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I have had a very happy day.

Elspeth has been round to visit.

Mark was at work, so there was just the two of us.

I felt a bit guilty, having such an obvious shirk whilst Mark was away working his socks off to keep me in luxury and idleness, but not so guilty that I would have considered saying: Oh, I’ll just do the ironing whilst we talk.

We haven’t got any ironing anyway. There is no point in having flat clothes if nobody is going to see them. I like the feeling of freshly-ironed clothes very much, especially if I have scented them with lavender, but not enough to make me bother to do it if we are not trying to impress anybody.

Anyway, I didn’t do ironing or indeed anything else useful. Instead I sat comfortably and happily in the sunshine, and we drank cups of tea and talked about everything for almost the whole afternoon.

Obviously we have talked on the telephone, but I am still a little bit of the generation that thinks a telephone is intended for when you want something, and being in the same place was much nicer.

I can’t even remembered what we talked about, nothing thrilling, but it didn’t matter. I know in our brave new world you are supposed to nobly sacrifice human contact in the name of saving everybody from catching bat flu, but  actually in the end I think a short life with friends is better than a long one without. By the time she left I felt as energised and happy as if I had been across the road to the hotel staff house and bought some drugs.

Of course Mark did not mind in the least, because he is much nicer than I am. I think if I had been at work and he had spent a happy afternoon drinking tea and exchanging gossip I would have felt most disgruntled. I would not have minded that he had done it, but I would certainly have been cross that I hadn’t.

Also I liked the opportunity for idleness. It was brilliant to spend such a long time doing nothing whatsoever except sitting around drinking tea.

It was almost like being back at work.

I hadn’t been having a terrifically busy day in any case. When I repainted I had to peel all of the stick-on flowers off the walls. I have these all the way up the stairs, so that I can see them from my office. They are bright and cheerful and encouraging, and I like them very much.

Today I had to stick them all back on again.

This was not nearly as easy as it sounds. Some of them had stuck together and could not be peeled apart. Others turned out to be like a large jigsaw puzzle, with only a few enormous pieces, but nevertheless practically impossible to match up. Of course they all stuck to me, and to my dress, and to my hair.

I did not even make up for it in the evening. I did not have a busy evening cooking or sewing or painting or doing anything useful. Instead we sat in the conservatory and watched a film on Mark’s laptop. We had been trying to get the television screen to work, but in the end it was all just too complicated. It doesn’t connect to our laptops, and used to show films that we could get through a very old computer. This has finally got to the point where it won’t upgrade any more, and is going to have to retire on grounds of ill health.

The television is a bit ancient as well. The pixels are so big that most films look as though they are about square people. It is so old that even if we wanted to watch real television on it, we couldn’t.

I like films sometimes, though, even if they are just on little laptop screens propped up on Mark’s knee. Tonight’s was a good one. It had Judi Dench in it, and was about an idiot girl who thought that she could bring about world peace by telling secrets to the Russians and hopping into bed with one or two in the process. I was very glad that nobody had asked me to be a spy when I was a teenager. I was so completely stupid that both sides would have shot me in the end, which on reflection is probably why nobody asked.

All in all it has been a restful day.

It is nice to be at this end of it and still have enough energy to clean my teeth.

I have not taken a picture. Have a picture of the dogs. The other one is Number One Daughter’s dog, who is Roger Poopy’s brother. They are not normally allowed on the bed like that, but it was Clean Sheets Day.