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.