Wednesday 26th August 2020 Day 155
7.00 I am woken by the short jingle warning me of a text arriving. It is not very loud but wakes me instantly. Gone are the days when you could have marched round my bedroom banging kettle drums and I would have remained blissfully unaware in my heavy sleep. I decide to ignore it, if anyone wants me that urgently they would phone. I close my eyes again then sit up and grab the phone, it is just a reaction to a text conversation I was having last night but I am fully awake now and get up.
The weather looks a whole lot better than yesterday, no rain and a little sun but there is definitely an end of summer feel in the atmosphere. Sadly most of the grapes on the vine on the front wall of the cottage, have shrivelled up from lack of moisture, I have never seen this happen before. A month ago they were prolific, masses of bunches but now virtually nothing. I think this winter I may cut the vine down dramatically and let it start again. It vies with the Virginia creeper which possibly also needs a hair cut.
9.30 I am going to do a bit of cooking. I seem to have accumulated a lot of carrots so I
am going to make carrot soup and a few cauliflower cheeses for the freezer. I’ve discovered that roasting the carrots first makes the soup so much nicer and more creamy. I am going to try listening to some more Katherine Mansfield short stories while I cook, from the BBC Sounds app. It seems that all her stories are not so melodramatic as the one I heard the other day and they make a good accompaniment to the cooking. I have done a complete about-face with being read to, I used to hate it but I love it now as long as the reader can hold my full attention, which this one can.
11.00 I just caught sight of myself while passing the hall mirror, something I usually try to avoid these days! It reminded me that last night I spent quite some time trying to remove my contact lenses and they wouldn’t budge, they were stuck as if glued on and in my fervent efforts to get them out I must have dug a bit too hard into one eye as it is now completely blood shot. Eventually I realised why the lenses weren’t coming out. It was because they hadn’t been in there in the first place ! I must have taken them out and forgotten. I am going to try to convince myself that it was just tiredeness but I am not convinced.
17.50 Tonight my ‘Local Lady’ friends and I are meeting up in the field as we did a few weeks ago for drinks and snacks. They turn up with folding chairs and bags of drink and crisps and we walk up the road to the field with Audrey happily in tow, we are still social distancing of course and now I think we barely notice, it has become automatic. There is a bit of sun still but not much, the weather isn’t that great and it starts to cool down quite quickly but it is still a nice catch up. I guess this will be the last one this year. What are we going to do over the winter? No pub quizzes, no meeting in each other’s houses. We have been so lucky to have had such a good summer, what will we make of winter I wonder?