Treeting

Mark has gone back to work and I have been tidying up and replenishing the fridge after having had him at home for three days.

I am excited to tell you that the archways in the conservatory are coming along splendidly, although my hands and arms are beginning to look as though I have taken up conducting an orchestra whilst wearing gloves knitted from the fronds of a blackberry bush. This is because building archways out of cut chicken wire is like trying to arm-wrestle with barbed wire.

I am scratched and scraped, and the ends of my fingers have been bleeding. One is still bleeding a bit, and leaving sinister-looking bloody smears on the keys as I am typing.

I have taken them down yet again, the archways, not my fingers or the keys of my computer, obviously. Well, I have taken one of them down a bit, because I thought that I would make it  into a tree rather than an arch, so that the next arch along looks as though it has branched from it. This is to give the conservatory a mysterious, magically foresty atmosphere, and it has worked encouragingly well, or at least it has worked a bit. You can see it in the picture.

I think it would make a very convincing Forest of Arden, especially in the evenings when it is dark and you can see all of the little lights,  if only we were allowed to have theatres any more. It has been ages since last we sat enraptured in a dress circle, which just makes me want to scowl whenever I remember, or when anybody mentions the Government.

The extract from these pages, incidentally, looks as though it will be released upon an unsuspecting public on 23rd of March this year, which is in a week or so, because the Daily Telegraph is printing people’s diaries in order to celebrate a whole year since the first week that we were not allowed to go to work or do anything exciting.

I would not bother rushing out to purchase a copy, however, because they might be doing it over several days, and I do not even know if their online newspaper is the same as the paper-and-ink sort. Rest assured that there will be nothing in the newspaper that you can not find here. It is probably better to read it here anyway, because I expect the newspaper censors out all of the boring bits or the political points with which they do not agree, together with any accidental libels. This is called editing. In any case I do not have any secrets to be revealed that you have not already read several times, on these very pages, where I can say exactly what I like.

I was extremely heartened this morning to notice that Windermere seemed to be having its own outbreak of civil disobedience. This was not because of an impulse to light candles and march about to make the point that we do not approve of anybody being murdered, but because the sun had come out.

It has been the most beautiful day, and when I went into the village there were people milling about all over the place. They were not standing anxiously in lines outside shops, peering worriedly over masks and clutching shopping bags. They were standing together, in little groups, laughing and talking. Two ladies were sitting on the bench chatting, and a handful more stood outside the Co-op.

Nobody was wearing a mask, so I could see that they were all smiling, and they were not in the least a metre apart. They were standing close together, and enjoying one another’s company exactly as if they were a scene out of a film about the olden days. It was a happy sight.

I am glad to see things are beginning to change. It looks to me as though people are not as frightened as once they were.

There may be some hope for the future after all.