Tennis balls

I have cut Oliver’s hair.

He was starting to look like a girl.

Obviously I mean in a gender-inoffensive not prejudiced in any way or thinking that boys should not have long hair or anything like that, because of course it is absolutely fine and all persons should have their hair in any way they like no matter which way they prefer to identify.

Anyway we could all see that he looked like a girl so this evening after a couple of glasses of wine I got the dog clippers out and now he looks like a tennis ball, except brown not green.

We have taken to having a glass of wine in the early evening. We try and get tidied up from our day’s endeavours, and then at five o’ clock we sit down all together and put the radio on, so that we can listen to the dear old Prime Minister encouraging the nation. The glass of wine helps us feel properly encouraged.

It is all a bit like the Spirit of the Blitz, except the children do not pay proper reverential attention the way that all the children do on the old Horlicks advertisements. They giggle and wrestle and wag about, and we have to Reprimand them sternly. One day they will be telling their grandchildren about the Terrible Plague Times, and it will be rubbish if they can’t remember a single word the Prime Minister said because they were rolling about on the floor trying to stick their fingers up one another’s noses.

Of course the Prime Minister did not say anything today, because he has got Bat Flu himself. I hope he gets better. It was entertaining to listen to the questions today, because all of the journalists were trying to find a polite way of saying: So what will you do if he dies, then? and Michael Gove was pretending not to understand what they meant. We were eating chocolate and drinking wine and Oliver was complaining about having tickly long hair, so we shaved his head whilst they were all still going on in the background.

I have got tickly long hair as well. I am starting to look like a girl. I miss haircuts. I am not sure I could face the social consequences of looking like a tennis ball, though. Obviously you can be as gendery as you like but if elderly ladies shave their heads people think they have to start making tactful noises about chemotherapy. On the whole I had probably better not, tempting as it feels at the moment.

Of course we have had a very busy day. Mark has been building up the wall on the outside of the conservatory and creating an automatic watering system for the strawberries. There is a picture of the wall, although building work has ground to a halt because of the lack of sand. All the same I think it is splendid. It will help to keep it warm and also give people who come next door for their holidays something beautiful to look at. Also it will stop the rain leaking down the wall.

It is very tiresome to realise that we can’t just order things like sand any more. Life is beginning to feel a bit like living in an episode of a very peculiar television series called Black Mirror that we watched briefly once. Somebody said that it would be a good thing to watch, so we tried it on Amazon one night during the winter, but it was unsettlingly weird, so we didn’t watch it any more. The world is not at all the place that it used to be.

Fortunately we have been preserved from the worst of it, because my parents have subsidised us once again. They rang me up and told me about it this afternoon, and I was very grateful but assured them that there was no need because we were coping brilliantly. When I looked at the bank account this evening I discovered that we had actually been down to our last three quid, to last us until June, when dear old Rishi starts handing out cash to pirates, and so we have been saved at the eleventh hour, what a happiness.

I have finished off painting the walls. Mark came in afterwards and helpfully washed the orange paint splashes off the windows and places where they shouldn’t be. Also I have helped to build a bed by the back door in which we will be planting herbs.

Mark built the bed a little while ago. Today we put a big tub full of water in the bottom, and a pile of soil on the top. There are wicks dangling in the water and a tube for filling it up. I have put coriander and parsley in it, and tomorrow I am going to go and dig the mint out of the front garden. Mint is a nuisance in a garden, a bit like hair in isolated lockdowns. You have got to keep it trimmed back otherwise it just gets everywhere. In a little flowerbed by the back door it should be just fine.

I will take a picture of that tomorrow.

What excitements you have got to look forward to.