The builders go on with their buildery lives...

[flemmings]

Possibly the guys renovating southern next door may be wishing they were at home in isolation, but I doubt it. They're busy, they're paid, they're in company, and they've been wearing heavy-duty masks and filters since last autumn. The bumps and conversations (and yes ok the cigarette smoke) do lend a much-needed air of normality to my life.

The timeless bubble feeling I spoke of yesterday lasted just until I tried to make a list of our current infants and toddlers. Couldn't name one. Consulted an old list from a year ago and slowly, slowly, the names came back. And so did the apprehension of a world out there that's not out there any more and now I detect a certain chafing of the spirit, expressed by a distinct lack of patience with Wilkie Collins' narrators. No, I do not find your dirty old man butler or your catty charitable spinster amusing in the least. Get *on* with it, man. Where's Marian Halcombe when you need her?

Feeling just fine yesterday, I left off the anti-inflams after breakfast, which led to a miserable knee-twinging night and a knee-grinding today. Shall return to judicious medicating. Also read to 3 in the morning, an historical Japanese novel by a Japanese where, for once, a woman marries into a family much nicer than her birth one; and consequently slept in to past 11, in the old fashion of my 40s. Natsukashii...

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

Yes, any glimpse of normality is welcome. I spoke to a friend the other day - she had been out for a walk, and seen not a single other person in the street. :(

Marian Halcombe is such a one-off character.

Have you found the masks? That's such rotten luck, mislaying them, and now this.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I know Marian is a one-off, but since Collins did her once, he might have concluded that a woman with one shoulder higher than the other needn't, perforce, drown herself for love. She could very well go back to being a super diamond thief or something and live it up in London. Err, supposing she actually hasn't done these things already...

Masks continue vanished. Some people, some of them even non-Asian, were wearing them at the super today, go them. I shall sew something eventually, to show willing if nothing else.

So sorry you got rousted out of sensible Vietnam and dropped into not sensible at all Oz for the duration. Stay well.