A top of many colours

Thursday 16 April continued

Even though it’s sunny there’s a strong north-easterly wind which makes it cold so, having done my tour of the garden, I decide on an indoor occupation. I will cut out a top I’m planning.

    Because all the sewing shops are closed I looked for a pattern online, intending to make a loose, sleeved, tunic-length shirt for the summer, as befits my age (mid-60s). Instead I ordered this.

It’s probably far too young for me (I fancy the sleeveless version with the handkerchief hem) and I have no idea whether it will work but the only loss is the cost of the pattern as I’m making it from material I already have (seeing as I can’t buy any new), with each section the remnant of a different summer garment. In fact, it doesn’t have to work because all I’ll have to do is explain that I made it during the lockdown and people will understand. For once I’ll have a good excuse for my dress eccentricities.

After a fun couple of hours juggling with bits of material I decide it’s time for some yoga. I’ve started doing yoga in the garden as I was beginning to creak, missing my weekly class in the village. Because it’s made me feel so much better, I've resolved to try and have at least a short practice most days even though I rush it when on my own and don’t get the mental and spiritual benefits.

    Online classes are another option but that involves moving furniture, setting up an ancient laptop which I’ve never used before and battling with our almost non-existent broadband.

    Ellie thinks the mat is a new sort of dogbed – unsurprisingly since it’s placed on her favourite spot for keeping watch on the world.

When I start my exercises however, she wanders off, ever tactful. I’m flattered that the birds on the hand keep coming to the feeders nearby. I hear the flutter and brrr of their wings.

We’ve been early these days ‘battening down the hatches’ (as my father with his naval background would have said), giving ourselves a break, and watching television for most of the evening with a clear conscience. Frog keeps up with essential coronavirus news during the day so we allow ourselves to avoid any programme that mentions the dreaded corvid (as I call it – although I like crows) and stick to comfort viewing.

    While I prepare supper he watches a programme about a Yorkshire steam railway, which I’m only too pleased to miss as I find the unreconstructed male engineers and their disparaging comments about their wives hard to stomach.

    I managed to fill the freezer and store cupboard before lockdown and now take two Clive’s pies out of the freezer, a mushroom one which is Frog’s favourite and a chillified kidney bean and veg one which is mine.

Two of Clive's pies, handmade in Devon with love (as listed in the ingredients)

I mash some potato and mix it with the last of the hummus so as to give Frog his quota of garlic as well as spice up the potatoes which are tasteless. The only potatoes with any zing come from Waitrose, to which we would have to make a special trip, and so far we haven't made one. (Every trip is an effort at the moment and every time I think of the film 28 Days Later  - Google it if you don't know the plot. It's a good film though.) Lastly I chop and steam a vat of my home-grown broccoli - which is anything but tasteless.

After supper, as we settle down to a ‘Poirot’, the phone rings and I race to answer it while Frog sets the recorder. I see from the display that it’s Frog’s sister J.

    ‘J!’ I say. ‘I’ve been meaning to ring you.’

    It’s true. She was top of the mini-list I make each day to remind me of what I could be doing, but I decided to email instead as I’m not a fan of the telephone.

    ‘Ah,’ she chuckled, ‘I must be psychic.’

    Which is a very nice thing to say seeing as it’s several days, if not a week, since we spoke and her husband died two weeks ago. I did ring her a lot to start with and then wondered if I was being a nuisance so decided to take a step back. She obviously doesn’t mind.

    She’s now self-isolating because of her age and state of health and because when they finally took her husband to hospital he was found to have coronavirus – but as he’d been in bad health for many months if not years and very poorly for weeks it hardly seems to matter.

    However, like Frog (and unlike me) J is amazingly pragmatic and positive and now sounds more confident and more herself than I’ve ever known her. She’s been sorting out her clutter (she’s even more of a hoarder than Frog), dancing to her old records as she goes through them, and with the help of a grand-daughter planning her husband’s funeral.

    We can’t go because she lives the other side of the country and because only 20 people are allowed and that number is easily taken up by children, grandchildren and her husband’s family who all live nearby. She’s planning a bigger do after lockdown.

    She’s written five pages of A4 about her husband for the funeral and, because she thinks I’m a writer, she wants to read them out to me.

    I listen, rapt.

    ‘Well?’ she says at the end. ‘’Could I be a writer?’

    ‘You already are,’ I say.

    I hand her over to Frog, and after an hour and a half we return to Poirot, worn out by the unaccustomed contact with the outside world.
 
Sometimes recently a picture has come into my mind of Frog and me alone on a boat in the middle of a vast ocean. I wonder how we would cope if anything happened to either of us.