Another day…

I had rather a depressing thought this morning, as I was lying in bed contemplating whether the floor would constitute a step too far in my initial matinal journey. (It did.) The thought was this: those who are meeting me virtually for the first time through this medium – people from whom I am beginning to enjoy hearing – must only know me as a complete pessimist. A real miserable bastard. Over the past couple of weeks-slash-months, my blips have been on the depressing side of, erm, depressing. Not to mention a photographic technique that leaves an awful lot to be desired: here is my window; here is my window with condensation on it; here is Ottawacker Jr. cleaning the condensation off the window.
 
Honestly, says he, protesting too much, I am actually usually quite a happy and well-balanced person. You can ask both of my friends Except, of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And I have always, as the French say so eloquently, “pété plus haut que le cul.” So wallowing in misery is something I manage to do well, even when the misery isn’t quite as miserable as I make out. When you are really miserable, after all, you just roll into a ball and say nothing. These are truths we all understand.
 
Today, however, wasn’t the best of days. I was about to jump on here and talk about Kenny Dalglish coming down with Covid19 – he is, for many reasons, an important figure in my life, and one of my son’s myriad middle names is his – when I received a call from my brother telling me my uncle had collapsed at home and gone into hospital.
 
I’d spoken to my uncle just this morning, called to check in (one of the steps in seeing whether the floor would constitute a step too far in my matinal journey), and he had been seemingly OK. He’d had a rough morning, he said (with the five hour difference between Ottawa and the UK), but he felt better and was watching a re-run of Liverpool’s latest trouncing of Everton on LFCTV. I’d not kept him on too long, as he started to think again about his situation and become a little less positive – his wife, after all, is in hospital with Covid19 – and he had had an ambulance out to assess him a couple of days previously. He let it slip – during these unguarded minutes discussing the brilliance of Divock Origi’s control – that he had refused to go into hospital. I had thought he had been refused admission because he wasn’t sick enough. Apparently they wanted to take him in but he said he would be fine.
 
Anyway, he has been taken in today and is in the best possible place. It is almost guaranteed that he has Covid19 – his wife has it, and Formby where he lives seems to be a bit of a hotspot – so the brilliant nurses and doctors know what to do and, if there is anything they can do, they will do it. I am completely numb about it; he is the final link to the generation above (my dad’s brother) and has been a presence in my life from the moment I was born. It is almost beyond comprehension that the link with the past be broken.
 
Otherwise, the day was a mixture of banal and shite. I felt ill all day and was snappy and unpleasant; my new blipfriend Veronica suggested that my symptoms may be the result of stress. I think she is spot on. I like to think of myself as completely immune to the effects of the world – I look at it, analyze it, laugh at it and am fine – but it really isn’t the case at all. I might need to switch off and focus more on the immediate than the global. My days of influence are long gone, and were never as full of influence as I like to think.
 
There were many happy things in the day. My place of sleep still being the basement until this whole shebang is over – I can’t be trusted when asleep – the entire family of wife and son and two cats made its way down to me for an early morning cuddle and chat. That was wonderful (pre-phone calls, obviously) – we were all together laughing and chatting and planning together for a good 30 minutes (except the cats didn’t do much than ask for food). Also today, Mrs. Ottawacker managed to move out of my office and set up her desk in another room – and we managed to disassemble the desk and reassemble it without killing each other or breaking the desk. And then, later, once all the moves had been completed and the floors cleaned, when I suggested I might be happier working in the basement after all – and would she like to stay in my office upstairs – Mrs. Ottawacker gave me a most radiant smile, and said “of course, dear, if you think that is a good idea.”
 
There was a post-dinner moment of joy: having forgotten that it was Easter – I know, what a plonker – we had to come up with last-minute ideas to mollify Ottawacker Jr. As he had just lost a tooth that turned out to be relatively easy: I told him that Jacinda Ardern had said that the Tooth Fairy AND the Easter Bunny were both essential workers – but that given the recent problems with the virus they might be delayed. And while we had $1.25 to put under his pillow, we had to be inventive for Easter. So we had a scavenger hunt (his idea) inside the house.
 
All we had were some old mini plastic eggs (with nothing inside them) from years gone by – but the promise of making a big TRADITIONAL EASTER CHOCOLATE CAKE tomorrow proved incentive enough. We took our turns hiding the eggs in the living room and finding them – shouting hot and cold as appropriate. When it came to his turn, Mrs. Ottawacker sat on the floor covering her eyes, and the cunning little bugger slipped the egg unnoticed inside the hood of her hoodie. She managed to find five of her six eggs easily enough (we don’t live in a castle after all) but the elusive sixth egg, millimetres away from her ear proved too much. I’m not sure whether Ottawacker Jr. actually peed his pants laughing, but it must have been a close call for a good five minutes. As she moved her hands to point in a given direction, he was squealing hot or cold, and sometimes both at the same time. Who needs chocolate? The blip today is of the innocent one hiding eggs, the extra photo of his exceptional egg-drop.
 
Of course, Mrs. Ottawacker knew the egg was there the whole time, and was just playing the gallery. But it cheered us all up no end. So we finished the day en famille watching a Rick Steves travelogue on Ireland. The more I see it, the more I want to live there. No snow, nice people, countryside is amazing…