Quacking better

I am so relieved right at the moment that it almost feels as though breathing is easier.

Lucy is home.

She has been coughing and has been obliged to isolate, and so she has come home to be locked down with us together.

This is brilliant. Her cohort of students has been studying via video link for the last week anyway, and was due to have a couple of weeks annual leave before they had the last of the training and could go out on the streets.

Basically, the way her timetable was set out, had she not come home she would have been trapped in her little house by herself for the whole of the next month.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am that she is here. I have been worrying for ages.

She seems to me to be all right. She has got a cough, which sounds much like everybody else’s, and is hot and exhausted and shivery and has gone to bed.

I am trying not to think how terrible it would have been had she been ill alone in Northampton, with no medicines or supplies or anything, because she is nineteen and on a tight budget, and had nothing.

None of that will happen. She is at home and we are all together.

I keep remembering a terribly anguished mother duck we saw once from the taxi rank, whose ducklings had all fallen down a grid as she had attempted to lead them across the road. Her relief and happiness when we fished them out with a child’s fishing net borrowed from the Tourist Information, was an ecstasy of quackery.

I feel like her.

Numbers One and Two Daughters have both called this evening. They are both managing nicely, and my worries about them have dissipated as well. Number One Daughter has her kindly husband at home with her. I could hear him laughing in the background with Ritalin Boy as we talked. Number Two Daughter is in Canada and has written to the Government for an extension to her visa and might even be allowed to live there for ever if she is very fortunate. They are all cheerful and warm and safe and well fed and not sick. I could not ask for any more.

I can still hardly believe that it is all happening. Our whole world has disappeared, as thoroughly as if we had been visited by the bailiffs.

We are asleep at night instead of working, and I have not seen a single drunken idiot for ages. My new daytime world does not include anybody with their nose crusty with cocaine, nobody vomits on the pavement, nobody roars and swears and growls or tries to show me the contents of their underpants.

It is the oddest sensation, as if my life has been snatched away from me. It is gentle and peaceful, but a sharp edge has disappeared. You would think this would be lovely, but actually I do not know how I feel about it. I have been displaced from my night-time country. The daytime is different altogether.

Apart from this, this peculiar softening, nothing much is different. We did not really go anywhere very much even when we had a life. Oliver and I walked up the fell this morning for our permitted daily exercise. Mark was mixing cement, which he considered exercise enough. He mixed several lots, so perhaps he did more exercise than you are supposed to, sometimes he is just reckless.

When I got back I did some painting. You can see the results in the picture. I imagine by now you had forgotten all about my paint-selection abilities, but once again they have not let me down, and the resulting colour is in the picture.

Mark laughed so much he could hardly mix the cement, but I think it is an absolute delight. It is warm and welcoming and will look brilliant with the blue shelves.

We dragged everything in before we went to bed and he has covered the floor with the levelling compound. By tomorrow it will be dry and we will have a lovely conservatory.

We have bought a jigsaw puzzle to do in there when we are not eating bananas. Jigsaws are as scarce as loo roll now that the country does not go to work any more, and they seem to have a resale price of about a hundred quid.

We will have to do it quickly and see if we can make a fortune.