I can’t sing any more.
The bat flu virus has eaten my singing voice.
It was not exactly a tuneful melodic singing voice. It was more of a belting songs out at building site decibel levels voice. It was the sort of singing voice that could be heard over everybody else’s at the far side of the school hall, the sort that informed the children, miles away in the choir stalls, that their mother had indeed turned up for the carol service, and their lift home from boarding school was assured.
It is not there any more.
I was baking this afternoon and kept myself company by putting Godspell on the wonderful cyber-music magical speaker thing, the thing that plays any music you like at absolutely any time and never has crackles, scratches or jumps, it is a marvellous world.
I like Godspell. It happens to be a musical on which I worked, many years ago during a long distant incarnation as a theatre lighting technician. It played at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, and was so utterly wonderful that the cast had left the stage, changed and made it to the bar before the audience stopped their standing-ovation clapping.
It was a jolly good show, and I used to sing a two-part harmony out of it with my best friend at the time, who was called Sarah Lancashire and who went on to become rather more successful than I did.
When I came to sing that very same duet by myself whilst washing up today I could not sing at all. My voice croaked and wheezed and went flat.
I did not help myself by accidentally bursting into tears when the man they called Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and said: what will you give me to betray him to you?
I think it must be hormones. They are an absolute nuisance.
I could not sing any high notes, or even any low notes. I have a range of about six wheezy tuneless notes. I practised for ages, with the mixer on in order not to alert the rest of the household to my tunelessness, but to no avail.
Mark was building the new kitchen floor, and agreed that it was not an all right singing voice any more.
I hope it comes back.
The baking mostly worked out all right, though, I made biscuits and lots of mayonnaise, so that there would be enough for Lucy to take back with her. Also my baking worries were soothed when a very kind friend sent me a message to tell me that they have got yeast, and would post me some.
Her is a grateful plug for their business. They have got an online delicatessen called Oliviccio, so if you need nice things, they post them, and if you live near them they deliver, only I don’t.
We have been planting more mushrooms. We have been investigating the best ways to do it, and Mark has brought home some cherry logs. We had a cherry tree at the farm which had fallen over, and we have drilled and plugged it with mushrooms and beeswax.
I am ridiculously excited about this and have to keep resisting lifting the lid off the mushroom box to see how they are getting on. I have to resist this because there is a seed bed on the top of it which weighs about a hundredweight, and also because I know that there is a spider in the mushroom box which has just built a nest with a lot of potential baby spiders in it. I do not want to know about the hundreds of baby spiders, and hope that they will all find a crack in the mushroom box and go and live somewhere else. Preferably a long way away.
We will be able to survive on mushrooms and tomatoes by the end of this, what jolly good fortune.
In fact I read an article online this morning about the things that the middle classes were doing to occupy the lockdown, and was mildly entertained to discover that we are doing quite a few of them.
It appears that the middle classes are all reading the wonderful book by Hilary Mantel, released, by a stroke of joyous good fortune, just in time for being locked down, and also, which was what reminded me to tell you, growing tomatoes.
The article was in the Daily Mail, so they might not be the best people to identify the characteristics of the middle classes, because as far as I can see, most of my middle-class acquaintance seem to be trekking around their estates with their gun dogs in the sunshine. Nevertheless I am pleased to announce, that at least by the standards of the Daily Mail, we are definitely middle class.
Except that neither of us is having secret fantasies about Rishi Sunak, which featured heavily on the list.
Well, I am not. I haven’t actually asked Mark.
Have a picture of the Library Gardens this morning.
Windermere is very quiet.
