It was 7.30am when the street lamps turned themselves off today– and 10°C outside with a pink tinge in the sky, and I’d done diary entries (I write up my notes into a diary – it gives me a chance to review them and fill in any gaps) for the last couple of days and just sat on my bed for 30 minutes with my mug and given my hand a rest. I did my Duolingo lessons (as I continue to try and increase my French mental dictionary), Soot the almost 20 year old cat…

…had been curled up and snoring next to me for the whole time I’d been sat there, and it was 8:10 AM when I heard the headlines: Ofgem had told energy suppliers to stop installing prepayment metres after some peoples houses were broken into and they were forcibly installed; the Pentagon had said it was tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon across America, and that Chinese forces are on standby to invade Taiwan by 2027; share values in Apple, Amazon and Google had fallen after lower sales and lower profits so far this year were revealed and 20,000 train drivers with the RMT and ASLEF unions are on strike today. The cat walked off and returned again during those, him and I had a bit more time sat quietly, the fish man (known as that because he delivers fish) knocked on the door while breakfast was being fried; and then it was eaten, and once I’d brushed my teeth, I heaved stuff out of the kitchen, filled up the mop bucket and started mopping. I finished just before my little ‘Kitten: learn to crochet’ kit (I’ve been trying to teach myself to knit for a very very long time and I keep forgetting how to do it) appeared in the post…

…I sat down and wrote more of Wednesdays notes up into the diary while it dried, and a few blobs were still visible when I got up again, and I tried to get them off. Soot got up and was having a drink when Mum put kettle on for a couple of human mugs, he jumped on her once she was seated with the towel and brush and something made me perch on the arm of the sofa and ensure his very furry stomach was properly groomed by holding his front paws up. The furniture was moved back in, he pulled a bag off the radiator and got in and out of the litter tray; and I tried to write a name sheet for my Age UK volunteering (so I can identify the people I was seeing while volunteering at this music group I’ve recently joined in with – making the coffee the people want) which included the coffee orders from last time, then wrote more of Wednesdays entry and had almost finished it when I was offered soup, so I got up. Soot was snoring in the centre of the sofa by then, and after my mug I dressed myself, packed my bag, and he was still snoring and Mum had something playing in her ears (via the hearing aids she has stuck in them) when I left – on foot – at 1.37pm (it was 10°C) and my phone started giving me directions. The churchyard looked like it had had the grass cut recently (but there were a couple of indications that spring is on the way…

… the foliage in the park was having something done to it, and the road next to it was very noisy, and on the next street, the little fruit store had Golden Moon pears and Turkish quince for sale.

I made it – a little bit late (as I couldn’t remember if I was in the right place) by which point the participants of this Age UK music group had already started their music. A bloke came in with an accordion several minutes after me, date slices and chocolate brownies were the cakes on offer, and the man whose name I wasn’t sure of was sat down and not doing anything; someone was singing Jolene and a man and woman got up and started dancing briefly. I remained stood in the corner, someone asked the singer if she knew the words to Nellie the Elephant (the song by The Toy Dolls) and that got sung, I noticed stickers saying ‘self disinfecting surface’ on them were stuck on door handles, my blood sugar started being annoying while a bloke was singing something I forgot because another volunteer told me she was diabetic and showed me her blood sugar sensor. Things ended after that, the accordion player told me he’s been playing the accordion for about 40 years and he’s got another one in a different key, I was offered a brownie, which I accepted (they looked very professional), I mentioned my tiffin (something that I always ensure I keep a supply of at home); by then everyone had packed up their instruments and mostly left, and it was 3.55pm when I said goodbye. There were a few school kids around back out in the town centre, a man staggering around in a peculiar position outside the museum (Wikipedia terms it a ‘cultural centre’) at the end of the road, a lot of crocuses were on the grass there…

…the store called Savers had an extremely strong smell of washing detergent wafting out, I grabbed tiffin ingredients from Tescos, saw a girl wearing false eyelashes stood by the bus stop, some boys were bouncing a basketball around on the tennis courts at the top of the road, and I eventually made it home at 4:37 PM. The hens were in bed, I closed the roost hole, boiled the kettle, sat down in my chair with my mug, and was sat on and Soot snored. An e-mail from my cousin appeared on my phone, I read out a diary entry, a bit more Duolingo friends quest work was done by my mother and I (the competitive side we both have causes us to ensure these quests given by the app never get failed – despite me using Google Translate a lot because I can’t remember the vocabulary, I like trying to keep my place on the leaderboard!), he purred on top of me for a little longer – and when Mum moved he went and took over the warm spot on the sofa. No updates had been made to COVID figures today when I had a check; and then I decided to get up and mush together my tiffin before supper (and that and the vegetables cooking by then meant weird smells were wafting around).