For many, this past year has brought about a love for our local communities. In this article, Scheme customer and Everyday Freedom advert actress Freddie Stabb shares her experience of the pandemic at home in South West London.
Having lived in Chelsea all her life, Freddie is incredibly loyal to the area and relishes the community-feel of it. She cannot sit in her favourite local café, Mona Lisa on World’s End, or pop to the shops on her mobility scooter without seeing someone she knows, and as a result has an extremely wide and diverse network.
However, the pandemic has forced her to rediscover pockets of natural beauty nearby and she treasures taking her mobility scooter to Battersea Park. On the southern bank of London’s River Thames sits Battersea Park, a protected green space that first opened to the public in 1854. Within its 200 acres of parkland are several hidden gardens, a boating lake, and even a children’s zoo, making it one of the city’s most interesting parks. Its northern perimeter is a promenade that opens out onto a view of the river and the grand Chelsea mansions beyond that. Freddie has loved going there to feed and take photos of the parakeets and squirrels.
Animals are a love of Freddie and she cherishes her two cats, Rocky and Mango who have been wonderful companions over the last year. She said
“Many of us are turning to pets to help us endure this challenging time in history, with the mental health benefits of owning a pet, a great comfort to me.”
Just like the majority of people, Freddie found the pandemic a struggle and embodied a ‘take every day as it comes’ mantra, giving herself a task no matter how small to do every day. Also, like the majority of the entertainment industry, some of Freddie’s jobs were put on hold or simply cancelled. However, she was lucky that some could be done either at a social-distance or online.
Freddie with her Motability Scheme car
The extraordinary time we all lived through created a need for everyone to find joy in the small things, for Freddie this includes her ‘chosen family’ who she formed a bubble with and taking up new hobbies! One of the new past-times taken up by Freddie over the past year is silver jewellery-making, an incredibly complicated task requiring patience but with results good enough to sell!
Freddie is optimistic about coming out of lockdown and has planned many exciting things over the next couple of months. She is certain to be using her Motability Scheme car, a beloved Ford S-MAX to visit the countryside to see childhood friends as soon as possible or enjoy some sea air on the Isle of Wight!
About the Motability Scheme
The Motability Scheme supports families in staying mobile by offering a unique, all-inclusive leasing package for brand new cars from all the major manufacturers. If you care for a child or someone who doesn’t drive, you can be added as a named driver instead. And as well as standard cars from a range of manufacturers, cars with adaptations, Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles, scooters and powered wheelchairs are available too.
If you’d like to find out more about the Scheme, request an information pack below and we’ll send you all the information that you need to make the right choice.
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