Thursday 6th September 2020 Day 170

7.00   It has been one of those unspeakably frustrating nights when sleep just wouldn’t come and I couldn’t relax. I sat up and read for a bit, answered a couple of emails and listened to an old Desert Island Discs from 2008 with Liz Smith, which was very entertaining and interesting, then the Sleeping forecast which still did not induce sleep, so in the end I gave up and just waited until forever when I finally dropped off.  Surely it wasn’t because I ate some cheese just before bed time?  Well I won’t be doing it again.

9.00   Household chores seem to have built up a bit so I must attend to them today and I have to pop out on a couple of errands.  I have written one of my copious lists of things I must achieve.  I like writing lists because it feels so good when you can draw a line through

each one until they are done. Note: What an anorak I have become.

12.00   I really must take Audrey out now as I am going to meet my local friends in one of their gardens for a cream tea this afternoon for which I am starving myself this morning in the faint hope that scones cream and jam will not put on so many calories.

I grab the lead and we process out to the car.  I can’t remember whether I locked the back door so I leave Audrey to sit and wait while I go back and check.  I hadn’t locked it.  I lock it and get back to the car and remember I don’t have my phone with me and I am waiting for a call so I go back, unlock the door, spend a couple of minutes looking for my phone which I find in my back pocket, lock the house again and return to the car.  Audrey has decided that she may as well get a bit of shut eye if I am going to keep her waiting and has passed out by the driver’s door just in case I decide to drive away without her. She is awake again in a flash when I return and jumps into the boot ready for off.

14.30   We arrive for our cream tea and chat and diets go out of the window which makes a very nice change.  It is warm and sunny in the garden and I reflect on how very lucky this country has been to have had the summer we have had.  I hate to think how different these past months would have been if it had been a dull rainy summer and I worry to think what the winter months are going to be like as lockdown type rules stiffen as inevitably they will and it will be too cold to meet outside.  I think the novelty of zoom get togethers has worn right off but we are human and inventive so no doubt we will find a way.  Maybe thermal hooded boiler suits?

So, from Monday we cannot meet up in groups of more than six people, perhaps we had better all have a shin-dig over the weekend and could someone please tell me why six?