Four weeks have come and gone. So far so good but there’s a long difficult road ahead.
Being even more canny with the anti-bacterial spray this week during the routine morning clean in case no replacement arrives in our latest shopping delivery, again. Still got plenty bleach and as our local GP has posted on the practice website 1% bleach to 99% water is an effective cleaner, if less easy to use.
Optimist that I am I’ve ordered more flour – both bread and self-raising and that rarest of consumables, yeast, with no real expectation of them arriving at the weekend. My son has managed to buy a bag of flour in town and my daughter is now the proud owner of two bags of SR flour. I suggested she places them on her mantlepiece as the rare specimens they are.
In my first plague diary I mentioned we were updating our wills but with self-isolation it is impossible to complete these in the customary way so we set up a video conference with our solicitor – a first for us and her. Had no great faith in managing it but it worked beautifully. Isn’t new technology amazing? So, there we have it our wills are signed off. Might re-visit signatures once out of seclusion and that’s something I look forward to.
In a rush of blood to the head(s) we decided to keep the family amused by videoing the two of us dancing to Springsteen’s Born in the USA. Blimey, does it go on. Seemed to have raised a few laughs from the ‘young ones’ that people so decrepit were capable of embarrassing themselves quite as much. I was even able to get out of bed next morning which was both unexpected and encouraging.
Weather is still very dry and so no excuse for not getting out for some daily exercise. However, I’ve been put off by the increasing numbers of heavy breathing cyclists and runners who haven’t heard of social-distancing and so tend to take my shorter walk along the farm track in preference to the slightly longer ones. The short one is nicer with lots of different bird song along the way, usually the sight of roe deer – three this morning – never close enough to get a good picture or rather I’m too slow to get a decent one – we came round a bend today and surprised a couple of them right in front of us but they fled before I got my camera out. Sheep don’t move as fast. More obliging for a slow-witted photographer.
Still no sign of the birdseed order arriving. Stocks getting low now. So many birds around – blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, chaffinches, sparrows (hedge and house), jackdaws, robins, siskins, woodpeckers, starlings, pheasants, collar doves, wood pigeons – so you see we go through a lot of seed. Off and on activity in the duplex nest across the road – where starlings and jackdaws are hoping to nest.
Finished Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Definitely recommend it. The final story, of Ella, is a little repetitive but builds up to —I’ll let you discover for yourselves. Started to read Jack London again. Bâtard last night (in which a dog hangs a brute of a man) followed by part of To Build a Fire – man against nature (how apt) before my eyes closed.
Our daily (evening) two hours of television has moved from box sets to films as recommended by the BFI. Adelheid, set in post-war Czechoslovakia was satisfactory in the way a single slice of bread as a sandwich is. Next evening came something very different – Kurt Russell in Breakdown which we remembered having seen previously but it’s a very watchable slickly filmed yarn populated by slow-drawling rednecks up to no good. The fly in the ointment was the lead woman (although she hardly featured) presented as a victim incapable of behaving like an adult – “give her the gun” we kept shouting at the screen but Kurt Russell had to do what a man has to do and held onto it while driving. Last night we watched Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. A rom-com with lots of very funny one-liners but in the end didn’t hit the spot. Why did Cary Grant have mauve hair? Perhaps there’s no need to ask.
Stay safe.
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