Stay At Home

I have got a sore shoulder.

I do not think that this is a late-onset symptom of bat flu. I think I have trapped a nerve in my back.

I do not have the first idea what nerves are in my back, nor how they might conceivably become trapped, but I trapped my finger in the cutlery drawer a few weeks ago, and it felt a bit like this, so I am borrowing the diagnosis. In our current medically diminished era it is quite as good as any other explanation, and so I am accepting it as clinical gospel.

There is no point whatsoever in ringing the doctor. They have all gone out, as I discovered when I tried to arrange some psoriasis cream for Mark last week. If you want medical attention at the moment you have got to dial the generically popular number, hope it is the right one and not the police or Directory Enquiries, and then cough. After that a member of the Government will ring you back to beg you not to die anywhere where you might become an inconvenient statistic. Hospitals and care homes are out. Stay At Home.

I did consider ringing Number One Daughter, who does actually know about this sort of thing, especially when it has been caused by exercise, although I should explain that obviously it hasn’t been in this case. I didn’t ring her in the end, in case she suggested more exercise and then rang to see whether or not I had done it.

Instead I took a fistful of self-prescribed drugs for it earlier on, to no effect whatsoever. However, I am very pleased to announce that the second glass of wine has worked absolutely brilliantly, and I am floating in the warm happiness of being pain free for the first time all day.

I am very much in favour of drugs, although today we discovered that Lucy is spending a great deal of her new working life trying to eradicate them from society. These are not the sort that you purchase in Boots, but the sort that you get from a rascally chap with a BMW who comes round to the back door after you have placed an online order. She was involved in a car chase today, pursuing a chap who might have had drugs but didn’t, so instead they just gave him a ticket for being outside without a licence.

These new rules must be brilliant for enforcing law and order. In the normal way of things the police actually have to catch drug dealers and other such villains in the act. At the moment it is quite naughty enough just to be outside, which must make policing remarkably satisfying. A bit like those hook-a-duck things on Blackpool fairgrounds, a prize every time.

In fairness, it must be hard work to be a drug dealer under the present circumstances. You can’t claim for loss of earnings from the Government, and probably there is still the finance on the BMW. I am very glad that I did not choose it as a career path.

I have had to fill in a claim form today. This one was for a reduction in council tax, because of not having an actual job at the moment. It was a monumentally long form, running to seventeen pages, presumably designed to stop all but the most patiently literate from managing to achieve a discount. It was so long that in the end I got cross with filling it in, and instead just wrote a short but pointed explanation of my circumstances in big scrawly letters across the bottom, and added some advisory comments about the way the whole system could be far better managed.

I will post it in the morning. I am sure the council will be very grateful.

You will be pleased to hear that my office is now tidy, and brightly painted, and finished. I am feeling very satisfied with myself.

I have included a picture of Mark’s ledge around the flower bed.

Isn’t it brilliant?