I am writing this early, because we have got an Event this evening.
We have been invited to an online Zoom party.
It is not exactly a party, really, more a wake, for a friend’s father who has died of bat flu. It will probably be a party anyway, certainly it would have been had the chap who died been able to be in attendance.
Whatever it is, I am looking forward to it very much, if that is the right thing to think about a wake. I do not know exactly how Zoom works or what it does, although it is terrifically fashionable at the moment, and so I will be very interested to find out. Certainly it will be brilliant to see some other people, what an ace thing to do when you are not allowed to go out.
Not that we have especially wanted to go out. We have not had very much time to do anything much in the evenings, because of having to go to bed early. This is because Oliver’s school starts with chapel at half past eight every morning. Some of our neighbours remarked the other day what early birds we were, and how impressed they had been to see us busily doing things in the yard almost before the rest of the street was thinking about coffee.
Obviously we just pretended natural virtue.
It is the first time in our lives that we have regularly been out of bed before lunchtime, and so far I am not exactly enamoured. You have got to get on with doing things because there is such a lot of day to be filled and it would not be good to become bored. I have come to see that early rising is an entirely exhausting experience. Do not imagine that it will carry on in the post bat-flu world, because it won’t.
Mark has been doing Man Things in his newly redesigned shed today. I have told him that he must empty everything out of it into the yard, where he can throw most of it away and then give the rest a good clean before he puts it back. He has agreed to this but will probably not do it unless he is closely supervised. I did not supervise very much today, because it was raining and I was occupied in the conservatory, building a cage for the tomato plants.
This was the sort of cage that props them up, obviously, not to stop them from escaping, because they are tomato plants not tigers or anything actually interesting, imagine having tigers in the conservatory.
You can see one of the cages in the picture. I took a picture of this side of the conservatory so that you can see the lettuce as well. I have planted lettuces between tomato plants by way of ground cover. This is because it is a conservatory on a terraced house, and the space for growing things is limited. I have crammed as much as I possibly can in every possible space.
When we first planted it I was quite sparing with the lettuce planting, explaining to Mark that we were most unlikely ever to eat twelve lettuces every week, since at that time a packet of two was one too many.
This was the first week in March. If anybody had told me then that by the time the lettuce had become leafy we would be not only
LATER NOTE:
…I stopped writing there because of the Zoom. Also on reading it I have noticed that it is utterly and completely boring. Ladies and Gentlemen, here is the latest update about my lettuces.
Lettuces are dull, unless you add lots of mayonnaise. I am not going to talk about them any more.
It is now the middle of the night and I am very drunk indeed.
I have had the nicest, happiest, most joyful night. I love everybody and am feeling entirely partied out.
It turns out that Zoom is a thing where you sit in front of your computer and get drunk, and your friends sit in front of theirs and get drunk, and there are pictures of all of you on the computer so you can see anybody who is absent-mindedly picking their nose. Nobody has to drive, and nobody argues about what time they are going to leave, and after a few hours and a very great deal of wine you are all telling stories about when you were sick in your youth.
You can’t hear anybody’s story very well because you all talk over one another, especially when you are drunk, but probably you have heard them all before anyway so it doesn’t matter, and so you sit and grin at one another with the happiness of being together. No wonder people do it at work, it is a wonderful thing.
I am going to have a shocking hangover in the morning, but it will have been worth it.
I have Zoomed myself into contentment.
It is a lovely world.
