Thursday 20th August 2020 Day149

6.30  Another late night but I slept an extra hour.  Worry is asking to go out and in fact it was probably her who woke me.  I have never known her to ask to go out before but I have to remember that she is over seventy years old in human years and her bladder may not be what it was.

I see from the window, the fish all milling around the water inlets again and the big carp has managed to get into the first part of the stream.  I’ll have to check he is not stuck and can turn round and swim back.  I can’t help wondering if he might be better off somewhere like Bodiam Castle moat now he has grown so big.  He turns as I approach, flicks up a big splash of water with his tail and glides back to the big pond through the narrow channel past the rock.

11.30  There are lots of dogs in the woods again today, two big playful hounds, an ancient English setter with a mongrel friend (do we still say mongrel?) or is that non-PC now?  Then we see a puppy whippet on a lead, only a few months old which Audrey and I both find irresistible and I realise I have never seen a puppy of that breed before.  The owner has her hands full, with an excitable pup on a lead, a baby on her back and another small child who told me solemnly that another dog ‘had licked his eye yesterday’ and proceeded to show me a very normal looking eye.

12.00  I am setting off with a large taped up cardboard box with a small cut out entrance in it.  I am going to sit, hidden, in my friend’s garden in the hopes that her cat, who has got wind of the fact that she is moving imminently and is proving impossible to catch, will go in to the box where there is a saucer of tempting cat food , then I can creep over and cover the entrance quickly before he can get out again The box is placed on top of the coal bunker where he likes to sit in the sun.

13.00  No sign of the cat but two other local cats are very interested and enter the box no doubt to clean up the food.  Looks like we will have to think of a plan B.

13.30  The temperature has crept up to twenty-five degrees and I hadn’t even noticed it was hot, we must have got more used to living with temperatures in the thirties.  I am going to take a boot full of stuff to the tip on the way home.  There are fewer parking bays there now as they have been spread out and I notice that all the women there are wearing masks and all the men are not and although the cars may be nicely spaced apart, there seems to be no social distancing at all.  Still at least the cars are unlikely to contract Covid 19.

Looking forward to the next episodes of the series I am hooked on!