Monday 4th June - Jubilee and all that

We walked up the road for coffee with friends yesterday, sitting in their garden and watching sparrows everywhere, fluttering here, no there, from garage to garden ornament to fence to tree and back again, busy, busy, busy. Reminds me of that quotation from 'Three Men in a Boat (not forgetting the dog)' by Jerome K Jerome;

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

It is all too regrettably true. 

I haven't walked along our road n that direction for some weeks, and was hoping to admire the jubilee decorations, but there were almost none. I think our little patch must be the only ones who have put on a show; here are ours;

Some years ago I found myself in the disgraceful position of not having any patriotic bunting, and none left in any of the local shops. In the end I cut up a couple of yards (metres? who knows, who cares? y'all know roughly what I mean) of union flag printed waterproof tablecloth and stuck the bigger piees to a length of tape with my favourite 'extremely tacky glue'

Many's the time I've become seriously sticky in a craft project with this stuff, and I can promise you that nothing stuck together with this will ever unstick again. 

Several houses to the left and right, on both sides of the road, put up a show of flags which all seem to be surviving the increasingly blowy weather. I shall be interested to see how it all copes with the promised/threatened thunderstorms due tonight or tomorrow morning.

News seems slight and trivial at home, taking in the bigger global picture. 

News, for us, seems to be emptying the compost bin, clearing the dump of empty pots and sacks of potting compost from behind the bigger shed and relocating the bin, and then replacing the contents. This took several sessions over the course of a week, but the job is done now. 

The events of last week (going up to London for my lung function tests, first meal inside a cafe since March 2020) and earlier this week (his pre-cataract appointment, and me buying my first ever coffee in a cafe since March 2020, and driving a fair distance, only the fifth time I had driven anywhere since March 2020) would not have seemed particularly remarkable or strenuous pre-lockdown. But the total effect, including a follow up appointment over zoom with the chest clinic for me, left us both feeling wiped out. So I spent most of Tuesday sitting on the settee, with a rug on my knees like a granny, because the weather had changed and it was cold. 

My google timeline of places visited in May was quite a change from the solitary red dot in the middle map.

I have plans to spend the waiting time while his cataract operations are underway visiting a place with Arts and Crafts associations. The gardens are beautiful, and I'm hoping the roses will be at their best. Also that the weather will oblige. Hence doodling/copying a few William Morris flower designs. 

Doing the daily scribble-sketches is certainly a way of keeping track on what happened each day.