Scanned and gone

I have mended all of Mark’s trousers and painted the back of the front door. I have made biscuits and curry and soup, and know myself to be a person of no small virtue.

Oliver was surprised to come down the stairs and find Mark making a cup of tea in his underpants, but as a person who spends all of his leisure hours in his dressing gown, decided he had no room to comment, and ignored him.

I have got to give the back of the front door another coat. It is the same colour but it was very horrible. This did not matter as we never, ever used it, because of course it gets so damp that it does not open all winter. It has only just become useable because of the sunshine, but was still black and mouldy and smelled of gloom.

Mark is going to take it off and shave the bottom of it off so that we can open it even when it is raining. I am not going to give it its second coat until he has done this, probably.

The outside of it needs painting as well but I do not know if I am that enthusiastic about painting. We will have to see if we have got any paint left.

We bought some more paint today. We had a huge adventure and went to Asda.

B&Q is right next door, and was, fortuitously, open.

To those readers who are in lockdown to the point where they are missing shopping, do not worry. I do not know how bored I would have to be to find standing in a queue of trolleys at B&Q an exciting excursion. They had one till operating, lots of patient people with trolleys, and one rebel who pushed past us all to get to the exit, because he said he wasn’t going to buy anything after all and couldn’t be bothered to wait.

Much to my amusement he was hotly pursued by a shop assistant, who also pushed past us all to remonstrate with such thoughtlessness. She was trying to get him to go back again so that he could be directed down the correct route, so we could have been pushed past again. In the end she realised that this was fruitless, and just pushed back past us by herself, apologising unhappily.

I was not at all upset about this, because I am not of an anxious disposition when it comes to bat flu issues. This is largely because I think that I have already had it, and also because my understanding of the statistics mean that I do not think I am very likely to die anyway.

I must add the caveat here that I do not have a television and have got most of my information from social media, which is known for its well-researched and enlightening data. In fact, my investigation on Facebook has left me with a vaguely Never Neverland impression that the worst danger of the bat flu is that we all have to clap our hands every week because every time a child says they don’t believe in nurses, one dies.

Even though I am not especially frightened of a premature death, I still find the new shopping adventure a horribly difficult experience. You are not allowed just to amble around shops any more. You have got to follow the arrows. You have got to be especially careful not to touch something and then decide that you do not want it, so you can’t look at things very closely. You can’t pick them up, and you can’t put your face anywhere near the shelf, thank goodness I am not the sort of person who needs to read lists of ingredients. This is not the moment to be allergic to something generic and vague, like sesame seeds, that could be in absolutely anything.

We tried one of the new Scan And Go things in Asda, which turned out not to be scan and go, and took ages, because we were randomly selected for a security check, euphemistically called a Quality Check. These happen because somebody on the CCTV thinks you are suspicious, probably because we were scruffy, and because I kept putting five of a thing in to the trolley whilst Mark scanned one thing six times and so a girl came rushing up to check our trolley to see if we had stolen anything.

Obviously we had not stolen anything, things are not yet that desperate at Ibbetson Towers, but we had to wait patiently for ten minutes whilst she tried to empty our trolley without touching anything that we might have touched, and counted the cartons of apple juice. I was glad that we did not need anything embarrassing, like incontinence pads or haemorrhoid cream, and in the end she was very polite and apologetic, and we escaped into the sunshine.

We filled our shelves, thanks to my parents’ generous assistance, and we will not need to go again for weeks and weeks.

I am not at all sorry about this. There are worse things than being stuck at home.

We heard some swifts this morning.

Have a picture of Mark’s newly tidy shed.