We have all been a bit surprised to discover that we are now allowed to talk to one person at a time, as long as we are out of doors.
It was a surprise because we have been talking to lots of people at a time for weeks and weeks. Practically the whole of Windermere has been assembling in the park with their dogs every morning, ostensibly for exercise, but actually to throw balls to give the dogs an excuse to belt around barking at one another. Whilst they have been happily occupied we have all hung around catching up on news and gossip.
Of course we have all stood politely at a social distance, but nevertheless it has been a definite Gathering, and it has astonished all of us to learn that actually we were not allowed to do it and the police could have come along and fined us for naughtily chatting to one another.
I don’t think the police knew either. They stopped at our street party the other day but showed no inclination to send us home.
Since it seems unlikely that any of us will catch a disease from somebody standing two meters away in the brisk Windermere breeze, we have got no intention of desisting, even if Boris were to pop along himself and tell us how wicked we are. I suspect the only malevolent microbes present are the revolting ones which dwell in dog dribble, adhering to every ball in massive numbers, and which are shared between all of the dogs with disgusting enthusiasm.
If the police are reading this, I did not mean that and of course we will never do it again so you need not trouble yourselves with a trip to the park in the morning.
So far it seems that we are a long way from the restoration of normality. This is probably a good thing. It is so long that we have been gainfully employed that Mark opened his taxi the other morning and discovered a nest of earwigs in it. In the end there were just too many to be picked out, and they scuttled off all over the place, so he had to get the hoover out, which was awful, all those poor baby earwigs. Their mother must have thought a taxi would be a peaceful warm place for her babies, which is a tragic sign of the times.
We were a bit later than usual in getting on with our restoration projects this morning, because I started to get cross about the mess and lack of food. I have not cooked anything properly for days, and there was sawdust and dusty dust all over the place.
We had a tidy up and a hoover, and I made a risotto and some more cornflake cakes, except these were made of Shreddies. I did not look at the date on the packet because it only upsets me. The risotto will feed us for ages, so we can look forward to adequate nutrition at least until it runs out.
After that we carried on. I painted some more circus-tent stripes, and Mark gave the furniture a last coat of varnish. When he had done that he came upstairs to join me.
He was not painting. He had come to clean the bed.
We change the sheets on the bed all of the time, but I have never, I think, cleaned the bed itself, apart from the usual cursory headboard wipe. The bottom part of it, the drawers and the back bit which we never see, were horrible.
The dogs sleep on the floor next to it, so some of it was dog coloured, and some of it is in the damp corner of the bedroom, so some of it was black-mould coloured, and some of it is next to the old chimney which is blocked off but which still seems to leak spiders, and so some of it was cobweb-coloured. All of it was thickly coated in the dreadful traffic grime that comes with living next to the main road to Bowness.
There are almost twenty million visitors to the Lake District every year, and eighty percent of them come in a car. Lots of those drive past our house. Their absence has been one of the lovely things about the lockdown, sometimes it is a bit like living on the hard shoulder of the M6.
This morning decided us that when we are solvent again we are going to have to purchase an air purifier for the bedroom. I am not the world’s most enthusiastic cleaner, and it has not only been a losing battle, it has been a massacre, an abject surrender. We must be inhaling this stuff all the time, it is a surprise that we do not constantly dream of being lost in sandstorms.
We are getting much cleaner now. By the time it is all over and we are allowed to talk to two people at once again, we will have a pristinely grime-free bedroom.
Have a picture of the beautiful wardrobe. Actually it is half of the wardrobe, but you get the idea.
