Wednesday 1st April 2020

Wednesday already! Half the week gone by lunchtime.

When Harry Rollo phoned on Monday he said, ‘How are you?’ I said, ‘I’m locked in.’ He said, ‘Locked-in syndrome.’ I said, ‘It helps if you’re a gardener. Mystery viruses attack plants – but they don’t get all of them.’ I recalled as well how Beth Chatto, great gardener of our Nation, and highly strung, would get in an awful state about the bullfinches attacking her fruit trees (she and her husband had a commercial fruit farm at one time). But her husband, Andrew, always said, ‘They don’t get all of them.’

On the other hand, it doesn’t help if you’re a Poor Little Rich Gay. Poor Little Rich Gays just can’t bear everything not being right. I’ve dreamed for years of eight staff working full-time in my 3-bedroom residence. Then at last I could scratch the surface of everything that needs to be done. And rest.

Well, nothing’s right now, is it? Disease raging through the whole world.  Every week some new scheme to set it to rights – then hope dashed. We’re going to have a lot of this. A glimmer of hope and racking anxiety lifts, then dashed again. Down, down. It’ll go on and on… Poor Little Rich Gays just can’t bear everything not being perfect.

Some years ago a leak sprang in my first floor front bedroom. Bruce McBain and the entire Polish army of builders were marshalled. Nothing worked. Every time it rained water poured in. Weeks and weeks. My nerves were shredded, then minced. It was the same scenario last summer when I had a new boiler installed. Again and again it seemed to cause the leccie to fuse on the lower floors. And so cruel because I’d longed for a new boiler and the old one was touch-and-go twice a day in the winter whether it would come on, as far as I was concerned. So for the fusing, all known electricians in attendance. Still the same, fusing, fusing, me raving. But finally in both cases, after much struggle, much agony, the leak stopped and the leccie stayed on.

So we must endure and hope.

I have a horrible feeling that awful letter from the Prime Minister has arrived. I haven’t had mine. Have you? Maybe it won’t come. I think he’s died.

No it hasn’t come. Just an appeal for corona money from Save the Children.

That stained duvet cover to finish with. Four days of treatment, culminating in Nitramors, which is paint stripper. See graphs below. What do you think? I had to look quite hard to find it. I know it’s there – that’s the thing.

Don’t say one’s life isn’t crowded with incident.

Stain after 4-day Assault with Products

General View: Do you Think It shows?