San Francisco on my mind

Chris and I spent Saturday afternoon painting the walls at the back of our house. The old red brick now brightened up with the Alpine Blue masonry paint which took five weeks to travel from Darwen to Altrincham and finally to us. We're getting lots of jobs done during the lockdown, jobs which might have still been ideas if we weren't restricted to internet shopping and staying at home. I've never seen the cutlery drawers so neat before.

One of the lovely treats of being at home all weekend is when friends visit unannounced, usually on their daily day-release walk round the neighbourhood. I was putting some plates in the dishwasher after lunch when I heard David and Dino calling from the street to the garden and saw Chris wander down the drive to greet them. We had a ten minute chat and catch up, them on the street and us at the front door naturally. You really appreciate proper, face to face contact with people when you go so long without it.

Dino, who teaches fine art at Liverpool John Moores, is still working and having to adapt to online tutoring. I'd have imagined it would be pretty tricky to do but he's modified the way he works, like many of us, and he even says there are definite benefits to it. Not least of which are reduced stress levels from not having to drive from Salford to Liverpool every day.

Earlier in the day Matthew had stopped by to drop off a book. I have no idea when I'd mentioned it but I'd said at some point that I hadn't read The Days of Anna Madrigal, the last in the Tales of the City series, he remembered and, kind soul that he is, lent me his copy. The logistics of giving someone a book when you're supposed to stay two metres apart from each other are surprisingly problematic, especially when I was lending him one of mine in return. How does one land a hardback book in a friend's open backpack from six feet away without lobbing it at the back of their head?

There was a bit of a debacle last week when I ordered two books from Waterstones, one for me and one for Alison, only for them both to be delivered to her, in Leeds, on consecutive days. I've been in touch with them, offering to send one back, post-lockdown, and suggesting they post me a copy to Manchester as they were supposed to. I received an automated response to say their customer service team are working through a backlog dating back a month and my query is in a queue. I can't say I'm surprised they have such a mountain of complaints when they struggle with something so simple as putting the correct address on a book, but never mind, everything is forgivable in the age of Coronavirus.

In the absence of my new book Matthew's unexpected delivery was a welcome surprise. Especially as without it I'd have been forced to carry on trawling through Dracula, which I ordered while drunk one night thinking it was about time I actually read it. It's alright I suppose, it's just so Victorian and verbose, and the writing so small, that a chapter can take what feels like weeks to read. I get a far bigger sense of achievement with larger fonts.

For years I've had a habit of buying books which I think I ought to read so my bookcase is filled with unread classics such as Anna Karenina, Moby Dick and The Dharma Bums which sit neatly next to John Irving, Stephen King and (for shame) Helen Fielding. I'm a terrible snob when it comes to books so both the Brigit Jones books - given not bought - are hiding behind a Christmas Cactus, and my Stephen King horrors, well thumbed and secretly loved, are stashed behind a pile of my granny's antique Charles Dickens novels. I've even been known, in the height of my snobbery, to put what I consider to be higher brow books on shelves at eye level and trashy ones lower down, out of immediate eye line. Thus Doris Lessing and James Joyce enjoy the heady heights of the top shelf, unread of course, while The Lovely Bones and Life of Pi languish at knee height.

For a very slow reader I think I'm reasonably well read. I've read Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and The Go Between for example, and my favourite authors are Salman Rushdie and Gore Vidal who are both revered. However the fact that I turn my nose up at George Orwell and I stopped reading Brighton Rock at page 215 with only thirty two pages left to go leaves some of my friends aghast. And as far as I'm concerned Dickens can do one - they made me read that at school and it was dullsville in my opinion. I tried The Hobbit when I was a kid and I shan't be going back there either, Tolkien is banished in this house.

Anyway, I'm rambling, where was I? Armistead Maupin - certainly not high brow but a master storyteller and a favourite all the same.

Thankful to be able to ditch Jonathan Harker and his drearily lustful pal, Nosferatu, I started reading The Days of Anna Madrigal. I first came across Tales of the City at the age of eighteen when Channel 4 broadcast the mini-series based on the book. It was a revelation to me to see gay people on the telly and as I was, let's say, exploring my tendencies, I was initially hooked into it by that. Then of course the storytelling grabbed me and I was addicted.

I didn't know then that it was based on a book, assuming it to be just another TV series and it wasn't until I was twenty that I saw it in print after seeing a dogeared copy on a toilet cistern in Shrewsbury. Since then I've read the lot, aside from this weekend's delivery, and even seen the author at a book reading and interview in Salford last year.

Maupin has a talent for plonking the reader in San Francisco, in any given year, and making you feel like you know it intimately. I suppose that's what a good writer should be able to do and he has this skill in abundance.

In 1997 Chris and I took our first holiday together and at my insistence we went to California rather than Florida, somewhere he'd been time and again. My primary reason for this was that I didn't want to go to all the places he'd already been to with his awful ex. Another reason however was that I wanted to go to San Francisco and that desire was based exclusively on Tales of the City.

We originally decided that what we'd do is book our flights in and out of San Francisco, two weeks apart, and find accommodation when we were there, each day dependent on where we found ourselves driving to. While booking the flights and chatting to the travel agent, she revealed that her cousin Peter lived in California, in a place called La Jolla in San Diego. He was originally from Wythenshawe in south Manchester and had been in the merchant navy, settling in California, marrying and having a child. Since then Peter had been busy setting up a construction company, splitting from his wife and shacking up with an Asian boyfriend called Stan, many years his junior.

"You should go and stay with him!" she said, so she arranged it and we did.

With a couple of weeks to go before our holiday we thought it might be a good idea to at least ensure we had some accommodation when we landed in San Francisco so we got looking. The internet in 1997 was a cumbersome beast in comparison to what we have today, in many ways like a kid at a special school, small, slow and dim, so Chris asked around people he knew for recommendations of where we might call and book a night or two in advance.

Luckily someone from a record company he used to deal with knew somebody in San Francisco who knew somebody else that rented out a room. This was ten years before AirBNB was conceived but essentially that's what we were going to do. We were given instructions for how to find the friend when we landed, agreed a price of $40 a night, and that was that.

Landing at SFO via Chicago and after about nineteen hours travelling we bumbled out into the dazzling California sun. This was pre-mobile phone for us and all we knew was that we were to find the 'friend', a woman in a champagne coloured VW Beetle. Surprisingly she found us in minutes, packed our cases into the boot of the car and we sped off into town, her chattering away, a dime a dozen, and interrogating us about our journey.

We arrived at a typical wooden Victorian house in the Mission District. The 'friend' hoiked our bags out onto the pavement, then taking the steps at the front of the house two at a time, bounded to the front door and hammered on it. A young man came to the door and with wildly expressive arms flying around her head like a windmill, she explained who we were and introduced us then immediately went on her way with a parting "Good luck you guys!" I'm not sure if it was meant for us or our new landlords.

The couple, one Brazilian, the other French were strangely quiet and moody for hosts but welcoming and generous all the same. They had the middle apartment in the house with neighbours upstairs and down and, once cash had changed hands for the room, they gave us our own key and showed us around.

The place felt spacious and was filled with bohemian touches, a battered old ladder in the bathroom in place of a towel rail, wall hangings, plants everywhere with fairly lights twinkling away in them and a huge cactus bedecked with glow in the dark stars.

I was immediately jealous after all I'd grown up, in a small terraced house in the countryside in Oldham, and only ever lived in Chris's house in Sale, a small semi on an estate, since moving out. This place was wildly exciting to my unsophisticated, twenty one year old eyes.

We were shown to the guest bedroom, a large room with a bay window at the front of the house, and told that we could use the whole place as we saw fit, only their bedroom was off limits which was understandable. Delirious from jet lag and having been awake for the best part of twenty four hours did what any sensible travellers would do, we unpacked, had a half hour lie down, then headed out to find food. That night remains a blur in my mind simply because of exhaustion. I've never been very good without sleep you see, I've even been known to fall asleep in nightclubs and once behind someone's gran's sofa at an after-party in Moston.

The next day, wide awake at 4.00am but still refreshed and raring to explore, we helped ourselves to breakfast and headed out. San Francisco, it seemed, was small enough to walk around but big enough to completely knacker you out. We spent hours marching up and down its steep streets, being sure to take in as many sights as possible. The Golden Gate Bridge turned out to be way further away from anything than we expected but was definitely worth the hike.

Chris was especially interested in the crisis counselling phones which were dotted along it.

"Take a picture! Take a picture!" he insisted.

I obliged, only a little concerned that the last person to have used it may well have plummeted to a watery death beneath us. It was our holiday and we were going to do tourist shit. China Town was ticked off, the Financial District too for some reason, the cable cars were ridden and of course an obligatory trip to Russian Hill was made to look for the fictional Barbary Lane from Tales of the City.

Worn out and in need of a change of clothes after a day of hardcore sightseeing we headed back to the Mission. We took the Muni in the general direction of home and eventually disembarked. In 1997 Chris and I had only ever lived in Manchester, so we weren't accustomed to the system of street numbering and naming of junctions used in San Francisco. This led us to missing our stop and getting off one station too far. That one stop may as well have been twenty miles away.

Unaware of our mistake we wandered up into the daylight and stood there at the junction blinking into the sun, no doubt looking confused and startled, as we took in the sights around us. It was like a scene from a Romero film with scores of what appeared to be brain eating zombies staggering around the streets. As one tripped on a pavement another wandered in front of a moving car, oblivious to world around.

It took a minute or two to realise what we'd done, after all the junction looked very similar to the one we should have got off at. A quick plan was formed - we would walk back to where we should be, it couldn't be that far surely, and we knew which way we should go didn't we? At that moment I had never felt that I looked like a lost tourist so much in my entire life. Chinos and a polo shirt with a rucksack was not the fashion in these parts.

Spotting a police cruiser as it pulled up at the lights we nipped over and through the open window told the officer what we'd done and asked how best to get back to where we needed to be.

"That's quite a mistake." he pointed out in that slow, obvious manner some Americans are prone to, "What you guys need to do is take one block that way, turn right and go another five blocks."

Thank god! We finally knew how to get out of there, and we weren't going to have our brains eaten on the junction of Crack Cocaine and Mission.

"Thank you so much!" we said earnestly.

Just then the lights changed and as we stepped back, away from the police car, he called through the window to us, "Hey guys, be sure to hold tight to you bags!" He sped off leaving us to a certain death.

That evening, very much alive and kicking, we went for dinner and drinks in the Castro and reflected on the day's adventures. We sat in a colourful Mexican restaurant which had cute salt and pepper cruets, shaped like cacti, on the tables. I had chosen it because, despite this being California, or perhaps because this was America, I was surprised to see vegetarian food on a menu. My experience thus far was much like that in continental Europe, where anyone wanting to eat anything other than meat of fish had to settle for pizza and pasta.

I ordered the grilled cactus leaf with a sense of smug satisfaction. A sense that was soon wiped away when I bit into the weird tasting, gelatinous, lump on my plate fifteen minutes later.

After dinner we tried a few bars, all gay bars, some more successful than others. I should have known better with the first place as we got to the bottom of the stairs leading from the street to the basement to be presented with a heavy, black, leather curtain designed either to keep the world out or the clientele in. Thankfully it was early so we had a quick beer and moved on to a drag bar with a balcony that stretched around two sides of the building's first floor. Possibly influenced by the disgusting cactus leaf, I asked the bar man for a bottle of Sol.

"I didn't even know they still made that." he said before offering me a Budweiser and an apologetic shrug.

We left San Francisco after a couple of days to head south but as our flights were from there in the not too distant future the guys whose room we rented insisted we kept their house key and let ourselves back in for the final two days of our holiday.

When we did eventually land back in town we couldn't remember their address or indeed how to find the house, and not wanting to risk getting lost with a bunch of junkies again, we kept the key and booked ourselves into the worst hotel in the California, The Amsterdam on Taylor Street. It was so bad the cockroaches had moved out. I checked it out on Tripadvisor a couple of days ago after finding a scrap book of our trip to California, and it turns out nothing much has changed.

Our last two days were spent much as our first two were, being proper tourists. We went to Pier 39 to see the sea lions and took a trip to Alcatraz, we played mini golf (according to the photographs at least) and went to UnderWater World where we met a giant foam shark. Finally running out of things to do on our last day we spent a few hours at the cinema watching Jurassic Park 2. I don't remember the film but I do remember people booing at the screen when a Coca Cola advert came on. I think by that point I'd got the measure of San Francisco and I liked it. I promised myself that I'd go back one day.

Cut to twenty one years later.

It was September 2018 that we eventually returned. Someone once said, the more things change the more they stay the same, and that felt so true there.

We stayed in an AirBNB in Dolores Heights with two guys who rented a room out, only this time our trip from the airport was in an Uber and not in the back of a friend of a friend's champagne VW Beetle. The city felt bigger and noisier despite not having grown. Poverty was more noticeable and everything felt much more expensive than it had done.

The sea lions were still there but Pier 39 had become more of a tourist trap, if that was possible. The Golden Gate Bridge was still really far away but still worth going to see again and while the Castro felt way more gentrified than it had two decades earlier, it was still full of gay bars, outrageous characters and drag queens.

I'm glad we went when I was only 21 years old because returning when I was 42 made me realise that unless I get a better paying job, I can't really afford to go there again.

The city has become richer as I have become poorer which is a bummer but that's okay because I'll always have Armistead Maupin to take me back there.

Washing Machines and Personal Trainers in Paris

This morning Chris was standing behind me, while I added tonic water to our online Tesco order, and a sizeable chunk of chewed Shreddies and banana fell out of his mouth onto my head. He barely batted an eyelid. I'd like to say this was unusual but Chris seems to struggle keeping things in his mouth. It's not that he's disabled or anything, I think he just gets distracted by something more interesting and doesn't notice the smear of ketchup or flake of haddock clinging onto his face for dear life.

We need a new washing machine. Ours sounds like it's filled with hard plastic dolls with no clothes on, clattering about every time the drum moves. Apparently it's the ballbearings. I didn't even know washing machines have ballbearings. I saw a washing machine I really liked when we rented a house in Sitges last September so I took photographs of it. When I showed it to Chris this week he said that at £400 it's far too expensive and we could get one at half the price. I'm tempted to just buy the whole thing and gift half of it to him.

The one I took pictures of was dreamy, I loved it. It was both quiet and powerful at one and the same time, understated yet striking. I beginning to sound like a 1960s housewife.

Sometimes I worry I'm going to become one of those people that marries a rollercoaster or jizzes on the Eiffel Tower. I've never even been to Paris, let alone jizzed on the Eiffel Tower. I'm afraid of Parisians you see, in much the same way that when you go to a cool nightclub you're scared of all the people inside. Until that is that you realise the people you bump into on the dance floor are just called Mandy and Aiden and they work in accounts. In my mind, in Paris, they'd be called Madelyn and Andre and they'd be less friendly than Mandy or Aiden. Probably because Madelyn and Andre were less inclined to tolerate a gurning idiot, two hours into an ecstasy fuelled rave.

Alison told me that she broke a plate this morning by dropping a bowl on top of it. The end of a dinner service is a misery that can go on for years. You don't want to replace an entire set just because you only have five side plates but then you know at some point, you'll be throwing a dinner party and one person will have to have an odd one. We recently replaced our classic white ones that we'd bought at The Pier when we lived in London. I bought a stoneware set with a charcoal rim from that website Lorraine Kelly advertises. They've not been great; covered in cutlery scratches already.

I was in the shed recently and found the remaining plates and bowls from the old set in a box. I thought Chris had thrown them all away but it seems he's hoarded them because - you never know.

Sets of towels are another thing that eventually go to the wall, slowly and painfully. You start with a lovely set, fluffy, clean, and most importantly matching, and bit by bit over the years they turn into the sort of collection you might find in a crack den. The only way towels ever leave our house are when they're wrapped around a dead cat and buried in the flowerbed. In the meantime Chris, with his magpie tendencies, collects 'lost' towels. We have a collection of towels stolen from hotels and gyms around the world, all white, none of them matching. It seems a shame to buy a full set when we have loads of serviceable towels here, who the hell cares if by using them we appear to live in a homeless shelter.

When we had a garage we had two tumble driers in there - neither of them were ever used. I asked Chris where the second one had come from and apparently it was his parents' and they offered it him when they bought a new one. He accepted their offer because you never know when the first one would break down. Our towels could do with a few spins in one of those now, if we still had them. As it is they go on the line with everything else where they become stiff and scratchy. I actually had towel envy a few weeks ago when I saw Paul remove and fold a matching set of soft fluffy towels from his tumble drier. I've known one of our freshly laundered towel to cut my face open before now.

While scrolling through Facebook earlier I came across an advert for giant elastic bands that you use for exercising. You can hook them over a door, attach them to a gymnastic step, or simply slip them under your feet and use them as resistance bands.

I'm usually suspicious of adverts on social media because you don't know if the company is vetted or if they're going to swizz you out of your hard earned cash so I decided to do a bit of research. I wish I hadn't because now every advert on Instagram is for bloody resistance bands and other home workout paraphernalia, and they're making me feel fat.

The lockdown has seen a proliferation of workout at home solutions and every other twat on Instagram is doing it. People half my age, and half my weight, looking buff and feeling great with their multicoloured elastic bands and dumbbells. What I want to know is where these hideous twenty somethings get all their money for the kit they use, let alone the dental work, while I find myself sitting here, poor, snaggle-toothed and with a mild gin problem at the age of 44.

Sometimes, on a whim, I'll find myself dragged into the notion of keeping fit. Every couple of years I'll join a gym or buy some contraption designed to tone my arms or give me a six pack. The last time this happened I found myself paying seventy quid for a four week membership of a gym a few weeks before I went on holiday. I went swimming three times which works out at over £23 per swim. I think I may have paid over the odds.

Naturally I blamed the person who took my induction meeting. He asked me what I wanted to get out of my four week membership and when I told him that I was going on holiday at the end of December and I'd like to lose a couple of pounds he practically laughed at me.

'Well that's not going to happen,' he scoffed with a smug look on his face. 'I'll show you a workout you can do though.' He said all this while checking himself out in a mirror, tensing his muscles and running his forefinger down the outside of his own perfectly toned arm. I hated him immediately.

Decorative Wooden Doum-Ladder

The house is a tip. I feel like I'm living in a haunted junk shop. From my vantage point, at the dining room, table I can see a ceramic hare, a USB microphone, a half empty bottle of Chambord, a pile of CDs, a pritt-stick, an empty ziplock bag, a Co-Op food magazine with some of the pictures cut out, a bottle of sunscreen, a cat toy, nine bottles of red wine and a pirate flag. Everything is covered in a generous layer of dust, made more evident by the fact that four large pieces of furniture are black and someone (could have been me) has wiped their hand across each of them, as if to check exactly how dusty they are, before saying to themselves, 'I must buy some Pledge.'

I don't know how we've got to this state, after all Chris isn't working and I've only left the house four times in the last month. There's plenty of time for cleaning and yet  our bedsheets haven't been changed in a fortnight and there are toothpaste splashes on the bathroom mirror which are certain to require a fair amount of elbow grease to remove them.

I can hear the front bedroom door banging in the wind upstairs. There's a hook on it to prevent it from properly slamming but it's not tight enough to stop it completely and it clatters away as long as the windows are open. Chris has a fixation of airing the house which is why the window in the spare bedroom, much like every other room upstairs, is open in the first place. It's only used as a guest room three or four times a year and the rest of the time it's either a laundry room or somewhere to deposit junk until we decide to either throw it away or officially add it to the hoard.

It's windy outside so the door is banging a couple of times a minute and it's driving me mad. I mean, how fresh does a room we barely use need to be anyway?

I took a little break from work earlier when my eye was caught by an advert on Instagram and I found myself poring over the website of a furniture and interior decor company. Years ago I worked for Habitat and over the six years of my employment I developed an interest in beautiful and impractical things for the home that I just couldn't afford. Back then it was fine because I had staff discount, I knew when the sales were on, and for a while at least, I worked at the company's clearance store so if I was happy to wait till an item was 'last season' then I could get some real bargains.

Most of our furniture is Habitat, with the noticeable exception of the dusty black pieces that are taunting me right now. I once bought a fuscia pink chair designed by Philip Treacy, I don't remember how the hell I got it home because it was huge. A round piece that barely made it through the door and which I had to ebay eventually because it was so ridiculously large. A woman in Belfast won the online auction and sent an HGV to collect it from our little village.

I came home with an oversized paper lantern one day, the sort of thing you'd see hanging from the ceiling in a student rental, only the one I bought was at least five feet in diameter and stood on the floor. It ended up in an attic room of the house we lived in Derbyshire because it just wouldn't fit anywhere else. It was in good company up there standing proudly next to three eight foot panels with a picture of the Queen by some German artist I forget now, which made up an old shop display, a two foot letter E which hung from the ceiling and a massive white plastic coffee table which looked like a ginormous aspirin.

Today's online window shopping found me staring at a decorative wooden doum-ladder wondering if I could justify €74, where I would put it in my house, and importantly what exactly 'doum' meant.

I shared this find with Alison and Nicola on our group chat, safe in the knowledge that they'd not find this out of the ordinary, Alison having recently ordered a portrait of the dog and this morning buying magnetic fake eyelashes.

I asked how they worked, whether you needed metal eyelids or some kind of cranial implant but apparently the reality is far more pedestrian. You need to use some special eyeliner with magnetic properties that attracts tiny little magnets on the lashes themselves. I suppose she'll be alright so long as she doesn't walk past a fridge door with them in. Next on her list is a carbon monoxide detector.

The tech company I work for took a hit today after being told by a large, international client they wouldn't be paying us tens of thousands of pounds worth of outstanding invoices for the foreseeable future. Their business is music and entertainment, and in the case of the work we do, music festivals, and it has all but closed till further notice. This has meant a number of our staff being furloughed and the small team shrinking drastically.

It was expected that future work would take a hit but we assumed the bills we'd already issued would be honoured, after all this is a multi billion dollar company. I didn't realise just how hard they'd been hit until I read today that their value had dropped by more than half in three weeks.

Much of the work we do, day to day, is for individual festivals but they ultimately fall under this one organisation so our cashflow has been clobbered. The Government's furlough scheme is being used to cover eighty percent of these colleagues' salaries while our company will pay the remaining twenty percent. Without the scheme a bunch of them would be wondering how they were going to pay the bills so it's going to be a valuable safety net.

It's all very sad but the light at the end of the tunnel is that eventually my workmates will be brought back and I'm confident that the invoices will eventually be settled. There's no bad blood, everyone accepts that these really are exceptional times.

My job, for the time being at least, is safe. A lot of what I do is administrative, I do some bookkeeping, some marketing and PR, social media and so on, none of which is directly affected by today's news.

While on social media duty today I had a quick check of LinkedIn. There was nothing much to report or note but as I was scrolling through I was reminded of my pet hate - business language. It's not formal business language per se that does my head in, but that type of things people write on social media instead of writing what they actually mean.

The main culprits are words like 'excited', 'thrilled' and 'proud.' Proud to be part of the team that landed a million pound contract to supply goats to Chester Zoo; Thrilled to be working with Team Goat in East Cheshire; and so on.

In more than twenty five years of employment I've never been thrilled, proud or excited about anything I've ever done at work! Maybe it's because I don't work with goats but I suspect people just feel uncomfortable saying what they really mean - Look at me! I just landed the biggest contract of my career and that makes me totally employable! Maybe I'm just too cynical...

Politicians and Passive Aggression.

Every day there's a press conference from Downing Street, originally held by the Prime Minister but as he's been out of action for a while now the rest of the Cabinet are taking it in turns give it a whirl. Today they've dragged out the Education Secretary for the daily briefing.

The trouble with these press conferences, aside from the press not actually being there any more, instead appearing by video link, like vulnerable children in a particularly sensitive court case, is that they've turned into something altogether different. Gavin Williamson, when I tuned in today appeared to be delivering an after dinner speech and though I don't watch them every day now that tends to be the way it feels more often than not.

I can't help but feel I've tuned into a white tie dinner at Mansion House and a politician is addressing the diners at their annual banquet having just had their empty pudding plates replaced with lukewarm cups of coffee and chocolate truffles.

Hot on the heels of the MP du jour is generally a scientist who singlehandedly removes us from the City of London and lands us in a 1980s polytechnic with their descriptions of graphs and what the trends actually mean. Dehumanising the now 16,000 deaths by turning them into statistics and lines on a chart which are flattening or otherwise.

I'm being glib, obviously there is more to this than I describe. I think I put it down to my age. I'm only 44 but I just realised that Mr Williamson, the Education Secretary, who is clearly a smart guy, is accomplished and even has a CBE to his name, is a year younger than me. How depressing.

I did a quick Wikipedia check, out of curiosity, while I was listening to him speak as I detected a northern accent sneaking through, ever so gently, between words and wondered where he was from. He'd be a lefty's wet dream if it weren't for the fact he was a Conservative MP. Born in a northern seaside town, dad a local government worker and mum job centre staff, both of whom voted Labour. State comprehensive, sixth form college, then Bradford University, he may as well have been related to Ken Loach.

I do today's scientist a disservice as she is actually the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England. She appears much more comfortable standing at the lectern than Williamson and that, for me at least, gives her a sense of authority. She reminds me in a way of my granny, a measured, intelligent woman who commands attention.

I'm a big fan of social media - Facebook and Instagram being my drugs of choice - and I'm a member of a group called Mint Community. It was started as an online community predominantly, though by no means exclusively, for gay men that used to be on the Manchester gay scene in the 80s and 90s. It's a mix of music, jokes, support, culture, reminiscing, slagging people off and unsurprisingly pictures of supposedly attractive men.

Every week there is a selfie battle where someone posts four pictures of men taking a picture of themselves in various states of undress and members of the group choose which one they think is the most attractive. Inevitably people get carried away and it's not unusual to read that Baz from Salford has written something like 'Number three would deffo get it.' followed by an aubergine emoji. I recently noticed one group member, a beefcake with a beard and shaved head, had taken the time to criticise the interior decor of the apartments behind the selfie takers, which while being a bit of a cliche, I admired and thanked heavens it wasn't just me that had noticed.

The reason I mention this group is that recently the Foreign Secretary was featured with a bunch of photographs and the question - 'Politics aside... Dominic Raab... would you?'

I wonder if this kind of objectification will befall Mr Williamson in time. I'm pretty sure Theresa May didn't have to endure it.

Chris took me to Chorlton Water Park today. We've lived here for nearly ten years and neither of us had been till this week. It was nice, we interrupted a group of Muslim girls having a sneaky joint on a bench near the water and Chris fed banana to the ducks. I'm not sure bananas are part of the staple diet of a duck but they gobbled them down all the same.

Social distancing rules were generally being adhered to, mostly by me though as I found myself ducking and diving to avoid other people while walking along the river and round the lake.

One thing I've never really understood when in the countryside is the habit of people to say hello and smile as they walk past you. At one and the same time it's both incredibly English and the most utterly un-English thing to do. Chris gets involved, winking and smiling at folk as we walk past, nodding and saying 'How-do.' to randoms. I don't care for it preferring to stare at the ground like a petulant teenager and then criticise them after they're out of earshot.

My passive aggressive favourite is 'No it's absolutely fine, I'll move out of your way.' Today however conjured up from me the contemptuous 'Did you see that? I think she was wearing a corduroy dress!'

Serious Moonlight

The weather has turned so instead of working in the garden Chris is upstairs tidying the junk room. I can hear things being knocked over and thrown around from downstairs and it's making me tense.  The clinking of glass and half mumbled half shouted exclamations of 'What the fuck?' are clearly audible. This will not end well and I will have to bite my tongue later when he begins to accuse me of hoarding crap.

Admittedly I probably don't need half a litre of fake blood, a navy blue, polyester, woman's jumpsuit from Debenhams and one and a half rolls of wallpaper with a brick pattern on them. Nor do I need right now the unused easel which is about four years old and has never left its box, the cheap costume jewellery, and the broken, hammered metal, table lamp from Habitat which I've kept because it matches the not-broken, hammered metal, table lamp from Habitat which I don't use anyway.

In my defence, and with the exception of the lamps, each of these things were bought to be used in the production of a play. The twelve feet of thick, white, yacht rope for example was a prop in Marina and the Clone and was last seen tying up the reporter in Marina Oliveto's Primrose Hill cellar.

Chris is as happy as Larry out in the garden, pottering around all day, moving planters, hiding gnomes and pruning things to within an inch of their lives. He's very much like Dr Doolittle with the animals and has regular visitors in the shape of the neighbours' cats. At the moment there are three everyday guests who turn up unannounced a couple of times a day, usually in rotation, sometimes together.

Naturally we've given them names, nothing too personal because, well because they're not our cats. There's Blackie, who is silky and jet black from head to tail, White Face a sturdy beast who is black and white with, unsurprisingly, a smattering of white fur across his face, and Black Face who is also black and white and who I'm considering renaming because it sounds slightly racist to my sensitive ears. My auntie Elaine used to have a black and white cat who looked just like Black Face, he was called Minstrel which I think, as names go, is probably no better.

Since we lost our elderly and much loved cat Gilbert, in January, we haven't got round to getting rid of his remaining food, and now with Blackie, White Face and Black Face brave enough to knock about in what was his territory, Chris has been feeding them. The wet food and tuna ran out ages ago and now the biscuits are beginning to run low. Chris wants to start buying cat food for them but I have to remind him that they're not our responsibility and they a perfectly good home and owners who feed them just a few doors down the road. They are clearly taking advantage of his good nature, he knows this very well but allows it all the same.

As part of the growing menagerie we're also visited by an array of birds. Some of these visitors, like the robins and tits, are more welcome than the likes of the pair of shitting magpies who have spent the last fortnight gathering goodies with which to build a nest, and the massive pigeon that barges its way onto the bird table and flings whatever bits of seeds or bread are on there, all over the lawn.

I was sitting out on the terrace on Tuesday afternoon, soaking up the sun, and watching Chris gardening. To the idle eye of a passer by I could have been mistaken for a reptile warming myself up on a hot rock, only I was snacking on pitta bread and hummus, not flies.

As I sloshed back the last of my Pinot Grigio I noticed the ladybirds were back, buzzing around in the warm air and smashing themselves into windows willy nilly. I later went inside and found two more of them under the dining room table, dead and cluttering up the place. I fear the warm weather has brought them out early this year.

I was born in 1975 so I don't remember the fabled summer of 76 with its never ending heatwave, villages reappearing after a hundred years from the bottom of reservoirs, and the ladybird plague that came with the heat. Until recently, as far as I was concerned, these little red visitors were cute. They were flying jewels which ate greenflies and made the garden look summery.

That was until a couple of years ago when they started invading the house. I'm not sure how they get in but I find tonnes of them in the bathroom, the bedroom and now in the dining room. These once charming creatures are now revealed for what they really are - devil worshiping beetles to be hoovered up at the earliest opportunity. I must get round to sucking up the two in the dining room.

I finally got round to dying Chris's hair the other day. He struggles with bleach because his hair has a tendency to go ginger rather than blonde, so he leaves it on for way too long. I'm no hairdresser but I'll give pretty much anything a go so I used the tiny little brush that came with his kit to slap a load of this blue, stinking gunk on his head. 'There you go,' I said, 'now pop the little shower cap thing on and give it fifteen minutes.'

Chris decided against the see through polythene hat and it wasn't until one whole hour later he disappeared upstairs to shower off the bleach - eyes stinging and scalp burning. He reappeared after rinsing it through and blow drying his hair and asked 'What do you think?',

'It looks great!' I said, 'Really, very blonde.'

'It's a bit yellow,' he said, 'put the rest of it on would you?'

So dutifully I slapped the remainder on and left him to potter about for another half an hour. Eventually the burn was too much to take and he rinsed the last of the bleach off his hair and scalp. I asked if he'd used the special conditioner after washing away the chemicals, so his hair didn't become too brittle. 'No need,' he revealed, 'I mixed it in with the two bottles at the beginning so it's been conditioning as it was going!'

He has a look of an early eighties David Bowie now, if I had to pinpoint it I'd say the Serious Moonlight tour, 1983. I told him this to his glee and he spent the rest of the day and night singing away to himself - 'Ground control to Major Tom.'

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd missed a bit and there was a faint but noticeable brown line across the back of his head. Like a little cranial skid mark that only I was privy to. I've since taken the clippers to his head as he felt like he needed a quick trim and the skid mark has all but gone.

I suspect that he's waiting for that 'roots' look to come through so give it another couple of days and I'll be there giving him a short back and sides again. As I already mentioned, I'm no hairdresser, but I've been cutting my own hair for at least ten years and as long as he doesn't want anything fancy, I'm happy to give it a bash. I only really know two styles - short back and sides and skinhead - but thankfully that covers the pair of us.

I've been toying with the idea of writing to an author I've been reading recently but I'm not sure how that would be taken. I'm not a stalker and I don't want to profess undying love to them or anything, I just want to talk about how they write and learn a bit. I also like the idea of being an anecdote they recount in a future publication when they write about this person they had to call the police about. You never know, even though they are an acclaimed author with an international reputation, and millions of pounds in the bank, they might still want a new friend and I could be the perfect stranger they've been waiting for.

He lives in West Sussex apparently but I'm not sure where so I don't know how I'd get my letter to him. I remember as a kid my mum wanted to write to the Queen fan club. Queen the band not Queen Elizabeth. She too didn't have an address and this being pre-internet she took a punt and addressed the letter to The Queen Fan Club, London. Not even an attempt at a postcode.

I might try this tack myself, after all I have a name and there can't be that many people in West Sussex called that. Someone is surely going to be able to direct a letter to the right place.

Disappointingly it didn't work for my mum and a couple of months after posting it her little white envelope was returned to our house on the hill in Oldham.

Address not known.

Out Of Stock

Asda are scheduled to deliver our groceries this evening between 7.30 and 8.30. We usually use Tesco but delivery slots, across all supermarkets, are as rare as hen's teeth during the lockdown so, for the second time in three weeks, Asda it is. Earlier this week I spent a gruelling twenty one minutes queuing to access the Morrison's website only to be told, when I finally got through, there were no delivery slots available, and when I tried Sainsbury's they give me short shrift too. Apparently they are only accepting orders from vulnerable people, though quite how they know if I'm vulnerable or not just from my postcode I'll never know.

Perhaps there are no vulnerable folk in Chorlton, all too well fed on hummus and Bolivian organic quinoa to be struggling. The fact of the matter is that I'm not vulnerable but we've been using online grocery services for about three years now, ever since we got rid of the cars, and the thought of traipsing round a supermarket then trying to get a week's worth of shopping home without a vehicle, is depressing.

When we've done it in the past we've called an Uber but I'm slightly concerned at the moment about the prospect of being cooped up in what is essentially a mobile Coronavirus incubator. Still, after this week the likelihood of getting a delivery slot is slim so I think we're going to have to bite the bullet, strap on the face masks and wander down to Morrison's. In the meantime though, we have tonight's delivery which was booked over three weeks ago when the world was slightly less surreal.


I'm not sure who is in charge of making substitutions at Asda when they're out of stock but judging by what happened last time I suspect they don't take their role too seriously. One of the missing items on that drop off was a bottle of 'Premium Collection' Viognier which I was quite looking forward to. Upon discovering it absent from the shelves, however, the clown on picking duty thought it completely acceptable to substitute it with a bottle of that staple of the seventies dinner party, Black Tower. I was distraught, naturally, not that it stopped me from drinking it of course. Waste not want not and all that.

I've just had an email to tell me what's changed on today's order and while some of it is absolutely acceptable - Rigatoni instead of Penne, flat leaf parsley instead of curly leaf - I was agog when I read that the fancy vanilla ice cream I spent ages choosing last night is being swapped for strawberry, and (horror of horrors) the two bars of Galaxy chocolate are being replaced by Twirls! Somebody is having a laugh at my expense.

In addition to that the Maldon salt, which I threw in the basket at the last minute but didn't really need yet, is being replaced by rock salt, the sort you need a grinder for, a grinder which we don't have. I'll save it for winter and use it on the drive I think.

In addition we will not be getting either Chris's hair dye, a lockdown whim which he knew he could experiment with safe in the knowledge that nobody would see the results, or the broccoli quiche. Now I understand that substituting Light Ash for Frosted Beige is a dangerous game to play, particularly as they're not accepting returns at the moment, but broccoli quiche? Surely a nice cheese and onion, or a fresh summer vegetables could have been dug up from somewhere, Christ, I'd even accept a flan if push came to shove!

Ahead of tonights grocery drop off, Chris has popped out for some essentials we forgot to order, latex gloves and antibacterial gel to hand, and while he's there he's going to keep an eye out for the latest summer shade.

In other delivery news, we ordered a tin of masonry paint nearly two weeks ago which still hasn't been delivered. The other items in the order arrived, a few days late but at least we have them. When Chris queried the missing item Homebase told him that it has to come from the manufacturer, Crown Paints who I know are only some twenty five miles away in East Lancashire, to their shop in Altrincham to then be dispatched from there to us. I absolutely appreciate that the world is on its arse at the moment but I'm struggling to see how logistics have broken down to the extent that a tin of Alpine Blue takes nearly three weeks to travel across the North West. Maybe Homebase are helping prepare the new Nightingale hospital in the city centre, in which case I will absolutely forgive them, or perhaps their drivers are poorly, or the staff at Crown. Who knows? I tell you what though, when it arrives it's going to transform our terrace!

POST SCRIPTUM:
Chris has just arrived back from his shopping trip with all manner of goodies, like an April Father Christmas! He now has his hair dye and by this evening will be a bombshell of forties movie proportions, he also brought back a large bar of Galaxy chocolate which has made my day, and another addition for the Gnome Zone at the back of the garden!

In The Garden

I'm not sure what the Home Secretary has done but social media is awash with spite directed at her. Maybe she's murdered an orphan or abandoned a puppy. For the time being at least I won't bother investigating the source of the moral outrage, mostly because of where it's coming from. Instead I'll satisfy myself by snoozing people on Facebook, something I've been doing with glee for the last couple of years. Safe in the knowledge they will never know.

I just discovered to my delight that you can now mute people on Instagram too. Though because it's permanent this is a more severe punishment than Facebook's snooze which is revoked automatically after thirty days. Not quite as harsh as the hide option or indeed the social media capital punishment that is to unfriend someone but still, in terms of passive aggression, it scores extra points because you have to remember that you froze them out if you ever want to see them again. It leaves me wondering if I should make a list so I don't forget whose baby pictures I'm missing. A missing persons list for people that haven't gone anywhere.

It's Easter Sunday today, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, so as usual, in celebration, we're eating chocolate and doing some jobs around the house. Chris has cleared out his bedside drawer and I have emptied the dishwasher. Today, along with Christmas day, is traditionally a day when all the shops and restaurants are shut but as that's been the case for a few weeks now there's not much difference really.

The garden is looking good. It's still coming to life after a few months of winter so everything isn't quite where it should be yet but, bit by bit, Chris is resurrecting it. With all the free time forced upon him, he now spends hours out there, planting and weeding, fixing and painting, lighting up the trees and moving planters around. One of his favourite pastimes is pruning and there is a constant battle between us to stop him from chopping everything down, his argument being that 'It will all grow back.'

I don't see the point of decimating a perfectly good specimen in order for it to grow back again but I choose my battles and this year, already, we have lost the top fifteen feet of an acacia in the hope that he will leave the acers alone and spare the life of the beautiful, blue California lilac that grows over the terrace closest to the house. He's right, they do grow back, it's just that with vital limbs removed they tend take on the form of a twisted hunchback or a pair of tights frozen on a January washing line in a winter storm. Symmetry and grace fly out the window when Chris comes a hacking with his scimitar.

Sometimes I suspect it's a contest of wills between him and mother nature. He loves nothing more than to torment tubs of flowers and plants by turning their beaming faces away from the sun after they've spent weeks positioning themselves for the best access to it. Yesterday, while sitting out in the blazing sunshine on the decking, I suggested that he might want to invest in a bunch of lazy Susans to make the process simpler; it was greeted with a snarl of derision and, as if to prove a point, he immediately stood up and turned his two newest planters a hundred and eighty degrees so the purple blooms faced us and away from the sun.

One of the things I love about our garden is all the odd little ornaments and decorations dotted around it. Admittedly it may have gone a little overboard, what with the mantelpiece propped up against a fence with two Staffordshire dogs perched on it, and my grandpa's goat skull hiding down amongst the roses, but who wouldn't delight in the Gnome Zone at the end of the garden, a place where our seven or eight gnomes hide out amongst the shrubs?

I've probably said this before but the garden is a godsend while we're all being asked to stay at home. We have friends who live in flats who have no outside space to speak of. One friend told me that he likes nothing more than to sit in the carpark on the main road which his flat is on shouting at people passing by or yelling into his phone on video calls. The one hour day release is obviously a bonus to these folks but there's talk that even this might be curtailed to stop people from abusing the so-called privilege.

I'm a natural worrier so I try to be lighthearted about what's happening, otherwise I'd go mad with sleepless nights and fretting, but the stark reality is that nearly ten thousand people have died as of today, with over nine hundred of those in the last twenty four hours. Granted as a proportion of the UK's population, that's small, and undoubtedly some of those people that died while they have COVID 19 would have died anyway, but that doesn't take away the fact that these are real people with families and friends and lives to live. It's dangerous and it could easily be one of our friends or family if we're not all careful.

Our elderly neighbour Mary continues to be oblivious. Twice last week she jumped on a bus, first to go to the hospital with a sore wrist, and then shopping later in the week. She's happy to trot out to the shops twice a day then come knocking on our front door for help to close her garage or to comment on having some daffodils stolen from outside her house in 1998. There's a touch of dementia there according to her family and she's either forgetting the warnings or simply not comprehending what's happening.

Mary's daughter in law came round one day last week but did nothing more than yell at her from the street. She refused to go near her, reprimanded her, then shook her head and drove back to Urmston leaving a confused and irritated old lady standing in her front porch.

Mary continues to post stuff through our letterbox, more often than not TV Soap magazine which she gets free with a tabloid and which we have never shown any interest in, let alone asked for. She also has a tendency to poke ice cream cones through the fence for Chris while he's out in the garden. We appear to be unwittingly taking on the risk of transmission that her sons aren't prepared to take.

I wrote a letter to Mary explaining in quite strong terms why she needs to stop going out and also stop coming to our house. I didn't go as far as to call her a super spreader but I did tell her that two thousand, three hundred people had died. That was on the 2nd April, it's now ten days later, the letter is still in our hallway because we didn't want to scare an old lady, and five times that many people are dead.

So anyway, on Easter Sunday, when Christians traditionally remember Christ coming back from the dead, while simultaneously, on the television, all we hear is news about more death, I try to think about the other significance of this time of year. The one that's tied up with Spring and pagan beliefs of new life and new beginnings.

It won't go on forever; surely at some time in the coming weeks or months, this too shall pass, and we can look forward to new lives, and new ways of living. Living without the fear of going near friends, or helping a neighbour, taking public transport or going to work. Nina Simone once said that freedom is living with no fear, so maybe when this is all over, we'll feel free again.

Ray and Moira in Salou

Every now and again Chris and I find ourselves talking about living in another country. This morning the conversation was prompted by one of those TV programmes where you watch Ray and Moira from Runcorn being shown round five flats in the Costa Brava to decide which one they want to make their holiday home and eventually retire to.

More often than not the Ray and Moira in question have a budget which doesn't match their dream and we watch them traipse around, after the ever suffering presenter, complaining that they want a finca that overlooks the sea, has its own pool and roof terrace, four bedrooms (for the grandkids - there are always grandkids to consider) and is both modern and traditional at the same time, with no work needed. For this list of features and benefits they have the grand sum of fifty eight thousand pounds, but for the perfect place they can stretch to sixty.

If we ever do it I'd like to have a place here and one abroad. My preference would be a flat in Barcelona, down in the Barceloneta area, with the beach on my doorstep, the park and zoo round the corner, and the Gothic Quarter a stone's throw from our front door. I want somewhere we can get to easily once we land, without the need for a car, and there's a train straight from the airport to Estació de França.

We last went to Barcelona at the end of September. Charles and Paul were getting married and having their celebrations in Sitges, where they'd met, so Chris and I decided to make a week of it. We started with a couple of nights in Barcelona before getting the train down the coast. We'd toyed with going to Tarragona for the next two nights before heading to Sitges for the wedding, as we'd spent a lovely drunken afternoon there a few years earlier. 

The first time we went the Junior Chamber of Commerce was having an international conference in the town and we found ourselves chugging beer with a handful of future business tycoons. There was a stall selling bottles of beer and olives for pennies and we'd gorged ourselves on both while watching a wedding party leave the church in the square. 

That had been one of those days where my vegetarianism had been tested, not because I wanted to test it but because the bloody olives had anchovies stuffed in the middle of them and the Spanish tend not to count fish as part of the animal kingdom.

We decided against Tarragona this time, as beautiful and charming as it is, and instead, like the adventurous souls we are, chose to try somewhere we'd not been before. A little further away from Barcelona, past Tarragona, is the seaside town of Salou and we plumped for this as an option for a couple of days between our city break and the wedding parties.

We'd been told by friends they didn't think we'd really like Salou, that it wasn't our kind of place, but we like to find out for ourselves so we went anyway. Besides how bad could it be? we asked ourselves.

As the taxi from the station to the hotel drove through town I thought, this isn't bad. It looks clean and tidy, there's not a tattoo parlour or karaoke bar in sight - more than can be said for Palma Nova where we found ourselves for a major anniversary a few years beforehand - and the people seem alright. We pulled up to the hotel which again seemed alright, it was an adults only hotel and the clientele was predominantly over sixty five but you look on the bright side, at least the stairwells were quiet. 

The room was huge. Chris had booked a superior double which was three times the size of the room we'd just come from in Barcelona. It had it's own sitting room area and a very large roof terrace overlooking the pool, with sun loungers, table and chairs and to add an extra touch of luxury, it was astro-turfed so it felt like we were sitting on a penthouse lawn.

Dinner was an all you can eat buffet, Chris's idea of heaven, but within two minutes of arriving he'd already started a fight with a surly restaurant manager. A fight he knew he could win because he was the customer, so one he pushed as far as he could which included reporting her to reception immediately after dinner.

Salou at night was a different story to the genteel town we'd driven through that afternoon. I've never been to Benidorm but I've heard the stories and imagined that this is what it was like. It became apparent that the tattoo parlours and karaoke bars of Salou had been restricted in the part of town that lay between the station and our hotel, and instead were to be found in these huge pedestrianised party streets.

We find the only thing to do in these situations is to embrace it and fall in line, so we got pissed. Chris went shopping for tack while I wandered the streets looking for things I could share on Facebook. As we walked past a nightclub a Spanish chap came over trying to convince us to go in by offering free shots of something sugary, we declined, saying it was too early and besides, we lied, we were leaving early the next day for a flight so we were heading back. Undeterred he turned to his second line of business - drugs. 

"You wanna buy any cocaine?" he whispered in a gruff Spanish voice.

Admittedly I was surprised because I assumed he was simply a PR person for the club and replied "I'm sorry?"

"You wanna buy any cocaine?" he stage whispered, slower and even louder.

Understanding what was happening, and seeing how far I could push this, I pretended to be a little deaf and unable to hear him I said, "What? I can't hear you. Speak up."

To which he bellowed at the top of his voice, in what I'm convinced was an estuary English accent, "DO YOU WANT TO BUY ANY COCAINE OFF ME MATE?"

"Oh! I see!" I replied politely, "No, thank you very much." I smiled and we trotted off on our way.

As the phrase goes, Salou is what it is. It's a cheap and cheerful holiday resort, You're not going to find swanky restaurants or cool bars, but we enjoyed it for the two nights and a day we were there. That being said, it's highly unlikely we'll ever go back.

Our next stop was Sitges, a town we know and love and have been going to for years, to meet the gang and go to the wedding. We've often talked about buying a flat there too but it's so expensive I'm not sure we could stretch to what we'd want. We would in turn become Ray and Moira on A Place in the Sun. 

So in the meantime, we're left with our lockdown daydreams of holidays and of splitting our time between here and there, wherever there may be.

I started writing this blog again as a way to record life under the shadow of Coronavirus and I've barely mentioned it today so to summarise, on the 8th April 2020: The UK is to remain on lockdown as deaths keep increasing, the Prime Minister is in intensive care - which is mad isn't it?  I'm still working from my dining room table, Chris has no work or income at the moment so spends his days gardening, and our elderly neighbour Mary continues to be a super spreader - she's just headed out to the shops again despite receiving a letter from Number 10, like the rest of us, yesterday.

Barbecue at Buckingham Palace

I've done something to the middle toe on my left foot. It's swollen at the end near the nail, and it's red, shiny and painful. It's not smash your face in the playground painful or even break your leg painful but more like someone's stuck a very fine cactus needle under my toenail and it's got infected. It woke me up a number of times last night and I've got a tiny limp because when I walk I land with all my weight on the heel of the left foot. Chris generously described me as walking like an elephant yesterday even before I realised what I was doing.

Such an injury, regardless of how small it is, it means I can't put shoes on without being in some discomfort so I can't go for my daily, one hour allotted exercise. Of course in the last two and a bit weeks I've only left the house twice anyway, but now I actually have an excuse not to.

This evening the Queen is set to address the nation. The rallying call from the 93 year old monarch is no doubt designed to rouse spirits and encourage the country to keep calm and carry on. I'm not convinced that this message will reach the people that really need to hear it but I'll watch it and I'd go as far as to say it's a landmark occasion.

I like the Queen. Obviously I don't know her and only see what they want us to see most of the time but still, I like what I see. In fact I like the whole Royal Family. It's like having a real life soap opera sometimes and it never ceases to amaze me some of the pickles they get into. I don't think I have a favourite Royal but I have had a soft spot for the York sisters ever since Beatrice wore that Philip Treacy hat at William and Kate's wedding.

I was thinking, yesterday, that Buckingham Palace must be a great place for social distancing. You've just got to look at the garden for a start, it's practically the same size as Green Park. And all those rooms mean you don't really have to see anyone if you don't want to. The Grand Staircase would be brilliant for a bit of exercise every day and with all those corridors and rooms you'd never get bored.

The Buckingham Palace Website has this to say:

Buckingham Palace has 775 rooms. These include 19 State rooms, 52 Royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices and 78 bathrooms. In measurements, the building is 108 metres long across the front, 120 metres deep (including the central quadrangle) and 24 metres high.

Even if all the staff went home you could keep yourself busy, if not with matters of state there'd be an endless amount of dusting to do.

Speaking of cleaning, our house is generally quite clean, we don't have a cleaner as there's just the two of us and it would be an unnecessary expense, and since the cats died the house seems to be less dusty anyway. That being said, under the current lockdown we keep finding ourselves tackling jobs that haven't been a regular part of the weekly routine.

Today I took a damp cloth to the hallway. The radiator was a disgrace when I got to it and when I lifted up the pink, glass Habitat lamp I was shocked to find an army of dead flies and other insects, bereft of life, camping out underneath it.

Last week I not only cleaned out the kitchen drawers but also did a complete overhaul of their contents and organisation. Why we had so many hundreds of little white bag twists in there I'll never know. I toyed with the idea of binning the lot then thought - you never know - so only disposed of about sixty percent of them returning the rest to the drawer, just in a more orderly manner.

With the sixty percent of the bag twist stash that landed in the bin went a plastic pastry brush, one of three pastry brushes, which had melted bristles. I wanted to get rid of both the plastic brushes and just keep the wooden one because really, who needs three pastry brushes when only one gets used twice a year? But Chris, ever resourceful and with a touch of the hoarder about him, insisted on keeping the unmelted one to use as a toaster cleaning brush.

I chose not to dispose of the three bags of bamboo skewers because, being long and thin, they didn't really take up that much space, and besides, you never know when you're going to need 250 skewers for an impromptu barbecue.

I noticed that one of my serving spoons had gone missing which was a blow. The last time I lost a spoon it was a teaspoon and it was found four years later in a half empty jar of sweetcorn pickle which I was about to throw away. During those four years the pickle had eroded part of the spoon's stainless steel handle which was quite disconcerting when you think that you eat this stuff on a burger. I suppose the fact that we hadn't finished the jar in four years is a good sign for our innards. It was also a sign of how often we have impromptu barbecues which might require 250 bamboo skewers.

I bet barbecues at Buckingham Palace are brilliant. I might donate my bamboo skewers to the Queen when she returns from Windsor.

Easter Eggs

Quizzes, it seems, are the new thing. This week we have taken part in two in the space of three days, a general knowledge quiz and a music quiz, which turned out to be part general knowledge too for some reason. We signed up to a repeat of the first a week on Wednesday and I've managed to drunkenly volunteer to write and host one myself this coming Thursday. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with mine yet but I think I need to shake it up a bit.

As it's all done over Skype or Zoom or Hangouts I can make it visual so I'm toying with the idea of a round in which either the contestants have to guess which animal I'm pretending to be with kitchen utensils or alternatively I might challenge them to come up with the best animals they can with kitchen utensils and then everyone guesses. It's quite a responsibility.

I originally declined the Thursday quiz mastery because I like to start work at 8.00am during the week but then someone pointed out that this Friday is Good Friday and I won't be working anyway. This left me with nowhere to go and I conceded.

We had three Easter eggs delivered with yesterday's groceries. We've already eaten one and I can't see the other two surviving till next weekend so I'm going to have to order some more from Tesco and just demolish the remaining treats in the meantime.

I always loved Easter as a kid. Every year until I can't remember when, we went as a family to our grandparents, my mum's parents, over in Poulton. Invariably the extended family would gather there too with my mum's brother John & my auntie Elaine, and my cousins Sarah and Peter. My mum's sister Anna would join us too on a rare release from the Epilepsy Society in  Chalfont St Peter, along with her boyfriend Fred in his zip up cardigans and his roll up cigarettes.

Anna, but mostly Fred, loved nothing more than to spend the afternoons over the Easter break in the Thatched House or another of the village pubs, necking pints and getting pissed. In turn the alcohol would diminish the effect of both their medication and they'd come back to the house and proceed to have seizures. Anna's fits were something to behold and quite scary. Not because we were unaccustomed to them as children, we'd grown up knowing all about what happened when someone had an epileptic seizure, but because they were so loud and surprising.

Without any kind of warning Anna's body would completely stiffen, from head to toe, like rigor mortis just without the mort bit. This temporary petrification would often send Anna sliding or falling to the floor where, once made safe, she'd be left until the fit passed. Accompanying the stiffening was a monotonous, and deafening, deep wailing noise. Whether or not she was in pain I couldn't tell you but it was a sound I'll never forget. A haunting sound, and not a spooky haunting, a horrific, tremendous noise that could be heard throughout the house and went straight to your core.

Fred's fits on the other hand were an all together more romantic affair. From an observer's point of view it was like watching someone astrally project. His out of body, and as it happened, out of mind experiences would find him rocking to and fro, often hanging onto something like a door handle or the back of a chair, and gently whistling, unaware of the world around him. Like the wind blowing in through a window that hadn't quite been closed properly.

In both cases, and whether it was the seizure taking it out of them or the pints of beer they'd knocked back beforehand, they'd usually retire to their bedroom and sleep like the dead, not to be seen for hours.

As a child, Easter in Poulton meant chocolate of course, long warm days sitting in the sun as it blazed through the sash windows, and watching boring TV. One of my enduring memories of childhood is in fact, being bored all the time. I'd whine to my parents and be told in no uncertain terms that only boring people get bored, and to read a book.

Grandpa would be up early while Granny slept late when she wasn't working. It wasn't unheard of for her to emerge mid afternoon and then stay up to the small hours reading. The house felt vast, and calm, despite so many people being there at the same time. Clifton House had a way of slowing everyone down.

If we were lucky my grandparent's cleaner Mrs Gray would be there. She lived a few streets away, made marzipan animals, pronounced breakfast as if it was two words - break fast - as if to make a point about its meaning, and had a large round growth next to her nose, the size of a marble. I always wanted to ask about it but never did. I would do now but I was very polite as a child.

She'd occasionally bring her dog Tish round to wait while she was cleaning. Tish was a particularly mean Dalmatian. She'd sit there in her bed in the kitchen or the pantry and growl at anyone that came too close, baring teeth and generally being grumpy. We grew up with Dalmatians - Dylan, Skipper, Dougal and then after I'd left home, Jake - and all of them were delightful compared to Tish.

Dalmatians are known for being friendly, approachable and completely mad. In fact Granny once told me a story about a woman's Dalmatian that had got off its lead in Blackpool, trotted to the end of a pier, and launched itself into the Irish Sea at full tide for no apparent reason.

More exciting than Mrs Gray and her marble sized growth was her husband Mr Gray. Mr Gray had tunnel vision and wore a flat cap. That's all I really remember about him, other than his name being Larry, so why I thought he was more exciting to talk to than Mrs Gray remains a mystery. We would usually only see him if he was passing by along Victoria Road and we were in the garden. His whistle would give him away and we would rush to climb the fence in the corner near the big black gate behind the incinerator.

One Easter when I was maybe ten or eleven years old I asked Granny if she would take me to church because I was curious about it. She agreed and I think was quite pleased that I'd asked her rather than my parents. The fact of the matter is that she was the only person I knew that went to church. We were not a religious family, Granny was no exception, after all she was a woman of science. She loved the old language that was used and picked her churches based on which prayer book they used. St Chad's in the heart of the village used the King James Book of Common Prayer and this was right up Granny's street.

Grandpa was a lapsed Methodist and loved nothing more than poking fun at the pomposity of the church. His father, a mill owner, who was terribly disappointed when Grandpa decided to train as a doctor instead of going into the family business, would have been equally disappointed by his son's love of wine and his daily pre-dinner tipple - the gin mix, made up of one part gin, one part sweet vermouth and two parts dry vermouth, poured into a stemmed glass with no ice and served at room temperature. I learned at an early age that the gin mix wasn't for the feint of heart and would take a layer off the roof of your mouth. It was delicious all the same and the smell of it on a family member's breath is something I associate with my childhood.

Easter Sunday, 1986, Granny and I got up, got dressed and headed into the village, a five minute walk to St Chad's in the centre of Poulton. We walked through the grounds, resplendent in flowering crocuses, purple, yellow and white dotted across the lawns and between the headstones and tomb tables. We passed the door with the skull and cross-bones gravestone in front of it where, local legend has it, a pirate, on the run from the law, once made his way up from Skippool Creek to the church and died in that very doorway. My mother taught me that if you spit in both the eyes of the skull, spin round three times, then knock on the door, the ghost of the pirate would appear. Something she'd learned as a child and probably my Granny before her. Obviously I never tried this for fear of certain death.

(This photograph and another childhood story about the Pirate can be seen here.)

Granny and I got the entrance of the church and went into the cold stone building. We were evidently late as the place was full so we sneaked into a pew at the back, as quietly as possible in the echoing church, so as not to disturb anyone, and took our seats. I was quite disappointed to be so far from the action but still, I was there and I was about to find out what church was all about, and on a special day too - Easter Sunday. 

I was idly flicking through the pages of the prayer book on the shelf waiting for the service to start properly when the congregation rose to their feet and, expecting to sing a hymn or follow in a prayer, we followed suit. Then the strangest thing happened, one by one people started to drift out from the pews and walk towards the back of the church. We stood there watching, confused, as the good people of St Chad's left their seats, gathered up their belongings and filed out into the sunny churchyard.

It was when Granny spotted the vicar heading our way that she got suspicious and collared him. It took just a few words with him for her to work out what had happened and she realised that with Easter being a moveable feast, and this year it being early, Easter Sunday had coincided with British Summer Time starting and she'd forgotten to put the clocks forward the night before. We'd arrived for my special Easter service an hour late and missed the whole bloody thing.

Since then my only experience of church has been weddings, funerals and a tedious debate about fracking at Preston Minster a few years ago.

This year Easter will be spent, much like the previous three weeks, at home. The papers are saying that the lockdown might be lifted by the end of May if, and only if, we the British public stick to the emergency measure and stay at home like good citizens.

The Government, concurrently, are issuing pleas to stay in as the weather improves this week, and thinly veiled threats that the lockdown will become less of a 'we're all in it together so let's do the right thing' affair, and more of a 'you will stay at home or we will set the police on you' type thing.

I suspect, and this is after a brief chat with a police officer this week, that the powers that be have been easing us into what will become a more draconian state until this passes. Taking a society from total freedom to complete lockdown is far more difficult than introducing it in small steps as they have done. We're all used to staying at home now and less likely to balk at the idea of being told to rather than asked to. Anyway, time will tell and I'm not going anywhere any time soon.