I was woken at dawn by some birds squawking and squabbling over nesting materials in the front garden.
I was not impressed, everybody is going on about the wonderfulness of hearing birdsong now that there is no traffic, but this lot were making the sort of noise you might expect from two girls outside a nightclub at three am who have just discovered they are sharing a boyfriend.
I had to close the window.
Mornings are not the same anyway at the moment, because we do not have our non-speaking postman any more. I do not know what has happened to him, and probably never will, because even when he comes back he won’t tell anybody. I miss him very much. We have an ordinarily conversational postman these days, not that it matters, because we are too socially distanced to talk to him, but I miss the vague noises and growls of the old one. I hope, hope, hope that he is all right.
It is very early evening, but it is Easter weekend and so we have celebrated with a glass of wine for Low Tea.
I thought that it might be sensible to come and write this before I had dinner, and the second glass. Two glasses of wine are not good for literary masterworks. Three are a recipe for writing twaddle.
Lucy and Mark are drinking their wine in the conservatory and doing the jigsaw. It is nearly finished, but I do not feel any sense of alarm that it might be triumphantly completed in my absence whilst I am writing to you. It is my experience that wine does not help any of us make better judgements about placing jigsaw puzzle pieces, especially now we have got to the end and all that is left is about two hundred pieces with pictures of leaves on them.
Oliver is not drinking wine. Things are not yet that desperate at Ibbetson Towers. He is upstairs writing his chapter of Alexander Hamilton And The Zombie Apocalypse.
In fact we were fortunate to have wine. We are trying to be prudent and temperate in our alcohol consumption. The reason for this is that in our long ago past lives as taxi drivers, we always bought boxes of wine rather than bottles. This was because actually we did not drink very much really, because of being sober taxi drivers five or six nights in every week.
In consequence, we discovered long ago that if we opened a bottle of wine, we either drank rather more than we liked in order not to waste it, or it very frequently went off before we could finish it. This made for some superb cooking but was not great for a balanced budget or morning headaches.
Boxes of wine last for ages, so we bought those.
We still buy them, but somehow they do not last for ages any more.
Hence I had to go and get another one this morning.
Obviously I went to get other things as well, proper food like parsnips and chocolate. We are not yet utterly corrupted by unemployment.
I was the last customer allowed into Sainsbury’s before they closed. They do not usually close halfway through Saturday morning. They said they had not got enough staff to carry on.
I was deeply grateful to have been allowed in. These are difficult times.
Despite everybody Having To Make Sacrifices, I would not have liked to drink the Co-op’s wine again, especially not at Easter, and came away grateful to the Gods for such miraculous good fortune.
I made moisturiser when I got home. Mark uses this to soften the deadly psoriasis on his hands and feet, and we had run out.
I do not use it as much as he does, because I do not have psoriasis, and also it does not come in a nice squirty bottle with a pretty label and a properly middle-class marketing campaign, although I feel as though I should, because it is not expensive to make and smells lovely. You only need a little tiny bit, it is made of cocoa butter and shea butter and almond oil and rose water, and it makes your hands feel soft and cool.
It even makes Mark’s hands feel a bit softer.
This is an achievement. They get very bashed and scraped and leathery from fixing the cars, and have got occasional little tattoos on them where he has managed to get oil in cuts. They are not hands that could model nail varnish.
After that I made a seasonal Easter cake. This is exactly like a normal cake, except it has not got anything interesting in it like walnuts or banana or fruit, because Oliver will not eat anything which includes textural surprises or interesting tastes. It has got last year’s blackcurrant jam in it, which I discovered at the back of the dresser, and which was fortuitously still quite all right, and raspberries for decoration around the edge. It is to make us feel celebratory, although it might not work quite as well as the satisfying pocket full of takings that would usually be the result of Easter Saturday.
I expect probably it will all come out all right in the end.
In the meantime I am having the longest guilt-free shirk imaginable.
