Have I Got News For You! (Spoiler: no)

The view from a bushwalk I went on a couple of weeks ago before I got the treadmill working.
Now I can exercise in a windowless room while watching old episodes of Prime Suspect, as God intended.

It has been both three and a half weeks and a hundred and fifteen years since I proudly declared this blog Relaunched. Since you last heard from me there has mostly been pandemic and lockdown, mental hardship and guilt.  

My counsellor, who is a woman of immense good sense, was pleased to see the blog was back, and told me to keep it up, that what I had to say during this time might be helpful to other people so here you go and you can blame her if it’s boring. And it will be boring because everything is at the moment, isn’t it?

Boring and scary. It’s like we’re all anaesthetists (people say that job is the most boring and the most scary, because there’s a lot of sitting and monitoring your unconscious patient while surgeons fossick about inside them, and then suddenly ALARM! PANIC! Her blood pressure is plummeting! Death is at the door! Only you can save her!). Or is it like we are all parents of small babies, which is similarly just feeding, changing, sleeping, feeding, changing, sleeping ALARM! PANIC! Why is it not on the change table where I just put it?! What is that rash?!

May Blossom has been missing contact with the outside world a lot, so we caved a good eighteen months before we had planned to and let her have a phone. It’s an old one we had lying around, and currently has no sim card so doesn’t make calls to most people, but she can text and Facetime. This has been a very good thing, except that now whenever I tell my mum any news, and trust me there is precious little to tell, it’s not news to her because May Blossom has already been on the blower.

The days feel very trudgy: we put foot in front of the other (rarely in a literal sense).  I try not to think too much, about times when we weren’t in lockdown and mostly I pretend my friends don’t exist, so the missing them isn’t as great.

Moments of thrill do occasionally burst upon me. I made a change to a Woolworths order the night before it was sent, thereby risking losing my delivery slot that I’d waited five days for. But I added the dishwasher detergent and didn’t lose my slot. The adrenaline rush was insane.

It was big enough news to ring my friend Richard with. We’ve decided to report things to each other even though there’s nothing to report. He rang to tell me he had discovered that a bookshelf he had assumed was attached to the wall at the top was not in fact attached to the wall. He attached it. Now his baby won’t get squashed by a bookshelf. These are the things we should be telling each other, the little wins that we wouldn’t have thought twice about before. They’re what we have right now.

Like last week when I took a pair of leggings out of my drawer and discovered they had a pair of underpants still attached. They’d gone through the wash, the dryer and been folded and put away, undies and all. I simply put both items of clothing on at once and for a few minutes I felt extremely efficient and happy. This reminds me I forgot to ring Richard to report the undies and leggings situation.

If you follow me on any social media you will know that I bought a terrible coffee machine last week. It was cheap and nasty, and really I got what I paid for. But I wanted the high of a bargain. I wanted to game the system, find the shortcut through the maze from here to normality and happiness. Why I thought a Kmart espresso machine was going be the way to get there, I cannot say. It did make me feel quite alive though. Alive with rage.

I can’t quite give up on the machine. It makes yucky coffee and takes up too much of our already limited counterspace but still I leave it there, reproaching me for my damn clicky checkout finger, reminding me that there’s no quick way out of this. There’s no espresso route to the world returning to normal. We’ll get there when we get there.

What’s new with you? Are you vaccinated? Have you attached anything to a wall?