Last day

I have just discovered that today is the last day of 2020.

I did not know this until I could not buy more flour because the cash and carry was closed.

I had not expected this, and had to look at Mark’s telephone to find out what day it was. The telephone, and my computer agreed later when I checked, just to be on the safe side, told me that it was indeed the 31st of December, and since months do not ever have thirty two days, we realised that the year has finally ground to its end.

It has been a fairly sleepy end in my case.

Lucy was coming home last night, actually at the eleventh hour, leaving Northampton at the end of her shift to belt home up the motorway before the government flung the prison gates closed again.

She has got a week’s annual leave and we wanted to spend it all together. She has explained that this is allowed because we are a something called a support bubble, which is the most appalling phrase invented ever, and one which you need not expect to find soiling these pages ever again, it is actually worse than ‘social distancing’.

Our current Government seems to have mastered the use of the oxymoron if nothing else.

Lucy knows that she is allowed, because she is a policeman and the mind of the Government is revealed to her. In any case she has asked her sergeant.

To be honest the only difference this makes to me is that I don’t mind telling you about it. I do not think that we are very likely to catch or spread bat flu, not least because we have all had it, but if one was to be up to wickedly illegal activities it would probably be wisest not to announce them on the mighty Internet.

I can reassure the worried that we are not going to go anywhere we might spread disease.

We were going to go to the cash and carry but it was shut, so that was a narrow escape.

Anyway, she left Northampton in the middle of the night, and I woke at half past four in the morning to discover that she had not yet arrived home.

She should have been back by then.

I waited and listened for ages and ages, so worried that it was actually difficult to breathe properly.

I am not very good at people being late, having once had somebody never come home at all.

In the end I got up, and when I checked my phone there was a text message on it telling me that the motorways were deserted and frozen and covered in thick fog, so she had stopped for a little sleep because she was tired and finding it difficult to drive.

I can’t tell you how little this reassured me.

I did not want to disturb her sleep, so I thought I would not ring, but after a few minutes my self control disappeared, and when she answered she was just pulling into the alley at the back of the house.

Ten minutes later she was safe and warm in bed with a cup of tea, and I was awash with relief.

I still couldn’t sleep, so I read my book for a while, which is a biography of Jeremy Corbyn, and which is making me equally cold with horror. I am cross with Boris at the moment, but the alternative, as explained by this biography, would have been quite mind-blowingly dreadful.

I suppose things could always have been worse.

The result of such a night of insomnia was obviously that I have felt fuzzy and incompetent all day, that is, even more so than usual, although I did not help my own cause by having a glass of single malt with my breakfast.

It was a very late breakfast.

This has not mattered in the slightest, because we are on holiday, and we are not allowed to do anything, and to top it all, it has snowed, and so the world has ground to a halt.

Windermere is brilliant at these times. We know practically everybody we meet, and we meet practically everybody, because nobody is at work at all. Unlike much of the rest of the country, there is no industry of any kind here. Windermere depends entirely on tourism for its income, and everything, I mean everything, has stopped. Even the shops that are allowed to be open are empty, because half of their usual customers are tourists. We have gone from a town of a hundred percent employment to a town of about ninety five percent unemployment at the stroke of Public Health England’s bureaucratic pen.

Hence, by a supreme irony, the times of Government-decreed isolation are the most sociable of all. Our neighbours are in the park walking their dogs, and going for walks up the fells, and lingering about in the queue for the post office, chatting and smiling and waving to one another.

I should not feel quietly contented with our current national disaster, but I do.

The picture was the park this morning.

I am going to go and make some New Year’s Resolutions.

Have a lovely New Year.