Tranquillity

We had a little look at Windermere on our way up to the fell this morning.

It is an oasis of peaceful tranquillity.

This might be related to the recent innovation of bouncers on the doors of the supermarkets.

The butcher has not got any, presumably he has sufficient faith in his cleaver and belligerent attitude to calm any shopping-related indignation. Also he does not seem to have run out of sausages, which might be good for his general confidence in life.

We did not go in to the butcher’s shop, because we do not need sausages just yet, and because we are still staying out of the way of the multitudes, although I have been told that I do not strictly need to isolate any more. All the same, you can’t be too careful, and in any case, a quick inspection of the world shows lengthy queues for absolutely everything, all politely spaced at two metres apart from one another.

It is all quite lovely. There is far more nodding and cheery smiling going on in our road than I think ever there has been. Suddenly everybody waves and calls greetings to everybody else, even to people that you always secretly thought were miserable old rotters. They are not so miserable any more. Now we are at the end of the world and civilisation has collapsed, we all beam heartily at one another.

I took Lucy’s temperature this evening with our new thermometer, because she had a dreadful headache. Also we needed to see if she is fit to go back to work for the last two or three days before all of the trainee policemen break up for their Easter leave.

We were all hoping that she would still have a high temperature, because we do not want her to be trapped in Northamptonshire by herself for the next few weeks whilst she is on leave, but she did not have a temperature. In fact her temperature was quite shockingly low, and she was ghostly-white and shivering. Some amateur medical sleuthing led us to the realisation that she had forgotten to bring her iron tablets with her, and was actually anaemic. She retired to bed early, with a dose of the emergency iron supplies that I keep here for her, and we will see how she gets on.

She came to keep me company whilst whilst I got dinner ready and we listened to Woman’s Hour, which was broadcasting exercises to be done by the Over Seventies at home, to keep them from crumbling to forgotten dust whilst there is no longer a world that they can join.

Obviously we tried the exercises, even though we are not over seventy, with some troubling results, and we have both been secretly practising walking on our toes and swinging our arms upwards ever since, by way of self-improvement. You are supposed to walk ten thousand steps a day to stay fit. Lucy thinks that it would take her about ten steps to get from one end of her tiny house to the other, so if she has to go back and stay in it then she will have to walk around it a thousand times a day otherwise she will not be fit enough to be a policeman any more.

She has spent much of her day wrapped in a blanket, where she is still trying to understand how to stop other blanket-wrapped individuals from carrying out rascally bedroom raids on other people’s bank accounts. Oliver has been having meetings with all of his friends who live in his computer, and we have pottered about in the conservatory.

This is the very nicest possible thing now.

It is warm in there, even though the weather outside has reverted to a March chill, and I ambled about in perfect happiness.

I have planted mint and thyme in the little bed next to the house door, and rescued some of the hostas from the ravening slugs in the front garden. They are newly installed in the banana plantation, where they will become fat and sleek and lovely, unlike the poor much-munched specimens in the garden.

I have tried our new strawberry watering invention, which appears to work beautifully so far. The glue had dried by today, so we filled it with water, which filled each of the beds in turn, and all of the strawberries are thriving.

I hope so much that it works properly.

It will be lovely to have our own strawberries again.

Have a picture.