Friday 23 January 2015

Friday 23rd January - Bright Frosty Morning

I thought that the coldest day of the year was meant to be a couple of days ago. That's a maybe; this morning, our super-blackout-lined curtains worked well enough that there was ice on the inside of our bedroom windows.

I haven't seen that since I was at my fearsomely expensive (and unheated) boarding school - our flannels and toothbrushes, kept in our dormitories, regularly froze overnight. Coming from a properly centrally heated home, and in view of the huge termly boarding fees, I thought that was pretty poor show.

I've take the whole of this past week off work; downed by a chest infection. I've not felt ill, but incredibly breathless and tired, and it has felt as though my head and chest were - still are - full of glue. We ventured out on Wednesday to see if returning to work was a possibility, but by the time I had staggered from the car park to the Post Office I was completely convinced that I was not ready to deliver full-on samba and ukulele lessons for longer than 3 minutes at a stretch. I guess if I was just sitting at a desk in front of a computer, cherry picking the easy tasks (rather as I am doing now) I could have gone in today. But today's schedule would have started with recorders at 12:40 and continued with three successive ukulele lessons, without a minute's pause in between. So that's a "no", then.

I spent the day pottering about, finally completing my tax return, tidying this, shuffling papers from one heap to another, watering houseplants, eyeing up tasks and deciding not to do them. You know the kind of thing.

Just now I went out to take pictures of our completed drive; it's beautiful. The cat isn't sure about walking on it yet.

The garden without the garage, and it's accompanying jungle, still takes some getting used to.



One casualty has been the old-fashioned washing line which used to stretch down the garden.

The sensible thing would be to replace it with a rotary line. Somehow, the sight of the washing dangling from loopy and over-stretched segments of a rotary line doesn't lift my heart in the same way as a proper line of washing, dancing in the sun.



I think it's probably to do with a half-remembered illustration or maybe story from when I was very, very young.

No comments:

Post a Comment