7.00  The sun is streaming through the window and I am more than ready to get up.  Worry is not ready to get up and refuses to budge, she’s obviously been prowling around all night.

9.00  A text from our choir leader who is indisposed today so I will get the second coat of paint on the front door and do some gardening.  This weather, rain and shine, has turned the hedges and weeds into Triffids.  It has also brought the vegetable patch on well and last night I had the first five runner beans which were way ahead of the others.  Delicious with butter salt and pepper just on their own.

10.15  A video call from friend Wendy to arrange the barbecue we are going to have on the beach, if we can find a quiet place, on Friday.  I don’t think throw away barbecues are permitted any more, due to the carnage on Bournemouth beach after the hoards left during the hot weather, so we will take a proper one and bring it home as we would have done with a throw away anyway.

Beach barbecues take me back to my mis-spent youth in Cornwall when a party of us would go to the beach in the evening, dig a huge fire pit in the sand, line it with flat stones and burn drift wood on it.  When it died down a bit, we would cook whatever we had been able to beg borrow or steal, on sticks or on the hot stones, maybe with a couple of cans of beer.  No drugs and I don’t remember there being cigarettes but I can honestly say we hadn’t even heard of the drug scene where we lived and this was in the ‘swinging sixties.’  Then it was swimming in the inky black sea, imagining we could see large shapes of some sea creature in the moonlight.

13.30  Back to reality and one large black Labradoodle trying to psyche me up to going walkies!  She has already ‘helped’ me to mow and tried to kill the water coming out of the serpent’s mouth, namely the hose and ended up soaking us both, so she’s very lucky we are going at all.

In the woods we meet a local lady walking her black and white sprightly but elderly whippet and the dogs have a great play although rather embarrassingly, every so often, Audrey comes over and sits on the lady’s feet, obviously for reasons best known to herself.  Funny how you can live in a very small hamlet and still not know so many people.  She has told me of a new walking place with a big lake only about a mile away, so we will definitely be heading there tomorrow.

16.00  I get a message from one of the group of friends I used to see once a month.  She is suggesting that we all meet up in her garden for a take away at some point.  I think I might say yes even though I am a bit wary still about going to a house that isn’t immediately local.  It is so difficult weighing up how you feel about things and what your true reasons are for your decisions these days.  Also, if I am honest, I really don’t want to get back on the social ‘treadmill’, it is one thing I have surprisingly not missed.  Does that make me BAH HUMBUG??!!

Now for painting the second coat on the front door, apparently, it’s going to rain tomorrow.