 April. 7:30 am My girlfriend’s alarm goes off as we reluctantly climb out of bed. I setup our mini home-workout area, while we quickly eat a banana and clean our teeth before starting on another weight training session, today is chest. We try to play the music not too loud so as not to annoy the neighbours, but the view provides some decent motivation. 8:30 am Our workout is done as we walk away relieved. Raquel runs a bath while I make up our protein shake, before we get dressed for the day ahead…In pyjamas. We held strong with real-work clothes for a week, before eventually finding pyjamas were the winner! I go through all my work emails, 15 have arrived overnight, so I quickly get back up and walk to the kitchen to make a coffee.

9 am I have the not so joyous job of going through a massive website migration so I desperately look through the site for any issues that might have occurred. I quickly jump on a call with the owner, Rob Hill, before apologising as I realise it’s still only 9am and everyone’s working from home. 10 am Everything is looking positive with the website, so I move onto a personal chore, time to write a blog post on my travel blog Spaghetti Traveller. I’m desperately struggling for motivation on what to write around travel while stuck at home, so I focus on ‘how to quit the job and go travelling’. I work three months in advance, so this post is scheduled for the first week of July.

11:30 am The article is sorted and scheduled, but the tummy is rumbling, so I head to the kitchen to stare wide-eyed into the fridge. The temptation to eat anything covered in cheese, knowing no-one will see what I look like for months, is overwhelming. I won’t lie, I ate cheese on toast with spaghetti hoops. I apparently haven’t grown up much in my thirties! 12 pm My early lunch is over, so I leave my comfy sofa and stop my episode of ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’ to return to my home office. I plan on writing a review for my CBD blog CBD Sloth on some new CBD gummies that came through the post a couple of weeks ago, which I’ve been testing each day. However, I’m interrupted by a call with a client and great friend Jon. He’s looking for a content strategy to be created, which I happily accept, fearing my work might be drying up over the next month. After a deep discussion around the direction the brand wants to go, what resources are available and how we can implement this over the next six months, I say goodbye and return to writing my blog post, albeit after a quick read of the news to see how bad the Coronavirus UK numbers are. 1:30 pm

That’s another blog post written up and scheduled, however now my attention turns to something I’ve been delaying as long as possible. I’m a judge for the EU Search Awards, however I still have to assess 46 entries by next Tuesday, I probably should have been focusing on this over the blog posts, but who doesn’t enjoy procrastinating. I sneak a quick coffee from my Tassimo machine, the closest I can get to a professional latte since all the coffee shops shut down. 5 pm My head is killing, having stared at the screen quite intently for the past few hours, so I drink a pint of water and give up with the entry judging temporarily, promising myself I will return to it shortly. I head into the kitchen with my girlfriend and I start cutting up vegetables as we prepare a homemade Tikka Masala (or our best attempt at it). We went a little bit overboard with the cream, sure we might regret that later, but we know it will taste amazing. Once it’s finally done, we sit down on the sofa and discuss what to watch, before I find out a bombshell…Raquel has never seen Gladiator. Well it’s decided! “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius” going through my head

During the movie we also do our 10 Step Korean Skincare Routine, yep, we oddly decided to take on this challenge during the lockdown. The process includes an oil cleaner, foam cleanser, toner, essence, emulsion, serum, sheet mask, moisturiser, eye cream and then it is supposed to end with sun tan lotion but we skip that one. 6:30 pm The movie ends and I return to my laptop to do some more judging…which lasts a total of 20 minutes before I decide it’s technically the weekend (not that it hasn’t all blurred together by now). We put a thin jacket on and head out to the shops to grab a bottle of gin and some mixer.