annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary
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Day 40
I'm fairly sure I'm counting the days wrongly - I counted back and looked at the day I'm starting from and it's not when I started staying in but when I started getting scared. Not that it matters, really, but I've not been isolating for 40 days. Not yet anyway.
So, better again. I woke up this morning to a Whatsapp message from my friend K in Madrid and we fell into quite a long 'chat' which was great - I haven't seen her in the flesh for 20 years but she's still one of my closest pals. Last time we met was when her sister gathered a bunch of us together in Calpe, a Spanish town on the Mediterranean coast, where we hid and surprised K for her 50th birthday then all had a holiday together. Twenty two of us, which made it interesting when we descended on the town looking for somewhere to eat.
We finished when she had to start work, and I looked at my phone to discover a long private message written in the middle of the night by a woman I fell out with in 1982, when I dropped the keys to the camper van she'd borrowed for Glastonbury festival into the toilet pit - not on purpose - they slid out of my pocket. I was at fault, obviously, negligent at least but fucking hell, she wouldn't let it go. She brought it up when I saw her on Millenium Eve, eighteen bloody years later. Anyway, she wrote me a lovely long message in response to my post about being scared, about when her best friend died of cancer, how she went into a big depression and loads of other stuff - really open and kind and set me up for believing I could go forward somehow, which I have done.
I do wish I had the ability to bring myself back from the edge of the pit - well, I suppose I do sometimes. just not always. I have to remember that if I reach out people do respond.
Today was Jim yoga (Buddhist guy) which was hard - he's unpredictable and included quite a few asanas that I don't have the strength for. I was building up some core and arm strength through those gym classes when all this happened - I've done nothing since and can feel the decline. Yoga keeps you flexible in mind, body and spirit but it won't build up strength. I may have to find something to do to address that. I still felt blissed out by the end of the class.
Second keyboard lesson was great. I'm to crack on with practising 'Morning Has Broken' until I'm good with moving the fingers up and down a bit, which is good. It's much better having that in my head than 'Go Tell Aunt Nancy', which can fuck off, frankly. I'm to sing out the names of the notes as I play them, to help me fix which note is which. It's just the best thing, having a teacher.
Today makes five years since we moved here, according to Facebook, or five years since I posted the photos of the garden as it was when we moved in:
which I did quite like in terms of its privacy and greenness, but those hedges were Leyland Cypress - two yards wide, thirsty, hungry, ugly, and will grow to a hundred feet if not kept in check, so they had to come out which we had to wait months for, then we had to wait more months for the fences, then Sam went into the hospice, so I stopped taking interest. Last year I had pneumonia and this is where we are now - locked down with no access to plants or seeds. But it's coming along:
It's a shame I lost interest at the point I did as we could have had some decent hard landscaping done and made more interesting shapes. Bloke is all about straight lines and doing things while I'm out. He dug up some of the paving slabs which went straight down from one end to the other and made the path a bit bendy, but with no regard to the shape of the bed on the left or the pond on the right - the rectangular pond at right angles to the fence - also dug when I was out... and he put the raised beds for the veg exactly where I thought a rotary washing line could be hidden so we could take down the straight line... moan moan. It looks much better than before but it could have been fucking amazing and now it won't be because we won't have the money to rip it up and start again. Maybe one day I'll have the energy to remake the pond. A circular one would be so good to design around.
I made new masks and walked on the hills with the dog, then came home, had dinner of baked potato and cauliflower cheese with added leeks and spinach folded in, watched Eastenders and now I'm having an early night. Tomorrow I have a facetime lunch date with my pal J the musician.
I am grateful for: being healthy; cheering up; people being kind and supportive when I'm down; Bloke doing the heavy work in the garden even though I complain about him all the time; a great book, Missing, Presumed, by Susie Steiner, fucking love it, currently 99p for kindle.
Sleep tight, amigas. See you tomorrow. Keep safe.
11:33 p.m. - 20.04.20
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