We woke up this morning in our usual tangle of an empty duvet cover with a single-bed duvet perched on top, to be wrestled over during the night as one or other of us got hotter or cooler. By quarter to eight we were both up. Clare was seeing to the cat and monitoring her morning ablutions, while I was busy changing the bed and preparing myself for the dentist.
My appointment was at ten to nine. A very short session with the dentist, as it turned out: clean bill of health, clear check-up, no problems, and next appointment June 2027: nine months. Quite unusual for me, given that I have so many fillings that normally at least one of them has broken, cracked or is otherwise causing trouble. But today, apparently, all was well.
Once back, I played a little acoustic guitar (working on 12 bar walking bass, since you ask) while Clare was in the bath, and then read to her the next instalment of Irène Némirovsky's The Wine of Solitude. This is essentially a semi-autobiographical account of the author as a young girl in transition from revolutionary St Petersburg to post-war Paris c. 1919, loving her feckless gambling father and hating her mother, who is serially unfaithful and against whom she plots endless revenge. A good read, then.
After lunch — a delicious chicken curry — we drove into town, Clare hoping to source some russet apples from the market. We arrived there at three o'clock to discover that the market was basically packing up and the fruit and vegetable stall had vanished entirely.
So we consoled ourselves with ice cream: a Mr Whippy for Clare and a tub of ice cream for me, which we ate in the late-September sunshine. It was over 21 degrees and very definitely T-shirt-and-jeans weather; almost too hot, I would say.
Then we resumed our progress down the High Street back towards the car park, making a few purchases en route. I have to help Clare quite a bit with walking at the moment. COVID seems to have made her very tired — me too, though to a lesser extent — and she essentially needs my arm and support to walk any real distance. I doubt she could comfortably manage much more than fifty or a hundred yards entirely unsupported at present. Hopefully that will improve somewhat as she gets over the COVID.
Back home again, I ordered a bigger duvet from Amazon: king-size, one tog. All our duvets up to now fall into one of two categories. Either they are thermally light but too small, and therefore migrate during the night between Clare's side and mine; or they are actually the right size for the duvet cover but much too thick, so we start to slowly cook and try to escape out of the sides.
Hence the weird combination of empty duvet covers or plain sheets, with odd duvets or throws or blankets arrayed on top, with bits and pieces being pulled backwards and forwards during the colder parts of the night. Hopefully the new one-tog king-size duvet will fill the gap for the next month or so, until the cold really does kick in. It's meant to be coming on Saturday.
And I spent the last hour working on my electric guitar, playing solos two and three from James Shipway's Blues Soloing book. In particular I've been working on the Strange Brew-derived, Clapton-esque solo, which today I finally managed to internalise sufficiently to play right through without looking at the book. I impress myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.