You will be very pleased to learn that the rain has stopped, and with it the waterfall into the Peppers’ living room.
We drank sufficient wine last night for nobody to care about it any more anyway.
The park, on this morning’s dog-emptying excursion, had drained to a squelch rather than a wade, and when we got back we hardly even had wet feet. After yesterday when I had to wring out my underwear on returning home, this was a huge improvement.
I am happy to report that things have improved so much that I have got my second load of washing flapping nicely in the garden, the first having already dried and been lovingly folded into the drawers before I came out to work.
What a difference a day makes.
Better still, I have purchased some new pyjamas and a dressing gown for Oliver.
I think that I could be said to be having a Happy Ever After.
The Happy Ever After bit took a while to get started, because in order to acquire the pyjamas, I had to go shopping.
This has now become my most utterly loathed activity.
I have never much enjoyed it, but that was because of all the usual reasons, like not having enough money, and shops being confusing places where it is impossible to know what to look at. Also I have found that the decisions one might make in a clothes shop are completely and utterly divorced from any other decision you might make at any other time, and which are entirely incomprehensible the moment one gets home and investigates the bag.
Those difficulties, however, are small potatoes compared to the horrors of The Masks.
Quite apart from the dreadfulness of not being able to breathe properly, or to see anybody else’s face, I have become so cross about it that I think my judgement might have become impaired.
I was in TK Maxx looking hopelessly over my face-enveloping scarf for pyjamas, when a sickly jovial male voice over the loudspeakers reminded us all how caring and socially responsible we were all being by not going near anybody else, and by wearing bags on our heads, and I was so cross that I shouted back at it.
Really I did, in TK Maxx.
I had no idea that I was going to do it and it surprised me just as much as anybody else.
The awful part was that although only a few people glanced round, at least one of them nodded sympathetically.
Also they didn’t have any pyjamas in any case.
I think that the problem is that I have become desperately despairing about living in a time when everybody is being made to feel that our breath, our touch, our very being, might be filthy and polluted. It is like Victorian prudery taken to the ultimate extreme.
I would like to take the phrase ‘social distancing’ and stab it to death, horribly and messily and violently, until every syllable had been hacked to pieces, and their shattered fragments sliced into the throats of anybody who ever tried to use them ever again. Most especially the BBC.
CS Lewis once wrote about a horrible futuristic idea where people were so repelled by anything physical, anything earthy or sticky or warm, that they did not sleep with one another any more, and had to make sterile artificial people to fill the gap.
I am rather an admirer of CS Lewis. He disapproved of all sorts of odd things, bungalows and women’s education and fun fairs amongst lots of others. Therefore I can take comfort from the certain knowledge that he would have been in agreement with me on this one.
I am encouraged by this. It is nice to know that you are broadly on the same side as your heroes, although I don’t agree about the bungalows. I think I might quite like one, especially with a big garage where I could keep Mark.
I stamped angrily around Kendal, and snapped at a girl in the ground-coffee shop who suggested that I might feel more comfortable waiting on the other side of the room until the person being served at the till had gone.
After about half an hour I gave up. I had thought that I might like to look at things and amble around, but the whole thing was miserable. The main street was muffled to a deathly quiet, and shops had security guards standing outside the doors to make sure that the handful of people who wanted to go in did not breach any rules, and after a short while I fled back to the small sane oasis of my taxi.
I had the brainwave of trying Sainsbury’s, and to my great joy they had the whole lot, pyjamas and dressing gowns and slippers and even some trainers.
I stuffed them into my bag and rushed away.
I do not ever want to go shopping again.
