Thursday 17th February 2022

Val’s been coughing for weeks. Not up to a visit, until suddenly a bit better and I was underway for Moscova, Hastings. But, in the meantime, between departure and arrival thereto, Val had gone downhill again, but not so far as not to be up to a rigorous critique of the Queen’s frock for the Christmas broadcast. Val axed straight to the heart of it. Couture is not comfort. Fitted is not comfortable. Wearing couture is strenuous as we know from previous days with ladies fainting, their feet killing them, unable to breathe, desperate for their boudoirs to be unwound from their frockage. So she’s ordered comfort, she doesn’t want to be squeezed in any more and Angela’s going to have to think of a new approach.

We’d thought of trying for Fish and Chips at Bexhill. The Multis had explained a complicated mechanism whereby you order from one shop but eat at the outdoor provision of another, the actual chippie’s interior being unspeakable. But that was off, owing to Val’s decline. I ferried him round to the Co-op and he sent me in with a list. One item I couldn’t read or rather I thought, It can’t say ‘knickers’. So I had to go out to the Official Car and Val said it did say Knickers. ‘But they don’t have them in the Co-op,’ I said. ‘I know,’ said Val.

Later I vac-ed Val’s premises and dusted. He lost his scrunchie but found it in his knickers. He said Buckingham Palace had smelled of a public swimming pool when we’d visited it. He had to be pitched off the sofa so I could vac it. An amazing array of essential items he keeps near him – an unpicker, a tape measure, a half-finished Norwayan Alpine tapestry and her wools, the Historical Atlas of Europe (Val always says, ‘If you want to grasp History, look at a map’) as well as some house plant food and a biography of Constance Spry.