Monday
A litter-pick in grass so wet it soaks last week’s mud from my boots.
It’s a plague house, so I sleep in the spare room and leave the curtains open, just for the joy of seeing the moon print bright rectangles on the wall.
Tuesday
Walked to the earthworks while there was a gap in the rain. The mud that washed down the path over recent weeks has created a new landscape; fresh grass is sprouting in all the wrong places. I saw the first forget-me-knots though, when I was least expecting them – in my head they arrive with the sun. Still we wait. Every single magpie I saw turned out to be one of a pair.
In the evening I drove to Crystal Palace. My windscreen wipers have 2 settings: too slow and much too fast. Every time I need to put them on the faster setting I imagine people in other cars thinking “who’s the drama queen?”. (As if people drive around judging the speed of other people’s windscreen wipers. 👀)
Wednesday
Try to buy paracetamol for the infected, but it’s too many boxes and the assistant is apologetic when the computer says no.
Thursday
It’s raining inside and out. There’s a puddle on the floor by my desk from the water which is dripping from the ceiling. I mop both floor and ceiling before I head to town.
At London Bridge I’m 30th in the queue and as we leave I notice they’re taking out the dead trees that no one watered last summer.
On the bus, the woman sitting next to me pulls out her phone and starts using software I worked on a few years ago. I message my old team in Athens to let them know and I say ‘Take me back, it won’t stop raining and water is coming through the ceiling.’ They say it was 32 degrees in Crete last week and the summer is going to be brutal. The one other person in the group who lives in the UK says she has a leak too. This does nothing for the UK’s already poor reputation.
As I walk past the caff, three men in high vis and hard hats are gathered at the counter. When I go back at lunch it’s so full that the man behind the counter says they’re running out of food. A customer in a coloured bandana complains he doesn’t have enough gravy while someone runs to the shop for an emergency loaf of sliced white bread. Everything feels like the end of term.
Other things: I heard the term ‘drabble‘ used this week, and I’d never heard it before: ‘A drabble is a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.’ The person who mentioned it turned out to be brilliant at writing them.
Walknotes 