Monday 30th November Day 251
6.45 The first alarm bell of the day to get me moving for my groceries delivery. It is a real November looking day out there, grey and murky.
8.20 My groceries arrive and this time delivered by not one but two men, one of whom it turns out is in training and the other refers to himself as ‘the Graduate’, Odd?. All hell is let loose when I realise I didn’t shut the kitchen door securely and Audrey appears in full voice, then feels silly and tries to sit between them on the doorstep looking meek and refusing to come back in until she knows I’m not kidding and then slopes back indoors like a whipped cur. The man in training is standing far too much into my space for my liking but ‘the Graduate’ says nothing to him and somehow I don’t like to.
11.00 We meet with Janet at the Blackboys Inn and off for a walk through the Duckings estate and into the fields beyond. There are so many pheasants in the woods and it doesn’t take Audrey long to put them up, till they are flying in all directions, not to be encouraged I feel and I rein her in, she will have to put up with catching the ball, not that she would harm a pheasant.
I hear that the Covid figures are down by a third, I also hear that the local hospitals are at stretching point, it’s hard to
know what is what any more and frankly I am more interested to know what the figures are likely to be post ‘cease fire Christmas’. From talking to friends, I think many people feel quite trepidatious about the relaxed rules over Christmas and intend to carry on being extra careful.
On Saturday I went with Sarah back to the Chalk pits at Earwig corner, Lewes. She told me that there is a memorial stone to the Lewes Protestant martyrs up there on the golf course, so we set out to find it. Having climbed nearly as high as it is possible to climb up the steep hills, we found ourselves faced with a padlocked gate with no possibility for a dog to get through even if we climbed over, so we move on around the very deep quarry and descend quite a way before finding a gate that is friendly and up we go for a second time. It is worth the climb in the end because the views are amazing. There is a pile of stones at what must be one of the highest points of the Downs and Aud and I pose for a picture; the Martyrs memorial it seems is further over than we thought so we will have to leave that for another day.