Bread, and bed, alone

It's been an odd day. My neurons are behaving badly. I woke at 5. 35 with the recurrent stuffy nose and tickly throat. Sleep was impossible after that, except in ten-minute bursts. However, I did have the distinct impression that I was dreaming in Norwegian AND Welsh! How clever of me, considering how poor I am at those languages when I'm awake!

I also conceived an obsessive desire to get hold of a 500-piece 'four seasons jigsaw'. This, it turns out, is considerably harder than ordering a four seasons pizza. Since I am still feeling rough, jigsaws have become my major source of entertainment. I can do them and listen to the radio at the same time, in theory.

A quick trip to town was in order (I walked, there and back, yay, and located my missing wages, which had got lost for a heart-stopping few days). I also visited all of the town's ten charity shops, a toy shop and a junk shop, in case they had any four seasons puzzles. They didn't.

I came home and baked more bread. and started one of the substitute puzzles I'd bought, and then thought to check Amazon again. The earlier problem with Amazon being able to supply the FS jigsaw puzzle had mysteriously been resolved, so I ordered it. It will come tomorrow, by which time I will probably have decided that what I really need to do is teach myself to play the mandolin, or learn Russian. I am 100% more fickle when under the weather.

Later, I discovered that even though my substitute puzzles are purposely small, they are still a great hassle to attempt to do in bed, even with a board. So, sod that for the evening! In the meantime, many young people of Stroud had been having a loud post-exam party in the fields just beyond our house, and I had been judiciously trying to pretend it was not happening. I did this by spending hours looking for a non-demanding kindle book. (Non-demanding, however, turns out to be fairly specific in terms of what I don't want to read, but that's another post). After buying a 99p special, I decided that actually what I really needed to read was a book called Bread Alone.

Fortunately, it was on my shelf already. It's about a woman who makes bread. (Alone, presumably). I used to notice this book on the shelves of WHSmith when I commuted through Paddington station in the early noughties. Later, it began to turn up in the charity shops, but it was only last year that I read another book, The Laws of Harmony (also about baking and relationships) by the same author, who now calls herself Judith Ryan Hendricks. At that point, I began to look for Bread Alone, but the library copy had vanished, and it wasn't new enough for the charity shops. Imagine my surprise when I visited my sister's last November, and found the book on her shelf! Imagine her surprise when I fell on it and begged to borrow it! She said she'd never seen it before in her life, and did not know how it had found its way into her house.

So, here we are now, in 2015. CleanSteve has reappeared, I am no longer alone, and it's time for me to start trying to go to bed for real, and begin reading the book The party outside has dwindled to sound-sparks. It is 12 43 am, and a light wind is ruffling the fields of The Heavens.