Thursday morning saw me back in the office away from all human contact. Well, apart from the stream of phone calls obviously. The day started in a similar way to the Thursdays when I was on holiday; with a taunting e-mail from the National Lottery saying I had won a lucky dip. In the last three weeks I’ve had seven e-mails, five to say I’ve won lucky dips and the others saying important news about your ticket, which both turned out to be wins of £2.50. From occasional teasing they have moved into full on mockery now. I’m not greedy, I don’t need the sextuple rollover of tens of millions of pounds, just enough to be able to retire and never have to deal with a holiday or position management query ever again.
I didn’t realise quite how much I had written in notebooks whilst on holiday until I actually got around to typing it all up. Thursday night saw the next batch of travelogues being typed up and posted on my blog, and in the case of the Leicestershire ones on Medium as well (I can add as many, better quality, photos on there without using up all my site’s file space)..
Friday wasn’t pizza Friday this week. Instead, we were heading to a field just outside Rusper for a barbeque. This may sound a bit random place to go for a barbeque, but friends keep horses in a field here. They rent part of the property from a lunatic who uses the rest of the space to store random conked out vehicles. We have been a few times to help them sort the place out, removing ragwort (I had something else to do that day), and build stables. There is plenty of space to socially distance and so a few of us gathered.
I’d been a few times, but never walked up to the other end of the land. I haven’t seen as many old, rusted and immobile tractors in one place since news reports on French farmers’ blockades. Lots of four by fours, a couple of sports cars and various other cars are strewn in different places, most of them in danger of being completely reclaimed by nature. It is like a proper old junkyard.
It was a lovely warm evening; right up until the point where the sun started to disappear and the temperature dropped like a stone. And then the pyromaniacs came out to play building a fire, enough to keep people around it until it was properly dark and time for everyone to head home.
Saturday was wet, which suited me as I just spent all day finishing catching up on typing everything up, then linking everything to my social media, and loading the hundreds of photos to Facebook, both to my personal page and where appropriate to my interest groups (i.e. History of Leicestershire). It wiped out most of the day, as it was soon quarter to seven and time to drop Helen off at the Parson’s Pig for her to meet colleagues for a birthday meal.
I got back and had pizza Saturday, and looked at the laptop, and the next thing I knew it was nearly eleven and time to pick Helen back up. I’m sure that days at the weekend go at three times the speed of weekdays. It was the same Sunday morning, I looked at my watch and it was about eight, blinked and woke up at eleven.
Helen was taking her mum for lunch, so I had Charlie walking duties. I found out that to walk around the field at the end of the close takes exactly 571 steps and equates to 0.29 miles, which means that four laps of that (three of which used exactly the same amount of steps), three laps of the park behind the house and to and from the front door of the house works out to be two miles in total.
Whilst the final games of the Premier League season were on, I got around to collating pictures of street signs I’d taken photos of before my birthday, so were over a month old. I know we’d been away in the interim, but it was a shock to find I’d not done anything with them for five weeks. Two more collections finished – Norfolk Settlements and Forestfield Conservation Area.


I would have loved to have blinked for as long Monday morning as I had Sunday, but instead of blinking when I see the time is eight o’clock, it’s a panicked reaction as I have to get showered and into work. At which point time slowed to a trickle again and the next eight hours took four days. And then the evening went in about thirty seconds.
My mum rings me on my mobile, and she sounds all worried. “Just checking you’re alright, I’ve been ringing your landline for a few days but no one was answering”. Considering we were in most of the weekend, and at the time she said she called this is confusing. Right up until she says she copied all the numbers into a new address book last week, and she had copied the wrong number. Just leaves the question of who was she actually calling?
We’re watching the last few episodes of the last season of The Wire, and I was gutted that Omar wasn’t the last cockroach standing; he has made me laugh out loud so many times watching the whole thing from the start in the last couple of months.
Charlie has picked up two new habits in the last week or so. The first is to pick up his bowl and wander the house and garden with it, as if he is hungry, even though he’s just been fed. The second is morning attacks on my rucksack, trying to ransack it. He ignores it from when I get in, all night and before he goes for a walk, but once walked and fed he is relentless in trying to get into my bag, regardless of whether there is food in there or not.
Just Eat’s TV and radio adverts are showing up just what a rent-a-rapper Snoop has become. Seriously, get a grip, you’re showing less self-respect than Joe Hart did in the Head and Shoulders adverts a few years ago.
Speaking of things on the radio, Absolute 80s plays Wham’s “Club Tropicana” a lot. Yet it’s only recently I’ve noticed (after thirty seven years of hearing the song), that they contradict themselves in it. The chorus has the line “all that’s missing is the sea”, yet the second verse has the line “watch the waves break on the bay”.
A couple of recent meals Helen has cooked have included artichoke. To me that sounds more like an instruction than a food stuff, especially if it wasn’t chopped up into small pieces. I now can’t help but hear it as Artie, Choke!
After quite a few weeks I’ve levelled up in Jigsaw World, I’m now at level 18 and I’m called a Jigsaw Shark now. Who would have thought there could be such a thing? I’m just hoping this doesn’t mean that all the jigsaws at this level are of sharks.