Social distancing is continuing in the Ibbetson household, not that really you would notice much.
Cash has become a bit tight, and so I have attempted to slow our quite astonishing consumption of lockdown chocolate by making it into cornflake cakes. This works firstly by bulking the chocolate out so that it lasts a bit longer, and also by keeping it in a tin in the fridge, where it is marginally less obvious than it is when it is in a dish on the dresser.
I am sorry to tell you that this ploy has not worked at all. Not in the least. We have become the household with the fastest consumption of cornflake cakes since records began, even Oliver, who is suspicious of my cooking, having studied Food Hygiene at school.
He helped me make the last set of cornflake cakes, which were actually made with Cheerios, and was appalled to discover that the Cheerios had been purchased once during one of Lucy’s briefer eating fads, and that their sell-by-date was 2015.
These were actual cornflakes, and were so recent that they were as good as fresh, the sell by date being November 2018. I put the box in the stove afterwards, before Oliver noticed it, and they were perfectly all right. That is to say, the first thirty of them were clearly perfectly all right, because they have vanished and I know that the dogs have failed to get a look in. I can’t vouch for the last six yet.
Roger Poopy disgraced himself on our walk this morning, when he discovered a deer, and instantly forgot everything he has ever learned about being a Good Dog, and pegged it.
Mark and I galumphed in pursuit through the woods, yelling after him as his excited barks crashed through the undergrowth into the distance.
We finally caught up with him about half a mile up the fell. The deer had got tired and given up, and was standing still in a little clearing, looking crossly at him and breathing heavily. This was not supposed to happen, and Roger had stopped at a safe distance, looking disappointed and waiting for it to dash off again.
He was most surprised to see us, and after a moment’s indecision when he contemplated dashing off to wild freedom again, he surrendered himself to his fate and slunk over to us guiltily.
The deer trotted off, and Mark put his foot on Roger Poopy’s neck and told him that he was wicked. He knew this anyway, but walked obediently to heel all the way home without being told, by way of atonement. When we got back he was too tired even to beg to be allowed to share our breakfast, and fell instantly asleep under the table, where he twitched and woofed, and dreamed of the thrills of the chase.
Mark and I nursed aching knees and back pain during breakfast. We are a bit elderly for cross-country runs through forests.
We thought that we might occupy some of our lockdown time in family creativity, and decided last night that we would write a novel. We are going to take it in turns to write each chapter, and see what happens. I wrote the first chapter today, the working title is Alexander Hamilton And The Zombie Apocalypse. Lucy is writing Chapter Two upstairs as I write. I do not expect that it will be a best seller, but if we manage to keep it going for a few days I will include not on these pages for your benefit.
Mark has agreed that he will join in the project, despite having possibly the worst dyslexia that I have ever come across. It is so bad that he can’t even get a spell checker to work, he will have his tongue sticking out for days.
Today he is still doing car repairs. He has been building a thing for squishing springs in order to take a broken bit off the end and put the newly arrived bit from Autoparts in its place. It is made out of a car jack and some other bits of otherwise irritating junk that he had lying around in his shed. There is a picture attached.
You might be interested to know that I got our NHS Responder apps working in the end today. I turned it on with great excitement and waited for the summoning siren to go off, but it didn’t.
Finally I got bored with waiting and went and got on with the rest of my life.
It has not gone off yet, but I hope it will cheer Boris up to know that we, the General Public, are On Standby.
I am ready and waiting to rush into action, and am hoping very hard that the app is quite specific about what sort of action it might have in mind. .
Bring it on.
