We have had a sociable day.
We have not had one of these for ages.
It was not the sort of sociable where you go and see your friends, eat lots of crisps and peanuts or olives and hummus dip, depending on how hard they are trying to be middle class, drink too much, and then have to sleep in the camper van in their garden. Those days are not going to happen for some time yet, and might not happen to us for ages even after the apocalypse is over, because we will have to spend our entire lives dashing about earning a living, to make up for the cash void of the moment.
Michael Gove has said today that the pubs and restaurants will be the last things to open. I have gone off Michael Gove, and very much hope that Boris disagrees. There is no point in the rest of the world being open and us still being completely unemployed, how awful that would be. I do hope Boris remembers that you can’t always trust Michael Gove and just ignores him. Pubs open first, that would be good. With taxis outside.
Today has seen the most magnificent blue skies and warm sunshine, and so everybody on Oak Street has come outside into the alley to mill up and down and chat to one another.
We all stood two metres apart and there were no police, who are probably all still blockading the motorway, so it was perfectly all right.
It was just like catching up on everybody’s news, only nobody had any news, because nothing much is happening to anybody. We did hear an interesting story about a rascal being barred from the Co-op for saying rude things to the cashier, and one or two people felt that they had had enough of their closest relatives for the time being, but mostly we just stood and smiled at one another and talked about all our DIY projects.
Everybody seems to have been busy mending things and building things. We did very well out of this, because the chap across the road had tidied his flat and we finished up with a box of useful screws and some flower pots and a bag of compost.
This occupied me for the rest of the day. I mixed the compost with the rotted manure from the farm and filled all of the flower pots.
This sounds so easy, but I can jolly well promise you that mixing manure and compost together is a jolly back-breaking job and involves a lot of shovelling and complaining. There were seven sacks of manure, and lots of flower pots, and it took me all day. Also don’t talk to me about hand washing. There had to be a scrubbing brush afterwards.
When I had finished I planted little tomato plants into some of the pots and took them back to the chap’s flat, so he can grow them in his front window and probably the police driving past will think that he is growing cannabis. I wish they were cannabis. It would mean that we could be properly self-employed again. Tomato dealing is not nearly as lucrative.
It was a happy way to spend a day. I put the piano jazz ballads on the music thing, and we were mellow and contented in the sunshine, although Send In The Clowns made me cry, and I have only got a croaky warble with which to sing along.
Mark has been doing things to his shed. He is swapping the roof around so that it faces the other way. This is partly because the existing roof cuts a lot of the sunlight out of the garden, and partly because when we talked about it all the other day, we redesigned the way the back yard will work.
We had been drinking at the time, and I can’t remember now what we thought we would do differently, but it must have been important because we were both very certain about the shed roof. In any case it will make it easier to collect the rain water, which is being saved for watering the conservatory.
Of course this helped with the sociability, because everybody wanted to know what he was doing, and there was a lot of standing about nodding and making interested noises.
I have attached a picture.
It is a small snapshot of the Oak Street Lockdown.
