The weather today had gone decidedly cooler so Meg and I needed to wrap up a little more warmly than we have been accustomed. We took our time getting ready and then sauntered down, fairly late, into the town. On the way down, we were delighted to see two of our Catholic friends from down the road that we do not seem to have seen for a couple of weeks. We were delighted that the friend who had some heart problems now seemed incredibly well on the road to recovery and was busy gardening away to her heart’s content. We exchanged family news and our various comings and goings and indicated how pleased we were to see each other again – but, in truth, it was a little bit chilly for us to stand motionless so we resumed our walk and our friend her gardening activities. When we got to the newsagents, I was persuaded by the owner to purchase some pink Himalyan sea salt. This is claimed to have all kinds of benefits not bestowed by other kinds of sea salt. The benefits appear to come from about 80 minerals, some iodine and oxides of iron which gives it the pink appearance. Tomorrow we will be having a ‘quickie’ i.e. not a normal cooked breakfast but I will try and give it a good trial on Monday morning when I will prepare a cooked breakfast of red onion, tomatoes and mushrooms made into an omelette for Meg and left as cooked vegetables for Mike. We needed to pop into Waitrose which we did in order to buy some things that we had run out of and eventually got tho the park very late. We bumped into our friend Seasoned World Traveller as he was leaving the park and we were entering it. As time was pressing a little, we went onto one of the benches adjacent to the lake that we used frequent in the past and ate our comestibles before heading off for home. By this time, it was about 2.00pm but we had a quiche ready and waiting in the oven just to be heated so we managed to make ourselves a ‘quickie’ lunch (thank goodness, for frozen ‘petit pois’ and a tin of plum tomatoes). Then the afternoon, or what remained of it, was a somewhat lazy affair reading newspapers and generally crashing out before we go to church later in the afternoon.
Our next door neighbour (in the newly built mini-estate of some 18 houses) is doing some building work at the side of his house, the details of which I cannot discern as there is our own fence and his own fence in the way. I assumed, in my naivety that he was probablt finishing off the side to his entesnion that he built about three or four years ago and has remained uncompleted for some 2-3 years now. One of the workmen constructing the ‘new’ edifice came round to ask permission to jump into our back garden (Mog’s Den actually) to finish off some pointing. I agreed readily and was pleased that they had bothered to ask permission (they have never communicated with us before). Later on in the afternoon, I went down into Meg’s Den to discover that our neighbour seems to be building ‘something’ which can only be a metre wide and the wall is about 1″ at the very most from our boundary line. What the new construction (which needless to say is only about one third built) is going to be I can only guess. One possible use might be secure enclosed space that might accommodate overflow things from the garden (kid’s toys, his own Harley Davidson) that would release some space in the garage so that things can be put away at night. We shall just have to wairt the ‘thing’ is finished and then try to infer what is going on. My only real concern at the moment is that there is no space for any rainware goods so I am trusting that we won’t have cascades of water coming into our garden from next door. Under recent planning permission regulations, people can do all sorts of things without even informing the planning committee so we shall just have to wait and see before passing any judgement on this.
As we suspected, some of the medical experts are giving much more explicit warnings about the COVID infection rate. Sky News is reporting that:
The nation is “dilly-dallying into lockdown” and action should be taken now to avoid much tougher COVID restrictions later, a government scientific adviser has warned. Professor Stephen Reicher told Sky News that vaccines are “not quite enough” on their own and “other protections” are needed now to tackle coronavirus
Of course, this is evident to most of us (as recent editions of this blog will testify) but, once again, the government looks as though they are trying to ‘tough it out’ as they are frightened to death about anything which even remotely looks like another lockdown
© Mike Hart [2021]