Over it

It would appear that I am finally and at last over the bat flu.

I can’t tell you how nice this is.

I can sing again.

I have not been able to sing for weeks and weeks, because of not having enough space in my lungs to bellow properly, as songs should be bellowed. Plenty of volume makes up for any accidental deficiencies in the melody, it doesn’t matter if you are rubbish as long as you do it with plenty of enthusiasm and confidence.

Even if it does matter, it is everybody else’s problem, not mine.

I have kept trying, because I like to sing to myself whilst tootling around the house, but have not been able to manage more than a feeble warble, followed by a cough.

I was sad about this, and a tiny bit frightened that it would never ever come back, and that I would be saddled for the rest of my life with a tuneless wheeze. It is very odd indeed to discover that you can’t do something so normal any more, as if I had suddenly become disabled, but in a secret, invisible way, that nobody would ever notice except me.

Mark went off to the farm today, to cut firewood, and so I shut myself in the bedroom to carry on painting my circus tent. Incidentally, this is coming on nicely. Mark said that he doesn’t mind living in a circus tent if he can be married to the acrobat. This made him laugh, and I had to give him a Hard Stare.

I didn’t have anybody to talk to, and so I put the wonderful internet music thing on, the thing that plays absolutely any tune you like, and is one of the best inventions of the civilised world, how the teenage me would have envied elderly me.

I started singing along. Within the very first few minutes I realised that there was actually a noise coming out, and so I turned the volume up as loud as it would go. This was all right because the next door neighbour was outside doing things in his back yard, and too far away to complain. He never complains anyway. Either he is deaf or he is one of the most patient people in the world.

By the time I had painted hanging yellow swags all along the roof of the tent I had sung my way through Cabaret, South Pacific, The King And I, The Sound Of Music, and the battery went flat about halfway through My Fair Lady.

I was so hoarse by then I could hardly speak, never mind sing, but I felt very pleased with myself. I am not going to be voiceless for ever after all. The carol services will be all right. I will even be able to manage the soprano bit in O Come All Ye Faithful, which is one of my all time favourites.

I did not hear Mark coming home, and he came in and was pleased to have a singing wife in a circus tent, which is why I married him.

I have hardly got any yellow paint on the sheets at all, and what there is will be under the duvet so it will be ages before Mark notices.

He had brought firewood home, and had enough time to pop into the yard to give the wardrobe another coat of varnish. All the furniture is sanded off now, and he has started varnishing it, which is ace, except you have got to leave it for ages and ages between coats, so he has to find something else to do in between. I do not think that watching varnish dry counts as being busy. This was why he went to saw up firewood. We have been so very busy doing house renovations that we have neglected normal things like cleaning the bath and sawing firewood. We are going to do them all in one big frenzy when we have finished.

We couldn’t do that with the firewood because we had run out and the house would have been cold. This is the Lake District. It is not summer just yet.

It is summer in our bedroom. We are going to have our very own circus tent.

I am very happy indeed.