Cummings and goings

I dreamt that Maria the Coronation Street character was on the reception desk when I went to an appointment with a university don in a building that resembled a Mozambican government office. The don was in the form of Andrew Neil, exhibiting the type of behaviour that would get someone sacked for sexual harassment if it was real. I think I prefer my more typical recent innocuous dreams about baggage, possessions and travelling from A to B.

Today I submitted the funding concept that has made the last week gruelling. I did some editing, proofreading of annexes and spent far too long trying to format and orientate tables. Inserting landscape pages into a portrait document in Word is one of the most frustrating things a human being can ever engage in.

I was braindead after submission so needed to spend time outdoors, and how I’d missed the sights and sounds of an English late springtime. A drunk guy clutching a can of cider whilst cycling alongside a woman with a dog was saying, ‘if I was in Portugal I would have stayed in Portugal. I wouldn’t have come to this shithole.’

In the shop I spotted McVities Cherry Bakewell Digestives, recently the subject of much debate by Hannah, Tim, Clare and I. Tim, always in the vanguard of new snacks released onto the market, had urged us to try them but until today I hadn’t encountered any in Cambridge as shop shelves here are usually filled with chia seeds and organic quinoa, not novelty processed sweet treats.

I bedded down on Midsummer Common to tuck in. Suffice to say, Mr Kipling would be turning in his grave and should sue for breach of trading name. Hannah is correct to say they taste like they’ve been wafted near cherry chemicals and then put in packets. I’d add that it tastes like handfuls of those fizzy sour cherry sweets you get in pick ‘n’ mixes have been rubbed on regular chocolate digestives. I am usually exceedingly easy to please with regard to anything sweet, but these were a disappointment.

I cycled past this box of books going for free near where we’re staying. I’m unsurprised that the Sharon Osbourne book hadn’t been taken, but I snapped up Stupid White Men as I always like what Michael Moore has to say. I wish I’d noticed that can of Thatchers cider at the time as I could have recycled it and paid forward the free book through another good deed.

The furore around Dominic Cummings and his essential travel to Durham from London, whilst family members were known to have coronavirus, is incensing the nation, and quite rightly.