Take the weather with you

The third week of the lockdown and, I am sorry to say, it is becoming increasingly more of a challenge to find things with which to pad out the blog. Life is becoming very much a routine, and whilst we are able to fill our days quite happily and relatively productively, giving a blow-by-blow account of me checking through my teaching materials hardly makes for gripping reading.

The fact that I had not gone beyond the top of the lane, whether when walking the dogs or to drop off the bins for the waste collections, since 10thMarch was further cemented by a new directive at the beginning of the week stating that people have to stay within their own locale, even for work – which is why, no doubt, I passed Luigi on Tuesday morning, each on opposite sides of the road, when out with Bella and Harry, heading down towards the river. He must have been off foraging, as when our paths crossed on our return journeys he was brandishing a large bunch of what to me looked like wild rocket, roots and all.

As for Stephen, he has been at home nearly all week, only making one visit to the factory, which he combined with doing the now weekly shopping on Thursday. Unlike the previous couple of weeks, he was surprised, and not a little pleased, to find no queue outside Sigma and when he went in, even more surprised that he was the only customer. Again, he was able to get all we had on the list, as well as a couple of extra treats, which is why he makes a good little forager himself – even if it is with a shopping trolley.

Actually, he had intended to make the shopping/work trip a day earlier as there was production that needed checking on Wednesday, but the weather added a touch of much needed excitement to the week when, with the prospect of the clocks going forward at the weekend, it obviously felt it had to get in a spot of winter while it still had a chance. We thought this was going to be confined to a sharp drop in temperatures on Monday and Tuesday (2ºC – which again made us happy that we were able to fill up the gas last week when the central heating was called on for background warmth) with some light snow flurries in the afternoons, and were somewhat surprised when on Wednesday morning as we were tidying up after breakfast it started to come down in those large, floating flakes that you know are going to settle.

And settle they did. An hour later the terrazzo as well as the cars and the fields were covered with snow; Stephen’s plans of going to the factory and Sigma were put on the back burner, and I pulled on the waterproof trousers for Bella and Harry’s morning walk. By lunchtime, however, virtually all traces of the snow had melted away, leaving the ground somewhat wet. It was destined to get even wetter, for though that was the end of the wintry weather, it started to rain overnight and continued to do so, not heavily but incessantly, until it gradually wore itself out by Friday evening.

It still took another twenty-four hours, however, for the skies to clear completely but by yesterday afternoon the sun had reappeared. Not that it was the end of the rain water, for with such a prolonged downpour, the water was running down the fields, in some places following the pre-dug channels and in some places not. It also burrowed into the soil to come out through a small fissure in the banking by the drive. Stephen assured me that it was nothing to be concerned about, and that he would mention it to Mario and Luigi – which is, as we know, a sure-fire guarantee all will be well…

As for the weekend, Stephen made himself useful by getting up the ladders this morning and dusting the bulbs in the kitchen while I, in the absence of eggs from Mrs C and no baking, pursued a solution to a problem that had reared its head: how do I post a letter to the UK when the post office’s opening hours are restricted to only a few a week, we don’t know what they are and we should only be going out for matters of dire emergency? The answer that came to me was surely in this modern day and age there must be a company offering the facility to upload letters online for posting in Britain.

A Google search showed several, and after browsing the three or four that seemed most likely by the search page description I plumped for one called Docmail that seemed, from an initial look, to be the most user friendly and competitively priced. I should have known that it would not be so easy. This afternoon, after registering, I duly followed the ‘easy’ steps to upload my letter, only for it take several minutes while it said it was looking for ‘tags’ before saying the action had failed. After trying again – because that is what you do with technology, if it doesn’t work the first time you do exactly the same a second time in the forlorn hope that something will have magically changed – and discussing it with Stephen we came to the realisation that it was not for individual, personal letters but for business letters for which you supply a database of correspondents from which to populate the relevant fields.

That being (a) far beyond my abilities or, indeed, interest and (b) not at all in line with my requirements, we aborted the procedure and abandoned the site. Not that I have given up; I’ll think about it tomorrow, for after all, tomorrow is another day.

P.S. A non-coronavirus week would have been more eventful as Wednesday was Mum’s 90thbirthday. In the event, she had to celebrate at home with Dad and the various carers but still seems to have had a happy day with lots of cards and lots of telephone calls, all in the comfort of her own locked-down home. Harry and Bella, wanting to mark the occasion, sent her a bunch of glittering balloons proclaiming her achievement. Mum was very touched by this, so much so that the next day she put them in the spare bedroom so, she said, the people in the Sheffield bus that passes the back of the bungalow can see them.