Of Paw Patrol, dog jumping and Salisbury

When Stephen saw me emerge from my Cave of Wonders this morning wearing jeans he looked positively hopeful. I then told him to ease up cowboy the only reason I am wearing jeans today is that all my tracksuit pants are in the laundry basket. 

I did manage to hang up a load of laundry this morning. As I was doing it I was reminded of the very slow tortoise in the intro to the delightful BBC comedy ‘One Foot in the Grave’. Although I suspect that the tortoise moved faster than me. And he didn’t have to check his oximeter afterwards. 

There have been some silver linings to this whole covid quarantine. Eva has gone through one of the most important milestones in childhood development - she is now choosing to watch Paw Patrol rather than Peppa Pig. I think we can all agree that this moment in parenting is very special and deserves to be celebrated with a marshmallow before breakfast. 

Gray has pretty much gone feral. I don’t really see him all day because he’s busy rutting around in the mole hills with his dog. He also built himself a bike obstacle course and has been training Willow to jump over broken bits of garden fence. 

The good thing is that I have a book that I have been reading since I was born and I’m finally making some headway with it. It chronicles the history of Salisbury and it is as slow moving as it sounds. There are many descriptions of chalk hills, church spires, wool and peasants. I do think that a nice touch happened when I hit the chapter on the Black Plague the day before I started showing symptoms of my own plague. Touché. 

My loss of smell and taste has been pretty devastating for me considering I’m already knocking on Helen Keller’s door with my shit eye sight and loss of hearing. Watching Masterchef now is extra painful because even if I could I wouldn’t be able to taste the Sri Lankan curry with snapper and coconut sambal. 

If these are the sacrifices to be made in the bigger, completely devastating consequences of this pandemic then I will do them with pleasure. For those of us who have gotten off lightly we can just thank God and be grateful that we did not have to face the hellish alternative that millions of people have had to face. 

I can hear my kids fighting somewhere… I know I’m wearing jeans today but this tortoise might jut put her head back into her shell. There’s a chapter on the trade of wool with Antwerp that has my name written all over it.