Achievement

A nice thing happened this morning.

Number One Daughter called to tell us that she has been promoted.

She has become a Staff Sergeant.

I am not entirely sure about the social hierarchy of the Army, but my father, who was in it once, assures me that it is an important change, and that she has done very well.

I have always been of the opinion that outside organisations do not sufficiently appreciate the wonderfulness of my children, and so think that it is absolutely about time. I think that she should be in charge of the Army, or at the very least of the weightlifting department, and think that today’s development is a step in the right direction, and we are all very pleased.

Lucy is recovering, talking about children. She has spent today learning to be a policeman from her bedroom. This is not as difficult as it might sound in our modern era, because lots of twenty-first century crimes do not involve people hitting each other and running away. It is very difficult to practice for that whilst wrapped up in your duvet drinking coffee.

She has been learning how to stop people from hacking into other people’s bank accounts and stealing all their money. This is a crime that can be both committed and investigated perfectly well without ever leaving your duvet, and hence perfectly well suited for this stage of her training.

She has had to request that Oliver desists from his computer-game related yells of triumph whilst she is actually talking to her instructor. Oliver has been all over the cyber-world this week, the end of the civilised world as we know it could have been planned with teenage Fortnite players in mind.

He and I walked up to the top of the fell this morning. I understand that this activity has given some readers cause for concern, but I can reassure you that it is perfectly all right. In fact it is rather splendid. We passed more people than we usually do, I counted four on the fell and five on the Rec this morning. This is because lots of people are not working and are heading out to the fells, but everybody stays miles and miles away from one another. We all compensate by smiling and waving a lot more than usual and shouting cheery encouragement.

I had a moment of going-for-a-walk panic later on, when I heard somebody on the radio worrying about what would happen if another dog sniffed hers on their walk.

This had not occurred to me as being a potential anti-isolationist danger, and so I listened to the answer with bated breath.

Fortunately the answer to that was ‘nothing, they don’t spread the infection so don’t worry’. This was good news, because I do not think I could explain the two meter rule to Roger Poopy, who likes to put his nose sociably up other dogs’ bottoms. Personally I am of the opinion that his personal habits are so revolting that bat flu would be the least unpleasant of the diseases that could be caught from him. I managed to recapture him this morning at the very moment that his knees bent and he was about to roll in a fresh-looking mound of fox poo. He was very disappointed, but I was immutable. Some things are just a disease too far.

Once home I replenished our store of buns, and made strawberry yoghurt for the children. This turned out quite surprisingly well, which was a relief, because even though Lucy brought the entire contents of her fridge home with her, we are almost out of some things now, and it would have been terrible to have wasted stuff. Fortunately we do not have milk in our coffee and tea, and we make all of our own bread, so on the whole we are all right.

I think the most irritating difficulty has been that we have not been able to go to Boots for our prescriptions. Mark takes blood pressure medication, and I have statins for Hard To Spell Disease. Boots is less than a minute’s walk away from our house, so I rang them to see if they would put them on their doorstep for us so I could just go and get them, but they wouldn’t, so we will just have to wait.

Mark has spent the day building bits on to the wall between us and next door. For the isolation purists amongst you, there is nobody next door at the moment, it is a holiday house, so please do not worry about viruses vaulting over the wall. There is nobody on the other side of us either, we can mill in and out of the garden with clear consciences.

He has done a jolly good job with the wall, although he is running out of sand for glueing it together. I took a picture, but thought I would show you the wall tomorrow when he has done a bit more.

Tonight the picture is of Achievement.