Not going out ...

After the stress of a walk on a sunny day, when all the world and his dog had taken to the normally quiet tracks behind the town, I decided today would be better following the example of Candide and cultivating my garden... Actually, it wasn't cultivation at all. It was my customary Spring activity of pruning and demolishing the two ancient and fairly massive hydrangeas in my front garden. As I found myself attacked by a stray strand of bramble in the very heart of one bush, I reflected that I'd been doing this very thing for the past 45 years, which gave a strange sense of continuity in these strange times.

It was in fact a very social morning. The fact that the bushes are in the front garden helped; my next door neighbour but one asked if she could have some of my hydrangea heads for the bug house she was constructing, and we stood a whole garden apart and chatted loudly for quite some time. Then our friend Charlie turned up; he'd been to the chemist for our prescriptions, which he delivered and then took away a parcel to post for me - another longish chat. When I went back out after lunch the neighbour in between me and the bug house lady was cutting his grass ...

Later, I enjoyed a hilarious online FaceTime chat with three friends because one of them had dialled our choir group chat with her bottom (she sat on her phone) and even sat in the sun for a while with my book. Later still, after dinner, we had online Compline. At different points in the day I'd had a couple of phone calls. I also spent ages riveted to Marchmont's blip story - catching up on yet another experience of this time of plague.

Blipping, rather than the hydrangea bush, the silver tree in our garden. At the moment the preview shows it lying on its side, so we may end up with the bush after all ...