Easy does it

Having taken to my bed last weekend thanks to the searing throat and ear infection, you won’t be too surprised to hear that’s where I ended up spending much of my time at the beginning of this past week.

I don’t, however, want you to think that I went down without a fight for, after passing most of Monday morning supine I did get up to shower and dress in time for lunch, though albeit in a tentative manner. Even the most basic of tasks becomes a bit of a challenge when your head feels like it’s gently gyrating two feet above your shoulders and every minor exertion calls for a sit down. Needless to say, I cancelled my lessons for the day but did some preparation in the afternoon in case I was well enough on Tuesday to honour my commitments.

Of course I wasn’t, and really I should have listened to what my body had been telling me the previous day as I was completely pooped and had to spend the whole day back in bed. The good news, though, was that while I felt like a washed out rag physically, the pain in my throat and ear had almost gone so at least I could swallow without mentally gritting my teeth before every mouthful.

The next morning I was feeling so much better I managed to drag myself out of bed just after eight o’clock (in the morning, that is) but, apart from a little gentle exercise with the dogs, I again took things easy to avoid another relapse and again cancelled my two lessons of the day. Stephen, on the other hand, apart from the demands of work at the factory also had an appointment at the dentist in connection with preparation for the brace on his teeth. I’m not sure exactly what went on other than it was a fairly quick visit, as he was back home much before I expected him, and that the specialist he saw had salt and pepper hair and nice arms. That’s ok then.

Thursday was almost back to normal, with only a slight dizziness if I moved my head too suddenly and virtually no pain. This was just as well as I took my final antibiotic in the morning, which was enough to gird me for my one and only lesson of the week, at Mancini after lunch. I was quite willing to take the evening lesson as well, but Laura messaged me to say that young Rocco was not at work as he was ill at home. What it is to be a trendsetter. Instead I took advantage of the time gained to bottle the coffee liqueur that I’d left steeping for the prescribed twenty-four hours. Why, you may ask, if I wasn’t able to take lessons was I ok to brew up something alcoholic? Well, I might have been ill, but I wasn’t that ill.

My recovery continued on Friday, thanks partly to a spot of light shopping in MSP followed by a much-needed haircut at Rocco’s, which is always guaranteed to lift the spirits. Something else that needed a bit of a lift was one of the wardrobes in the ‘dressing room’, or rather its doors. When I returned from Harry and Bella’s morning walk yesterday it was to find Stephen, who I thought was carrying out his usual Saturday floor cleaning operation, wrestling with one of the wardrobe doors that had apparently decided to fall off and was proving less than cooperative in returning to its housing. Needless to say, I rushed to his aid and called upon all my extensive DIY know-how to hold the door steady while he tried to put it back. He eventually managed this, only to find that the opposite door wouldn’t now close as the whole wardrobe had shifted out of true.

I should explain at this point, for those who may have forgotten or never knew in the first place, that our wardrobes all came from second-hand (or, if you prefer, pre-loved) shops and are of a certain age and rather than screw together in a complex IKEA type fashion they slot into place like some giant puzzle from a Christmas cracker. Consequently, Stephen had to spend several minutes shifting about various parts of the wardrobe (resulting, at one point, in a door falling on my arm, but hey, what’s a bruised wrist between friends) before he was able to get all the parts snuggly realigned.

The wardrobe wasn’t the only thing to play up, as after many months of behaving itself since sacking TIM, the Internet decided, yesterday, to keep us on out toes by playing hard to get. It’s not that the signal disappeared totally, but it did come and go in strength so that unless you were within a couple of metres of the router you could not be guaranteed of connecting with the server. All the standard actions, such as switching everything off and on and rebooting the router had little effect other than losing the signal to the radio entirely, so we did the only thing possible – called Sauro.

He was otherwise occupied yesterday (how?) but did find time to come over this afternoon to investigate the situation. Having little of value to offer other than going downstairs with my laptop to confirm that I couldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi, I left him and Stephen huddled over Sauro’s computer, which was linked to the router, and talking to an operative at EOLO while I took the dogs for their afternoon walk. On my return, it was to find a scene of domestic bliss as the pair of them were sitting around the dining table, drinking cups of tea but not eating biscuits as Sauro is forswearing anything containing baking powder, and with all right with the world – or at least LCDDB’s small section of it. Far be it from me to rain on anyone’s parade, but I am still unable to pick up a signal when in the back room, so I’m not totally convinced that all is as it should be, despite the operative sending an update down the line to the router.

I don’t want you to think that the entire weekend was taken up with firefighting, as we did, pre-Sauro, manage a trip to Corridomnia this morning for a spot of shopping (cleaning materials, nightlights, a new shirt for me and two new pairs of trousers for Stephen, so just the usual) followed by lunch at Diverxo, the newish sushi restaurant upstairs at the complex. And very good it was too, having a chic, spacious feel to it and an all you can eat lunchtime menu priced very competitively at €12.90 – and waiter service into the bargain. Whipping plates off a conveyor belt and making two trips to the hot buffet is all well and good, but how much more civilised is it to order from a menu card then stuff your face from a succession of dishes delivered to your table? Much.